The Paths Ahead

I have just received my first donations for a sponsored walk, and I haven’t even begun the walk yet.

Ever since doing my last walking challenge in July 2021, I have been hoping to do another, preferably not in July, and see whether I can push myself a bit further.  I managed to walk 300 miles (483 km) in a month last time, which sounds good but is only really an average of 10 miles per day – could I manage 400 (644 km) the following year?

However, in practice, life didn’t work out that way .  I tried taking up a sponsored reading challenge in 2022 instead, seeing how many books in German I could read in seven months.  However, this wasn’t very successful, either in terms of reading many books (because I was trying to fit this in around everything else in my life, instead of setting aside a month for a challenge) or in terms of raising much money to help Ukrainian refugees.  Probably, because a sponsored reading challenge is so much more unusual than a sponsored walking challenge, people didn’t know how to react to the news that I was doing one.

In the meantime, in 2023 I took up two new jobs, working in a shop raising money for the palliative care and bereavement support charity Sue Ryder and in a café raising money for community facilities at Ashwick and Oakhill Village Hall.  I am probably far more useful in selling second-hand clothes or washing cups in the café than I am while out walking around Somerset.  Also, considering how short-tempered and bad at interacting with other people I can be, holding down these jobs is arguably more of a challenge than just going out for a solitary walk.

All the same, it doesn’t feel like nearly as much of an adventure.  So some of my motives for wanting to do a sponsored walk are fairly dubious: the desire to do something more dramatic than sitting behind a shop till, and the desire to feel altruistic about taking a month off from my usual jobs to go walking.

However, it is also true that I want to raise money for good causes.  In fact, the difficulty is knowing which good causes to fundraise for.  Big Issue Changing Lives provides support for homeless or vulnerably housed people in the UK.  St Martin In The Fields also does a lot for UK homeless people.  Innocence Project works for justice for people in America who have been falsely convicted of crimes.  ActionAid works to help people in Africa, Asia and Latin America find a way out of extreme poverty.  All of them are thoroughly worth supporting.

At the moment, however, the biggest crisis facing the world as a whole is climate change, which is being made worse by, amongst other things, deforestation.  2023 broke record after record for hottest ___ ever.  2024 has already had days in early May that were so warm that they made me think, ‘Am I even going to cope with walking every day in June?’

The cost of living is rising because of, amongst other things, climate change.  Newspapers report that food prices will continue to rise as farmers find it harder to grow crops.  But this is a very First World perspective.  It assumes that there will still be food in the supermarket, and it’s just that if you’re poor, you might struggle to afford a balanced diet and might have to accept handouts from food banks, and that if you are well off, you might need to increase the amount you spend on donating groceries to food banks.

If you are a subsistence farmer in a hot country where the land is turning to desert, your problem might be the much more basic one of not having anything to eat, let alone surplus produce to sell.  So one of the charities I want to fundraise for is Tree Aid, which works with farmers in the drylands of Africa: in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Senegal.  Tree Aid doesn’t plant trees and abandon them.  It provides people in Africa with the tools and skills they need to grow trees, protect their land, and start viable businesses.  It aims to enable farmers to make a more reliable living from growing fruit and nut trees than they could by growing annual crops in unpredictable weather, while also protecting the soil from degrading into desert.

However, I also wanted to support a British conservation charity.  The Woodland Trust works to protect and restore what is left of biodiverse ancient woodland in Britain, but also encourages natural regeneration and provides advice and support for landowners and communities in planting an appropriate assortment of native British trees.

However, other problems in life, such as wars and persecution forcing people to flee from their homes, don’t go away because we plant trees.  On the other hand, flooding and droughts resulting from climate change can certainly make even more parts of the world uninhabitable, and can make life even more dangerous for people already living in refugee camps.  So, thirdly, I want to fundraise for the UN Refugee Agency.

A week or so ago, I started giving out flyers about hoping to do a sponsored walk of 400 miles in a month.  On Wednesday, Andy North very kindly gave me £20 towards my Woodland Trust appeal, and today an anonymous donor gave me £5 for my Tree Aid appeal.  So far, nobody has donated to the UNHCR appeal, but at any rate, I feel flattered by people’s confidence that I will do what I have set out to do.

