“A decade or so ago there was a clear stereotype of ‘a walker’, a cagouled, rambling folk group”

STUART MACONIE

BACK IN MY early days on the NME, my main occupation was filing live band reviews. And usually, the morning after a gig by the Happy Mondays or the House of Love, for example, I would wake up to discover a balled-up piece of A4 or a scrap of paper in the depths of my pocket.

On these I would have written a trail of hieroglyphs that, after some effort, could be roughly translated into vaguely cohesive notes. They would say things like: ‘Crazy light ball ballad’ and ‘New album pork pie reference. Neil Young? Kid Creole and the Coconuts?’

These notes would have been composed at speed with the first materials that came to hand and often in a state of poor mental clarity.

Nowadays, in a turn of events which that young scribbler wouldn’t have seen coming, I’m president of Ramblers GB, and the other morning I woke up after their AGM and awards dinner in Bangor to find some similarly cryptic notes on my mobile.

‘Get Oxfordshire Ramblers on TV’ was one. ‘Tweet about East Shropshire’. ‘Try to get to Telford.’ And most intriguing of all: ‘Gloucestershire Air Balloon.’

After some time in careful thought, the details began to swim back. Each of these and more related to an encounter I’d had with various walkers during the course of a sociable evening. Hazily, as these memories began to take shape, I came to realise how very different each of these walkers had been.

Thankfully it’s less common these days, but a decade or so back, there was a clear stereotype of ‘a walker’. It looked something like Tinker’s Rucksack, Vic Reeves’ cagouled, rambling folk band who were constantly heading up‘ Art hens lathe rn bar then dale ’.

But the walkers I met that evening were a long way from that hairy old image. I met a man in a smart black suit (I had wondered if the dress code would be Gore-Tex cummerbunds) who thanked me for a recent column in Country Walking.

“The one that pointed out that not all walkers are saints,” he said.

“Worth saying. Some people think if you’ve got a pair of walking boots and you like being outside, you’re Mother Theresa.”

Then there was a lady who wanted to talk to me about the art/punk/prog group the Cardiacs.

There was a chap who seemed more a creature of the boardroom or golf club bar than the hillside, but who had a past in student protest politics. Doubtless if I’d ‘worked the room’ more, I’d have found Buddhists, PS4 gamers, high ranking military types, maybe folk who were all three.

I guess it equates to the song Typical Girls, by post-punk band the Slits. The point of that song was there’s no such thing as a ‘typical girl’. The same can be said for walkers.

Fighting against stereotyping has been a mission of Ramblers and the walking lobby in general for a while. I think we can get too het up about these things but I do see the need to ‘reach out’ to all the diverse and different groups in Britain. Such efforts are easy to dismiss as ‘PC gone mad’, but I happen to think it’s just healthy, rather like our pursuit itself.

But with all due respect to the people I met, one sticks in my mind more than the others. Marika Kovacs was born with a type of glaucoma which causes severe visual impairment. She began walking in 2012 and now leads her own walks using Braille. She didn’t grab me to boast about this, of course, but to tell me that she was sorry that she didn’t listen to me on the radio more often but she was a fan of Steve Wright, who apparently is on at the same time on Radio 2.

Despite this revelation, Marika deserves a column to herself soon. In the meantime, she filled me with admiration and a shamefaced determination never to whinge about another muddy path, rainy day or wobbly stile again.

But don’t hold me to it.