I must start with a confession. I am prejudiced against Kate Humble. I am not sure why exactly. I think it’s all those pictures of her smiling. She’s forever smiling, like the late Beth Chatto, (though Chatto’s fixed smile was more like a grimace). Kate’s is that cheerful “I’m as friendly as a dog wagging its tail” smile.  I don’t think people ought to be photographed smiling; I won’t be if I can help it.  I don’t trust smiles unless they are fleeting. And images of people smiling are not fleeting.

I am ever so slightly acquainted. She lives nearby and I was once invited to a neighbours Christmas party where she also came (and went quite early – better things to do, no doubt – or jet lagged). We didn’t speak.

Kate has an enterprise near us – Humble by Nature. (I wonder). Kate is smiling in all the pictures of her on this website.  And there are lots and lots of pictures of her. All those white, perfect teeth. I have misshapen, yellowing teeth. Maybe it’s not just the smile but her teeth. I have teeth envy. I hate my teeth. I bet Kate loves her teeth.

This prejudice led me to feeling annoyed when I saw that she had brought out this book. Walking? Really? And thinking? Is she presenting herself now as a female Robert McFarlane (with a smile).  Is it going to be as pretentious as his books?  I had to find out.

One click on Amazon on Saturday , and piggybacking on Anne’s Prime subscription, my copy of “Thinking on my feet” (great title) arrived at 10.30 on Sunday. £6.99 delivered. The RRP is £20. However much one likes independent bookshops, that is such a good deal that buying books from shops feels like an act of charity rather than commerce.

I had already seen the cover – the title sitting on an autumnal leaf on an Acer. No smiling Kate. I turned to the back and found her beaming at me with her dogs on the Glamorgan Heritage coast, her stance as awkward as her Cheshire grin.  On the back was her message; “This book celebrates the simple, fundamental act of walking, the remarkable effect it has on our minds and the pleasure of moving through the world at walking pace”.   With Storm Callum lashing down on the conservatory roof I reckoned that I, for one, was not going to be walking today.

I read  quite a lot of book reviews – nearly all non-fiction. I’ve written a few reviews myself on this blog.  Reviewers approach their task in differing ways. Some like to  tell the reader about the content  based as much on their on knowledge of the subject as the authors and then pick holes in the thesis on offer. Others (Julie Birchill comes to mind) like nothing better than to tell you about themselves and what an accomplished person they are and slag off the author in a usually vicious manner. Many like to go down the “on the one hand, on the other hand”, route. I always admire how anyone can hold off forming their judgement until the end and then give a coherent account of the book as a whole.  By the end of a book I am usually separated from the start by a week or more and have forgotten what I thought.  So, here I am going to try something different.

It is a 300 page book, so I am going to break this down into 6 chunks of roughly 50 pages and write this up after I have read each chunk. Humble (I must stop calling her Kate as it feels, suddenly, impertinent) structures her book along the lines of a diary/cum travelogue (she travels a lot) , starting in January and finishing at the end of the year.

Humble’s home is a couple of miles to the south-west of here

Pages 1-46 Preamble and a New Year

Humble starts us off in Africa on the Kenya/Tanzania border where she is making a documentary about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). It was when  she was doing her daily morning walk, where she observes and describes in some detail her surroundings, that she comes up with the plan for the book.  We hear nothing of her thoughts about FGM. As for walking she quotes Nietzsche’s opinion much favoured by walker/writers that “All truly great thoughts are conceived by while walking”, whilst humbly acknowledging that her own thoughts about making a meal from left overs in the fridge as not so great.

The New Year starts in the Caribbean with her husband – apparently there for the fireworks. Her run/walks are full of description of her surroundings. They are vividly and keenly observed, though here a “riot of colour” leapt out at me – a cliche that ought to be banned from any writers store. There are rather a lot of cliches in the book.

Back in Wales, her farmhouse is perched (what else could it be?) on a hill above the Wye Valley and I enjoyed finding out a little more about the Christmas Eve service at Penterry  (though she doesn’t name it) church – something that I have always wanted to attend but never got round to. On one of her local walks she has a thought: ‘Maybe I should do the whole length of the Wye Valley walk this year’.  One thought leads to another: ‘Could I carry enough dog food …..would three dogs and me all fit in a one man tent’ . Nietzsche be dammed, I can very much relate to this profundity.

