Anthology
Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking
Introduced and edited by Duncan Minshull (Notting Hill Editions, £14.99)
Here is A book as certain to lift the spirits as the activity to which it is dedicated: going for a walk. Beneath My Feet is a collection of non-fiction writings on pedestrianism, shrewdly selected by duncan Minshull, who, as the author of two previous books on the subject, is emerging as the laureate of walking. His authors range from Petrarch to Will self, via Charles dickens, Fanny kemble, kamila shamsie, Christopher Hope and 30 others.
There are routes so familiar that they seem to contain the milestones of one’s life. Lucy Hughes-hallett regularly walks her dog in a local cemetery: ‘beneath this crooked pine tree i sheltered from the rain with my daughters, when they were small enough to walk into the cave it makes without bending their heads.’
William Hazlitt prefers improvised rural rambles, but cautions against walking in the country with a companion, because then you have to swap nature notes. ‘if you remark on the scent of a bean-field crossing the road, perhaps your fellow-traveller has no smell,’ he writes in 1822.
Among the city walkers is Will self, who, heading back to his hotel after dinner in Glasgow, neatly identifies the feeling any (decent) man gets when walking in the dark behind a single woman: ‘reverse paranoia’.
This elegant little book would make an excellent Christmas present for the indolent, such is the enthusiasm for walking expressed in its pages. kierkegaard writes: ‘i have walked myself into my best thoughts.’ Trekking through snow, Henry david Thoreau detects an ‘increased glow of thought and feeling’.
especially pertinent to the season is a piece by Franz kafka in praise of escaping the claustrophobia of a too-domesticated evening. once the walker is outdoors, the left-behind family ‘drifts into vaporousness, whereas we ourselves, as indisputable and sharp and black as a silhouette, smacking the backs of our thighs, come into our true nature’. Andrew Martin
This elegant little book would be an excellent Christmas present for the indolent