Walking to school

OK, no more angst for a bit, I promise.

I once watched a documentary about Freya Stark, a personal heroine who for some reason is pretty much ignored nowadays, in which she undertook a fairly strenuous walking tour of the Himalayas deep into her eighties. She said that landscapes unfold themselves most perfectly when seen at walking pace and you're able to take it all in*. Walking to school with the girls this week has confirmed that yet again; I hadn't realised quite how much I was going enjoy it.

Part of it is what we get to see: the mountain and its clouds, the moon, all the berries and leaves and seed pods and flowers (at the moment hibiscus, frangipani, roses, dandelions), the bugs (there was a pair of mating butterflies on the pavement on Monday), smashed birds' eggs and tiny skeletons, our neighbours, many varieties of wall and hedge and sometimes the utterly inexplicable: why do the people around the corner have seven palm-sized moulded hearts, all painted different colours, fixed to the top of their fence?

I wouldn't see a tenth of all this from a car. More importantly, I wouldn't be able to pick anything up or point to it or talk about it. I reckon my most commonly uttered words in the car have got to be "I can't turn around to look right now, I'm driving!". No such excuses when we're walking: we stop, often. We look at things carefully, we talk about them, we pick the flowers, we collect the interesting seed pods and we even, amazingly, sometimes talk to people on the street!

All this has also, incidentally, reminded me how antisocial high walls are. The people who have fences or hedges not only provide a much nicer bit of pavement to walk along, we're far more likely to know who they are.

*Except of course she actually said something far more lyrical and elegant to the same effect, which I can't remember.