A vibration on my wrist from my MiFit nags me to go for a walk. I cheat and simply move to the kitchen.

The River Wye from Bigsweir Bridge, looking north: Offa’s Dyke Path and the Wye Valley Walk pass here

Pages 47-100  Spring

This section is roughly split between her surroundings in Wales and the Wye Valley and an assignment she was doing in Shillong in India.

It is a pleasant surprise that Humble writes so much about areas and places well-known to me. She takes a walk with a friend along the Wye riverside from Bigsweir Bridge (I wonder why she names so few places?) – a walk I have done for several years before Christmas to collect mistletoe (don’t you dare), – though I extend mine to the wonderful Boat Inn at Penalt and she climbs above Whitebrook.  She is walking in the winter and what I liked about her detailed descriptions of what she is seeing is that although they may be cliched (e.g. the snow likened to a dusting of icing sugar), she is writing out of a clear love of the natural world and she seldom strays into the fanciful musings that I find so irritating in McFarlane’s writing (though I think Tintern Abbey looks nothing like ” it has grown out of the earth it sits on”). She thinks about the difference between solitude and loneliness and arrives at where most do, that solitude is something you choose.  I  warmed to her as she gave such careful attention to lambing on her farm and was nodding internally about how experiencing the world at walking pace allows one to notice the details and makes one feel part of the surroundings.

Humble was in Shillong to make a film about the matrilineal society there.  Again, her descriptions on the place are vivid and detailed and she manages to describe with little self-consciousness or awkwardness the chasm that exists between her material world and those of the people she is mixing with.  I did wonder if she had sufficient evidence to conclude that the particular society there empowers the women , making them “equal and liberated” .  And, having described how the locals were almost completely absent from all the material goods that we are used to in the West, I did wince at her speculation that “these people, whose lives and livelihoods are so intimately bound up with the land they live and work on are happier and less angst-ridden as a result”. But to be fair, she wonders, not concludes. I wonder what they would choose if choice were available to them?  She carries this preoccupation back home, where walking with a friend she ponders on how easy it is lose oneself in a “….whirlwind of to-do lists, emails, domestic chores, things that need fixing….”.  Perhaps she is just taking too much on, though as it happens I have recently just dispensed with to-do lists for similar reasons.

Pages 101- 152 Spring

View to Sugar Loaf from the car park of Skirrid. December

Wow, she wasn’t exaggerating when she says that she travels a lot. The end of Spring has her visiting  Sweden (a bit of padding as she was mostly being pulled by dogs on a sled), Scotland, Devon, London (to meet a painter of landscapes and the person who subsequently contributed  the three of four leaf sketches in the book) and the Scilly Isles with a couple of trips to North Wales for filming projects. But there are several local walks, too – mostly to places that I have walked myself.  The Blorenge, The Skirrid, The Sugar Loaf (I feel irritated by the “the” in front of all these hills – only because I have got used to just giving them the name without the “the”), Lord Hereford’s Knob (though how she got there in the snow I don’t know – perhaps she has a four-wheel drive and more courage than me).

When not describing the myriad delights of the birds and the flowers she repeats Nietzsche’s assertion that  “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” (a suggestion which I imagine might have been refuted by Stephen Hawking). She follows this by turning to the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield who  reckons that the cognitive benefits are restricted to those walking in ‘natural environments’ (Will Self take note).  On the other hand Humble also cites Frederic Gros in his ‘A philosophy of Walking’ : “you’re doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to  recover the pure sensation of being….”. I guess you pays your money and you takes your choice but this seems to be closer to my experience – when I am walking on my own at any rate.

The source of the River Wye – as peered at from a distance by Humble as she starts the Wye Valley Walk, which starts a couple of miles from here

