The first step on the path to improved wellbeing

SO the summer holiday season begins. The first week of the holidays is an odd combination of relief but also unsettlement.

Families are released from the school routines and then promptly have to cast about for another way of living life.

Childcare can be a challenge, as can keeping a lively lot entertained, as maybe some of you parents and grandparents are finding out already!

So I’m going to be spending the next six weeks looking at something you might want to do together or alone. It costs nothing, it’s good for you (of course), it

might take you places you’ve not seen before, and you don’t necessarily need any transport or special equipment. It’s good old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness walking.

How am I going to talk about walking for six weeks, I hear you ask? Well, I’m going to touch on when to walk, what weather to walk in, how long to walk for, different ways of walking and how walking is not only good for your body, but also mind and even community.

And of course, I’m going to be encouraging you all to walk a bit more over this next six weeks, maybe every day, and see how you feel by the end of that time. If you want to write into the Gazette and tell me (and everyone else too) how you’ve got on, where you’ve been, your favourite local walks and how your health has been improved in any way, then all the better. In Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods, he says the average American walks 1.4 miles a week!

Now I’m not sure if that’s true, but the US is a country where the

Car is King. I really don’t know what the average Brit walks a week!

What I do know is that when we move, we set in motion not only our feet but hundreds of delicate changes inside our bodies.

Our breathing and heart rate increases, oxygen gets to flush through us, improving our mood, metabolism, digestion, thinking, even memory!

When we walk, without much thought at all, our bodies move in a fine-tuned flow.

It seems to just happen: coordinating muscles, joints and tendons, to swing our limbs in such a way as to move our weight along so we can get to other places.

It’s highly complex, but you make it look so easy.

I’m encouraging you all to walk a bit more over the next six weeks and see how you feel by the end of that

time