Now here’s a proposal for a fine June morning. The Government is asking the nation to engage in “moderate, pleasant exercise” as a means of promoting fitness and social well-being. Kim Howells, the Minister of State for Transport, went as far as gingerly bicycling to the campaign launch. For in contrast to the usual exhortations to limber up, the message is a simple one: get on your bike or go for a walk.
It must be said that the two-wheel part of the Walking and Cycling Action Plan is rather more successful than the two-legged aspect; cycle lanes providing handy targets for rogue drivers. Provision of maps, lessons in “kerbcraft” and other encouragements to roam are laudable, if a little pedestrian. For the department’s recent revelation that a fifth of people never walk in excess of 20 minutes represents nothing short of a minor human tragedy.
Plato, Petrarch, Rousseau, Dickens, Browning, Blake, Proust, Kafka, Frost, Whitman, Plath, all waxed lyrical on the subject of strolling. In unleashing the legs one engages the brain. A brain, moreover, that strays into spiritual territory. The word “saunter” is said to have been derived from the phrase “Sainte Terre”, as medieval wayfarers begged for charity under pretence of journeying to the Holy Land.
Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics trekked to transcend themselves; modernists to plunge ever deeper into consciousness’s stream. Mrs Dalloway dallied, Bloom and Stephen rambled, while Eliot’s poetic protagonists were city strays like his cats.
In literature, as in life, walking is the great emotional salve. The wretched perambulations of The Waste Land’s central voice may be a million miles away from Elizabeth Bennet’s sprightly tramping in Pride and Prejudice, but both take solace in them.
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The Government’s approved mode of striding would doubtless be chin up, chest out; a march for which men must sacrifice their cool, and women any boot not made for walking. Not for Labour’s nanny stateists the ambling gate of Baudelaire’s urban wanderers, the flâneurs, with their penchant for taking turtles for turns to establish a leisurely pace.
That most practical philosopher Thoreau advocated the emergence of a new class “not the Knight, but Walker, Errant”. In his essay on the subject, he declared that he could not remain in his chamber for a single day “without acquiring some rust”. As the Government directs our attention to our bicycle chains, so we might also consider an oiling of ankles and knees.
After all, as Mao, who trod all over people, once said: “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”