Is Walking Good For You?

A recent science news story on the BBC website – the sort that contains a smidgeon of science and a homeopathic dilution of news – declared; “Slow Walking Predicts Dementia”.

It’s a horrid thought. Walk faster or lose your marbles.

According to the news, in thirty or forty years time, when my brain has unravelled into a fraying tangle of protein-plaqued fluff, the streets will be drumming to the sound of grim faced speed walkers – people who look like they are trying to lose a straight jacket whilst fighting off the after affects of getting shot by a dart containing powerful sedatives. My idea of hell. If there’s one thing guaranteed to make me break into a jog and head for the hills it’s turning a corner and finding myself confronted by a palsy of power walkers.

Yes, palsy is indeed the correct collective noun for a pack of power walkers. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

Walking is just not a sport, and never can be. Anything that fast, furious and quite frankly ugly, is the antithesis of what walking is all about. There’s a good reason for the expressions, a walk in the park, walking on air, walking back to happiness whoopah oh yeah, and so on and so forth.

And, for the life of me, I can’t imagine worshipping the ground anybody race-walked upon.

I was, it is true, once an employee of Leeds Social Services, managing a variety of mental health facilities, and as such thought it beneficial to chivvy my clients up hill and down dale in the misguided idea that getting them out of puff was somehow therapeutic. They would have preferred to get in the minibus to Ikea – they regularly told me, piteously – but I knew what was best for them. Best was getting up off their backside and hitting the tarmac. I’ll never know why they didn’t push me under a passing lorry. Drugs I suspect.

It is a long time now since I handed back the keys to the day centre and nowadays I don’t have any ulterior motive for walking anywhere. In fact I positively loathe the idea of exercise. I regard physical activity as a regrettable interval between pub seat and bar, and consider the concept of muscling your way to mental wellbeing about as silly as the idea that you could tickle your own toes to make yourself laugh. I do though walk as much as I ever did, and considerably more than most people. Seven or eight miles a day easily if I could be bothered counting. Which I can’t.

Let me be clear what I mean by walking. It’s an art, done for no other reason than the pure pleasure of perambulation itself. You don’t have to train or go some place special to do it. And there’s no competition, not even with yourself; who cares if you shave 0.13 seconds of your personal best wandering round the boating lake? And you don’t even have to be doing something sensible like going from A to B. B is the same place as A, just an indefinite while after.

There are no health benefits to walking properly understood. Or rather there are but they’re in my grandad’s sense; whenever he was caught doing something self-indulgent, silly, or potentially deleterious to his physical fitness – downing another round of black and tans with the chaps in the tap room of The Old Blue Ball, or ceremoniously lifting another Capstan Full Strength, untipped, from his solid silver, intricately engraved cigarette box, or wolfing an extra slab of tripe and onions, laced with eye-stingingly sharp vinegar – he’d look at you and wink, “it’s for the good of my health.” So it is with walking. You’re sucking in those diesel fumes and risking life and limb crossing where the traffic lights are broken for the good of your health.

Walking is essentially an urban activity. That’s because there’s so much more to see in the city, so much to stop and gawp at. True, some people do drive miles to a place with scenery (which is hills and trees I’m led to believe) and wildlife (mainly sheep and surly bulls), and walk around in specially made footwear squinting at a map, occasionally pausing to remark, “careful! cowpat,” or, “hmm, I wonder what sort of nettle just stung me?” But these people are ramblers, and, consequently, quite deranged. They should have tired of that sort of nature walk thing in Junior school.

Proper walking is quite simply going around the houses. It’s about lurking in shop doorways till the rain bates, studying menus in restaurant windows for silly spelling mistakes, watching community enforcement officers circle around a bunch of truants on a quad bike, and rattling garden gates when you see a mean looking mutt on a short leash. It’s about strolling by the cars in a traffic jam smiling cheerfully, pointing and laughing at the faces the drivers make.

It’s about just following your nose, even if your nose takes you to a part of town that sinks and you have to hold your breath as you wander through it.

It’s about dipping into the odd poundshop and discovering a copy of John Fante’s Bandini Quartet (in the three for a pound bucket!), impulse buying an improbably scarlet waterproof coat from TK Maxx because it’s cheaper than getting the bus home in the rain, impulse-consuming a rather stodgy veggie burger in the Hedley Verity, and watching the world go by from the best seat upstairs. You can be out for twenty minutes or until the last bus home, and there’s no rule about not getting on a bus if you’ve walked yourself into state of terminal knackeredness, or if you’ve bought half a shelf of mouldy paperbacks and a Blackpool Tower paper weight as heavy as a dumbbell from a charity shop in the sticks.

My preferred method of walking might be called the Zorro, zig-zagging across the city like that liberator’s sword. Except that image is a bit too militant and not exactly accurate – unless the return journey was a reverse Zorro, or an Un-Zorro. An Orroz. But just as there are no straight lines in nature, there are no straight lines in walking – though there are plenty in bus routes, as anyone who had travelled far on the Number One will know.

The only acceptable straight line to walk is along the canal. Start zig-zagging along the towpath and you’re in for a very wet surprise.

Once I wandered so far along the Leeds-Liverpool canal that I began to notice the accents were changing . . . to be honest I only made it past Shipley and bumped into my Scouse Uncle Jim who took me for a pint or two in Fanny’s Alehouse, so my recollection maybe somewhat skewed.

And on that note I think it’s time for a walk.