Walking for a date
RECALLED BY: Nick Hallissey, deputy editor
Our first date was a walk.
That may not sound surprising, coming from a chap who works for a walking magazine. But back in April 1998, I was no such thing.
I was in my first year as a cub reporter for my local paper. Liz was a drama student. We’d met through am dram: we appeared together in a production of Franz Kafka’s The Trial that had been declared “a powerhouse piece of theatre” by a cub reporter on my local paper. There had been an end-of-show party. Stuff had happened. The world was exciting.
And then I blurted it out. “Hey, we could go for a walk tomorrow. What do you reckon?”
In fairness, it wasn’t entirely atypical for me to think of a walk. I definitely was a walker – my parents had seen to that. Plus we lived in Cheshire, which had lots of nice bits to walk around. Lastly it was cheap. And given our stations in life, that was the clincher.
So the following day, we went to Delamere Forest. I think it was a grey and overcast April day in a mud-brown wood, but in my mind’s eye it was a spring day as directed by David Lean. Liz walked through the woods like a nymph, hair aflame in the low sunlight, robins landing on her outstretched palm like Snow White in mid song. Probably.
We chatted of all the things we hadn’t really covered while we’d been yelling Kafka at each other: of films and songs and musicals; of whether England had a chance in the World Cup (no) and whether Deirdre would ever get out of HMP Weatherfield (yes). On a practical level, the walk was a conduit to the swift exchange of data that comprises a proper date. But it was also just a walk. An average, simple, wonderful walk. The way they all are, somehow.
So we kept on walking. Marbury, Tatton Park, Mow Cop. The Peak District, Snowdonia, the Lakes.
I learned important lessons, principally NEVER TAKE YOUR PARTNER ON A WALK YOU ONCE DID WITH AN EX. And Skiddaw is probably not “the perfect starter mountain”. (I wanted to be different and quirky, but there is no getting round the fact it should always be Catbells via the Keswick Launch.)
Despite the mis-steps, in 2002 Liz became my walking partner for life. We are now, with a heady mix of enthusiasm and bloody-mindedness, trying to pass on ‘the walking thing’ to our offspring.
But here’s a thing: walking as a first date might have been slightly unusual in 1998. It might still have been a bit weird in 2019. But now that the nation has spent a year discovering beauty on its doorstep, walking is common currency. I reckon it’ll be the no-brainer first date of the future.
“The nature reserve by the gasworks, and dinner at the Thai place? You’re on.”
And so a thousand new adventures will begin.
“We chatted of all the things we hadn’t really covered while we’d been yelling Franz Kafka at each other.”
I theoretically learned to use map and compass when I was 12, when my dad taught me. Only I was adept at that thing where your face says one thing (‘Interesting!’) while your brain says another (‘No way am I retaining this tripe old man!’). By the time I was called on to access this corrupt memory file I was, notionally at least, the most experienced in a group walk in the Pennines. It seems crazy to think I’d only ever walked in fine weather or with someone else doing the steering, but so it suddenly dawned on me, and as the mist first flirted with opacity then erased the view for good my gorge rose. All navigators try to maintain an air of confidence but I was pretending harder than most. Relying on remembered glimpses of the ground ahead, and assertive-looking scowls at the map, I clammily thought if the visibility didn’t improve we were lost. But then something I did remember dad saying – “Mountains don’t change their shape in the mist” – popped into my head, along with that other fundamental, that a compass is really just a tool for locking your map into orientation with the real world. Whether I could see anything or not, these were still true. Plus navigation isn’t always (or even often) a matter of pinpoint accuracy. You can often aim for a much more forgiving target like a wall or a stream to gather you in and set you back on the road to certainty. I took a crude bearing (it’s a matter of lining up where you are on the map with where you want to be using the side of your compass, then rotating the compass housing until its lines match the vertical ones on your map) and bored into the mist. Counting my paces roughly to see how far we’d come, we soon hit the wall – and my anxiety dropped by half. I shot another bearing. At every stage I found I could focus on a tuft of grass or dimly-visible rock that happened to sit on my bearing and free my eyes from staring at the compass, to resume my air of ill-earned confidence. Soon I was hitting target after target, the ground’s features obligingly taking the shapes the map promised, until only one leg remained. The final target was a large ladder-stile in a wall a kilometre away across featureless, invisible moorland, beyond which a clear track would provide luxurious certainty. We hit it dead on – and though to my companions it seemed like no big deal, to me it felt like I’d flung coin after coin across a crowded bar, and had every one thunk straight into the jukebox slot.