DAY TRIPS WITH DAPHNE

 

One of my infinitely minor claims to fame is that I was once, in some sense, “portrayed” on radio by Bill Nighty.  He read my book first-person travel book Day Trips to the Desert on BBC Radio 4. Bill NIghy doesn’t sound remotely like me and yet I thought he got the tone of my “voice” and of the book, exactly right. 

 I met him very, very briefly in a studio in Broadcasting House and he was entirely the Bill Nighy you would want him to be.

 

Day Trips to the Desert isn’t exactly a walking book (whatever the heck that is) but there’s a reasonable amount of walking in it, walking that I did in Australia, the United States, Morocco and Egypt.

 

I can’t say how much of a walker Bill Nighy is but there are quite a few online pictures of him walking, such as this one in which he’s carrying a jar or Marmite, no I don't know why.

 And sometimes he’s seen, in a professional capacity, with Helena Bonham Carter:

 

Just last week the two of them were on the radio performing a play titled

Beside Myself, with Bonham Carter as Daphne du Maurier and Nighy as “man”.   To quote the publicity materials, the play allows the listener to “follow Du Maurier as she starts a conversation with a stranger while on an amble.”

Yes really, an amble!

“When a stranger approaches, Daphne … picks up her stiff stride, eager to get away. However, this one’s not to be deterred. As they walk along Daphne, to her own amazement, finds herself revealing much to the man about her life. Why is she compelled to divulge so much? Perhaps too much.”  Why indeed.  Perhaps it was the rambling.

 

This is Daphne du Maurier:

 

And this is Helena Bonham Carter, not walking.

 

She seems to be divulging quite a lot, but not too much, I’d say.

 

 

 

 

WALKING WRONG

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

Sometimes it seems to me that people only buy weekend newspapers so they can be told that they’re doing things wrong.  They’re eating wrong, drinking wrong, sleeping wrong, dating wrong, bringing up their children wrong, and so on.   For me this  reached new heights of annoyance in Saturday’s Times, in an article by Lucy Cavendish, in which told us that most people are walking wrong too.

This is Lucy Cavendish

She was trying to improve her memory by one method or another (and walking was just one of them).  Of course I’m well used to being told that I walk too slowly.  Briskness is the new healthy walking orthodoxy, but you know, I’m inclined to walk at whatever damn speed I want. 

 

 Cavendish talked to one Susan Saunders who’s a Health Coach (yep that’s a job) who suggested that Cavendish could ‘maximise the benefits’ of her walking by combining it with mindfulness.  More than that, apparently researchers at UCL have ‘found a link between preserving cognition and undertaking self-reflection.’  The article then explained what self-reflection is for the benefit of slack-jawed readers who might be new to the idea of introspection.

 

I found the whole thing so annoying that I went for a dawdle while thinking unintrospectively about Helena Bonham Carter and Harry Styles.  I suspect they both walk wrong.