Walking with Plato (12 page)

The Forth and Clyde Canal isn’t Britain’s prettiest waterway. It’s wide and quiet, and has an excellent towpath, but the view is often obscured by trees. And even when there
is
a view, it is often of nothing more inspiring than industrial parks and housing estates.

The route has one highlight though, namely the Falkirk Wheel, the world’s only rotating boat lift. This 114-feet-high landmark structure, which connects the Forth and Clyde Canal to the Union Canal, manages to be both a magnificent piece of engineering and a breath-taking modern sculpture at the same time.

Apparently, the design took its inspiration from, among other things, a Celtic axe, the ribcage of a whale, and the propeller of a ship, but to me it resembles nothing so much as a giant corkscrew. In any case, it’s a splendid sight, which attracts half a million visitors a year.

Of course, Wendy and I weren’t so much visiting the Wheel as marching past it. We didn’t reach it until late in the afternoon, and had to press on for two more miles before we reached Falkirk High railway station.

On our journey back to Milngavie, we shared a train with a crowd of business-suited Glasgow commuters. It felt strange, after a month of solitary tramping through the countryside, to be back in mainstream society, and I felt a little sorry for all of those people with their briefcases, laptops, and mobile phones.

That day’s walk was the longest so far: a total of twenty-eight miles, including the walk to and from Milngavie Station. It hadn’t been the most exciting of walks either. But, despite its length and lack of stimulation, it wasn’t unpleasant.

On the very first stage of JoGLE, between John o’Groats and Inverness, I had found the last few miles of each day dull and painful. By the third stage, on the West Highland Way, I had ceased to find them painful, and found them merely dull. And by this fourth stage, even the dullness had ceased to be an issue.

Don’t get me wrong. The dullness was still there, to a degree. It just wasn’t a big deal any more. I had adjusted to it. Accepted it. Even begun to embrace it.

Each day had a predictable rhythm: a mildly tedious start to the morning with the quotidian chore of taking down our camp. Then five or six hours of enjoyable walking with energy levels high. Then an hour’s weary plodding, late in the afternoon. And finally, a congenial evening of food, rest, and relaxation.

And it was a
nice
rhythm, consisting of modest highs and lows that flowed seamlessly from one to another like the peaks and troughs of a sine wave. It had a balance about it, and a tranquillity about it. The modest lows offset the modest highs, and the modest highs offset the modest lows. So, in a curious way, it was all good.

In
The Conquest of Happiness
, Bertrand Russell suggests that too much excitement may not be a good thing, and that a certain amount of boredom may be a necessary ingredient of a happy life:

There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty.

By this stage of JoGLE, I had begun to appreciate what he meant.

Many of us, nowadays, feel compelled to fill every waking moment of our lives with TV, music, Facebook, text messages, tweets, and smartphone apps. We can’t abide the thought of sitting quietly, even for a moment, with our thoughts. We crave excitement and stimulation, and regard boredom with abhorrence and fear.

But long-distance walking changed all of that for me. It taught me that periods of mild boredom are nothing to be afraid of. In fact, they can be a good thing.

On a typical day, I walked for about eight hours. I spent perhaps an hour or two of this listening to music and audio-books, and perhaps an hour or two conversing with Wendy. This left me with at least four hours in which I had nothing to do but walk and think.

Those quiet hours, free from electronic stimuli, and free from talk, work, and play, were sometimes a little dull. And in the early stages that dullness worried and bothered me. But, as time went by, the worry and the bother faded. I came to regard periods of mild boredom not as an enemy but as a companion – and even as a friend.

Those long, empty hours were a cold-turkey cure for my addiction to stimulation and distraction. And, although the cure was painful at first, once it had taken effect, I felt liberated. My mind acquired a newfound tranquillity, clarity, and focus.

The following morning, we packed up our tent, hoisted up our backpacks, walked to the railway station, caught the train back to Falkirk, and then walked ten miles along the Union Canal to
Linlithgow
.