I don’t know whether I will actually succeed in my aim of walking 400 miles in a month.  As most of the people who know me have commented, I walk and exercise a lot anyway – but there’s a difference between walking to work or spending an hour on the outdoor gym equipment at the Recreation Ground, and walking all day, every day.

One of my colleagues asked whether I should make my target 500 miles (805 km), so that I could adopt the Proclaimers’ song I’m Gonna Be as my anthem.  I explained that unfortunately, I hadn’t booked two months off work so that I could go on to walk 500 more in July.

It shouldn’t be too hard.  Ray and Moth in The Salt Path  walk the 630-mile (1,014 km) South West Coast Path over the course of two summers, which isn’t bad going considering that it’s a very steep path, that they are wild camping and carrying all their equipment, that they are so poor that they can’t always even afford food, and that Moth is suffering from a terminal illness. 

But for a healthy, well-fed person carrying a day pack, how hard could it be to walk 400, 500, or even 600, miles in a month?  I don’t know.  While I have walked seventy miles (113 km) in four days, both in walking from Trafalgar Square to Canterbury Cathedral and on holiday on the Isle of Wight, I’ve never kept anything like this up for a month at a time.

I also don’t know what effect this walk will have on me.  In July 2021, one good result of doing all that walking was that I was tired enough to sleep thoroughly every night, but it didn’t do much for my overall sanity (which, admittedly, was particularly dodgy throughout that year).  The acronym HALT warns that getting Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired puts people more at risk of a relapse – whether that is someone recovering from addiction to drugs or alcohol, or someone dealing with other problems like OCD, eating disorders, PTSD, or, in my case, depression.

So, while being on my own for much of the day removes most of the stressors that are likely to make me angry, going out for a long walk, and burning up far more calories than I usually would, is inevitably going to make me tired and hungry.  So I’ll need to remind myself to eat more than I would usually.  If I’m likely to be living on sandwiches for much of the time while out walking, I won’t necessarily be eating a very balanced diet, but will try to make sure that I eat some other things as well – if only muesli, yogurt and fresh fruit in the morning before I set off, and some dried fruit and some crisps in a packed lunch.  After all, crisps contain Vitamin C, right?  To be on the safe side, I have also bought a bottle of vitamin tablets.

I don’t usually find loneliness a problem on all-day walks, when I know that I’m coming home to PDB11 at the end of the day, and keep texting him in the meantime to let him know where I’ve got to, and that I’m safe and well.  But if my being out all day, every day makes him feel lonely, we might have to think about ensuring that I come home early enough for us to enjoy some time together after I come home and log my walk to check how many miles I have done, and before I fall asleep.

As to whether I will start getting angry or depressed about completely irrational things while out walking – well, I might do that sometimes, just as I might when I’m at home or at work.  But I need to learn to take responsibility for managing my own moods, as much as I need to take responsibility for finding my way around.

Only two weeks until the start.  Where can I go?  I’m aiming to take walks that are within walking distance of my home, I know that, allowing for the fact that footpaths don’t always lead in a dead-straight line in the direction that I’m heading in, I can cope with walking to (and then back from) places that are in the region of 18 inches away on a 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map (in other words, about eight miles as the crow flies): for example, north-east to Peasedown St John, east to Frome, or (if I risk stepping off my home map and onto another one) west to Wells.  Heading north-west, I can pass through my namesake village on my way up to Clutton.  These are routes that I have done. 

So, what else looks a manageable length?  Shoscombe, and see whether I can make it as far as Wellow?  Faulkland, and see whether I can make it to Norton St Philip?  How about Postlebury Wood, or Lower Bitcombe Wood?  If I venture onto the Wells map again, how about Wookey Hole, Ebbor Gorge, or Harptree Woods?  Pylle, or Pilton? The Glastonbury Festival is planned to take place between 26 and 30 June at Worthy Farm, Pilton, so I’ll try not to coincide my trip with that.  Maybe I should aim the westerly walks for the start of the month.

All in all, it’s looking like an adventure.  I’m looking forward to it.