The Cat Who Walks By Himself

Yesterday, I went for a walk on my own.

This should not be an outstanding achievement.  I am, after all, an able-bodied adult, and not legally required to have any kind of escort.  But since getting married last year, I have been so thrilled by the possibilities of togetherness that, for a while, I wanted to do everything together, from grocery shopping, cooking and washing-up, to reading, praying, and having baths.

In time, we discovered that some aspects of this work better than others.  Obviously some activities, like board games, work better with more than one player.  Also, despite both being individually very shy, as a team we have started to succeed in making friends with some of our neighbours.  On the other hand, trying to peel vegetables side-by-side in the same kitchen means we get in each other’s way – not to mention requiring twice as many chopping-boards and peelers to be in use at once, and generating more washing-up.

Country walks are definitely worth sharing.  One of the many things I am grateful to my husband for is giving me the Somerset countryside, with its abrupt changes from flat, fragrant meadows to steep hills, or from sunlit open country to ferny, mossy woods in limestone gorges.  Given that we both love this place, love the books that it reminds us of (the very landscape smells of the fantasy novels of Diana Wynne Jones), and love each other’s company, it seems silly not to walk in it together.

Are there any drawbacks?  A minor one is that my husband is a slightly slower walker and has slightly less stamina than I do, so that our walks don’t stretch me to my physical limit.  On the other hand, his willingness to pause, and his interest in the natural world, means that I learn more on walks with him than I would on my own.  He might show me how to tell a field maple from a sycamore; or we might both stand for several minutes trying to work out what species of cranesbill we’ve just stumbled across.

What I don’t learn, though, is how to navigate.  This is partly because I am mentally lazy and inclined to daydream.  When I go for a walk with another person, I find it easier to let them pick where they want to go, while I chatter about Diana Wynne Jones.

Another problem is lack of confidence.  When I was a child, my younger brother always knew how long we had been walking, which direction led back to the car, and how far away it was.  By contrast, it was a family joke that my own sense of direction was not so much legendary as mythical, with the implication that I had no hope of learning.  If I tried to learn, and asked why we were taking a particular path, my father would assume I was questioning his competence, and brush me off, rather than explaining.

Considering I am now in my thirties, I think it’s high time I stopped letting my family’s assumptions limit what I can do.  So I chose a day when my husband had work he needed to get on with and when the sun was so hot that he wouldn’t have wanted to go for a walk anyway, and set out across the fields.

To give the walk some interest, I decided to research which of the seven villages on my loop had restaurants, or pubs where we could get a drink and go to the loo, or shops where we could buy food.  In case my husband was also worried about my navigational skills, I promised to text him whenever I paused at an eatery, or at least whenever my phone had signal, to tell him how I was getting on.

It was a different style of country, and of navigating, from the one I had grown up with.  As a child, I had mostly gone for walks in the New Forest, where paths mutated but everything was open to the public, so that the best strategy was to take a compass bearing, then put the map away and follow the paths that led in most nearly the right direction.  By contrast, walking across farmland, I had to check my Ordnance Survey map frequently to check precisely where the public rights of way were, and then check the fields for signposts.

It was a beautiful walk.  I watched a deer bounding across a field of cows, and iridescent blue dragonflies in another field.  I found pink-and-white striped bindweed (which really does climb anticlockwise, as the song says – and in the same hedge as honeysuckle!).  I discovered a large, surprisingly fragrant patch of daisies being appreciated by numerous bees, in the border between one wheat-field and the next.  If my husband had been there, we would have shared all these sights – and would have got out the flower-book to identify what species of daisies they were.

My research indicated that every village had a pub or hotel; that most of these either didn’t serve food, or didn’t serve lunches; that the one I reached in the evening sold delicious but overpriced dinners; and that only one village had a food-shop, a supermarket-cum-post-office.  As the thing we over-spend on most is meals out, the supermarket is probably the most important to know about.  On my next expedition, I’ll take a packed lunch.

There definitely need to be more – both together, and alone.  Solitary walks offer the sense of freedom and space I had as a small child, when the back garden was a vast territory in which I could roam freely.  Now, my back garden extends to anywhere within a five-mile radius of my home.  But knowing that I can find my way alone reminds me that, when I do go for a walk with my husband, it is because I enjoy his company, not because I need a guide.