It’s Bear Grylls meets Norman Wisdom!

Walking The Great North Line Robert Twigger W&N £20 ★★★★★

It’s ironic that ‘taking the path less chosen’ is actually becoming a welltrodden route to a book deal. Even as we speak, would-be travelogue writers are poring over maps and history books looking for ancient tracks, forgotten drovers’ trails, anywhere you can get whimsically from A to B and thence into print. Alan Partridge did it (parodically) in Nomad, retracing his father’s trek from Norfolk to Dungeness for a job at the power station. Yes, I’ve even done it myself.

I thought of Partridge periodically during Robert Twigger’s itinerary, such as, for example, in the moment when we segue awkwardly from a discussion of divorce into an advert for a named brand of camping accessory (‘the WindBurner stove came into its own’).

Ostensibly, this is a book about a journey from Stonehenge to Lindisfarne undertaken for reasons that are never made completely clear, except that you can get a book out of it. No matter, because this book is really about the author not the trip.

We are reminded of this often in sentences of the ‘I’ve sat with Bedouin late into the night round embers that are barely glowing’ type, which are reminiscent of both Rutger Hauer’s famous ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe...’ speech from

Blade Runner and that

‘I’ve been undressed by kings’ line in Charlene’s hit single ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’. Apropos of little, Twigger will tell us that he thinks kids should be given courses in firemaking rather than ‘the laptop lunacy of desperate teachers’. The resultant style is an uneasy mix of Bear Grylls, Kahlil Gibran and Norman Wisdom; macho adventurousness, hippy musings and ‘Ohh Mr Grimsdale’ incompetence.

Some may find this winning but the self-absorption and lack of detail about the actual walk started to nag like the oft-discussed blisters, especially when we’re treated to chummy ‘bantz’ between Twigger and his companion about passers-by like ‘Did you clock his bird?’

Encountering some people enquiring about their table reservation in a pub, Twigger snorts, ‘Like many people who can’t take much of modern life seriously, I don’t usually give a toss where I sit. I’m too busy rushing through my existence, tearing off chicken legs of experience and spitting the bones out without chewing properly.’

I stayed the course, somewhat grumpily. But in the end, how much you enjoy this curious trip will depend on whether, like me, you like a nice pub table rather than biting off the chicken legs of experience.

It’s important to draw the line.