Pages 157-216  A summer Expedition

At the beginning of the book Humble comes up with a plan to do the 136 mile Wye Valley Walk – in 9 days . Now she is only pushing 50 but even so, considering that she was going to do so with a complete camping kit (however lightweight), I thought that this was an impressive ambition. Doubly so, as she appears to be the world’s worst map reader. Really, far worse than me. Not a day goes by when she doesn’t lose her way and some days she manages to do so two or three times. And as I know to my cost, getting lost always adds  extra miles.  She doesn’t make a lot of getting lost though apart from a few curses; I reckon she just needs to check her maps a bit more often, but who am I to say.  One rain-soaked  20 mile day resulted in horrible blisters and sodden boots and left her admittedly miserable and doubting that she could make it. Her account of multiple lancing of the blisters and swollen feet ought to have come with a “some readers may find this upsetting” warning. I know I did. But either someone was praying for her or there was something miraculous in the hot water that the owner of a B&B provided her with but somehow she recovered almost completely with half a day’s rest and (with a change of boots brought to her by her husband) she completed the walk as planned. Respect.  Notwithstanding her enjoyment of the birds and the bees I can’t say I felt encouraged to follow in her footsteps – and certainly not in shorts. Lyme disease is too much of a risk to walk in shorts in sheep and deer country.  She finished this section by putting her own achievement into perspective with an account of a gruelling account of a cancer-recovering Ursula Martin who walked  3,700 miles in wales to raise £11,000 for ovarian cancer charities. Humble goes to see her and puts it to her that her suffering (and boy did she suffer) might have meant that for much of the time she can’t have been able to enjoy the walk. Martin was having none of it. It takes all sorts.

Pages 221-271 Autumn

Humbles year continues to take her all over the world. She seems to have made a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo for the only purpose of seeing 19 gorillas habituated to humans, but puts in a plug that they need more tourists to keep the project going.  She had passed through Rwanda where she is impressed by how tidy the country is and their banning of plastic bags, thus shaming the rest of the world.  A trip to New York impresses upon her that the world is one of Haves and Have Nots and for the Haves she finds someone who has made an inroad into the saturated therapist market by taking his clients for a walk.  The implicit hope for the Have Nots is that it’s just good to go for a walk even if you can’t afford a therapist to accompany you; in fact she demonstrates this by sorting out a major issue that was keeping her awake at night (such a tease that she din’t reveal what was bugging her) by.  Having meetings on foot is given a plug too, and she cites Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Plato as onto that snippet of wisdom and, hey, it  could help reduce our obesity epidemic. The back cover blurb for the book describes it as a “heartfelt call to action for anyone seeking to enhance their health and happiness”.  That, it seems as well as her contribution to saving the planet.  Ambitious, then.

Two asides.  Closer to home she visits the remote Hafod Estate near Devil’s Bridge in Wales which she finds “wildly beautiful’ – I can’t say I found it either on my plod in search of its lost gardens.  And she misses a great opportunity to plug walking in Wales by stating that the South West Coast Path is the longest national trail in Britain when she should know full well that the Wales Coast Path beats this hands down at 870 miles.

pages 275- 294 The End of The Year

Oxwich Bay on the Gower peninsular

December finds Humble travelling to Scotland to meet an ex-veteran soldier called Sam Doyle who’s tour of duty in Afghanistan left him with PTSD and who is getting better though walking around the entire coast of Britain. (see www.ptsdresolution.org). She does well to describe his harrowing story in just a few pages and you can’t knock her wanting to give the charity a plug.  A scare about her Father’s health leads to a cathartic walk which was very moving, Christmas finds her walking on a beach in the Gower with husband Ludo and the dogs where she encounters a stroke afflicted man and his carer who can’t walk but can cycle (he has a special side-by-side tandem). This chance meeting “encapsulated something wonderful: a sense of liberation, optimism, recklessness and sheer unadulterated joy”. Which, she goes on to reflect, if you could wrap this sense up in shiny paper it would make a great Christmas Present.  And ultimately my sense is that she’d like her book (preferably in their thousands) to be wrapped up in shiny Christmas paper and for the reader to find a bit of that joy.

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Just before writing this last section up Anne asked me what I would give the book out of ten. I hesitated and said “six”. Not a glowing endorsement, I know. Humble comes across as a very likeable, warm- hearted and unpretentious person. She clearly loves the natural world of scuttling squirrels, buzzing bees and birdsong. I suppose what was missing for me was some tooth and claw as far as the nature was concerned. The message is clear that walking is good for us. But beyond the desire to rid the world of plastic bags and for it to have more gorillas, I am left wondering what she really thinks about what she sees or experiences. I suspect that this is intentional, that whoever is hiring the Humble brand would not want her to tarnish that smile with awkward or controversial opinions. Or any opinions. Who knows? Maybe she doesn’t think about it much. But if she does, she’s not telling.

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I’m very pleased to report that Walking the Blog has just been judged one of the top 30 outdoor blogs by the Danish company Sparpedia