I remember little about the walk except that the Union Canal was much prettier than the Forth and Clyde Canal, and that Wendy suffered a couple of hours of agony after being bitten on the inside of her lip by an insect.

Linlithgow boasts the magnificent ruins of a royal palace, a beautiful little loch, a fine medieval church, and a high street replete with historic buildings. However, all of this passed me by unnoticed. I recall getting my hair cut by a barber who removed my ear hair by setting fire to it, and I recall eating fish and chips out of a box, and that’s about it.

But, although I have forgotten the day’s sights, I remember very clearly the music I listened to as I walked. With only a week left in Scotland, I had opted for some traditional Scottish songs. And they really got to me.

In the past, I’ve observed a tendency in myself, when I’m worn out or stressed or depressed, to become emotional at the drop of a hat. I’ve found myself moved to tears by such unlikely stimuli as advertisements for Sunny Delight and episodes of
Bargain Hunt
.

On this day, though, I felt neither worn out nor stressed nor depressed, and yet I found myself welling up at the words to songs. For example, these lines from ‘When You and I were Young, Maggie’:

They say we are agèd and grey, Maggie,

As spray by the white breakers flung,

But to me you’re as fair as you were, Maggie,

When you and I were young.

Or these words from ‘The Road and the Miles to Dundee’:

I took the gowd pin, from the scarf on my bosom,

And said ‘keep ye this, in re-mem-brance O’ me’,

Then brave-ly I kissed, the sweet lips O’ the lassie

E’er I part-ed wi’ her, On the road to Dundee.

I was surprised to find myself in such a tearfully sentimental mood in the absence of any of the usual triggers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been partial to a bit of sentimentality – which explains, in part, my adoration of Dickens. But by this stage of JoGLE, I seemed to have got into an unusually heightened state. My feelings – all of them – had become more intense.

Walking for hours each day, attuned to the rhythms of my own breath, heartbeat, and footfall, and with a mind free of distraction and stimulation, had put me into a meditative state. And, like many a meditator before me, I achieved a higher level of consciousness. I began to
think
more clearly, to
feel
more intensely, to
understand
more deeply, and to
appreciate
more fully.

This enabled me to enter right into the words, music, and sentiments of those wonderful old songs: one moment striding along, arms swinging, bellowing out the words to ‘Loch Lomond’, and the next moment getting misty-eyed over the bittersweet parting on the ‘Road to Dundee’.

I don’t recall the sixteen-mile walk from Linlithgow to
Kirknewton
. I imagine that we took an indirect route along the towpath of the Union Canal (looking at the map that would seem the obvious thing to do). But it’s possible that we took some other route.

What I
do
remember is looking at Wendy, as we walked the last half-mile into Kirknewton, and being surprised at how exhausted she looked. I, on the other hand, felt as fresh as a daisy and as strong as an ox.

This was such a role reversal, Wendy being the
walker
, that I couldn’t resist posting on Facebook, ‘New walking-partner required. I’ve worn the old one out.’

This was met with incredulity and outrage among Wendy’s friends. ‘I don’t believe it! Wendy would
never
give up!’ being a typical response. So, for a brief time, I got to experience the perverse thrill of Internet trolling.

Kirknewton is a village situated just southwest of Edinburgh, which has, as far as I know, nothing to recommend it to visitors. Our only purpose in going there was to catch a train to Edinburgh where we had arranged to spend a couple of nights with our friends Marilyn and Raphie.

Wendy and I had spent two years living in Edinburgh, and it’s our favourite place in the world. So we had a splendid time there, visiting old haunts and enjoying our friends’ open-hearted hospitality. On the second evening, we even managed to squeeze in a visit to the cinema and eat dinner at a proper restaurant – just like regular people.

From Edinburgh, we took the train back to Kirknewton, and then set off on a five-day hike southeast to Kirk Yetholm.

We’d intended to break up the journey wherever we could find cheap accommodation. But cheap accommodation is in short supply in that part of Scotland. Consequently, for our first night, we had to book an expensive (by our standards) room at a pub-hotel in the village of
Carlops
.