In October 2024, I will get to Sydney.
Or, more precisely, over the previous 3 years leading to October 2024, I will have walked the 10,500 miles theoretically needed to get there in a straight line, a rate of about 8.5 miles every day, or a new pair of boots every six months. Obviously, I will most likely still be somewhere in the GU postcode of Great Britain, but you get the idea.
I’m not making any point here other than to say that I take a reasonable amount of exercise. In a world in which many people pay large amounts of money to run nowhere on a treadmill in a sweaty room, I still walk outside. It is cheaper, healthier and far more self-righteous. It is also a neat way of doing nothing. ‘Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in our production-oriented culture,’ said Rebecca Solnit in her History of Walking, ‘and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking’.
Exercise, I suspect, has also prevented me from becoming much larger than is good for me. As my wife, my best man and my GP never tire of pointing out, I have always been someone who is prone to running to surplus poundage. I love food and food, it seems, loves me, at least to the extent of sticking around in my system and making me look big. Show me a pie, and I will show you where a pie once was; offer me seconds, and you will swiftly discover that there aren’t any. I appear to be someone for whom the recommended BMI is like an ever-receding lantern on the moor of life, something that just happens to other people.
Not any more it’s not. These days, I am a changed man, and I will tell you how.
A bit of background. On my long 2022 walk, I lost 11 kgs, all of which I had put on within the ensuing summer of barbecue, balti and beer. This spring, I lost 6 kgs almost overnight when a rotten mussel rampaged around my insides in a Lochinver bed-and-breakfast, and nearly did for me. All of that was back on within the month.
Right now, August 30th, I have lost all of it again, and even an extra kilo. You’ll presumably want to know how.
Two months ago, our 20 year old Dualit toaster breathed its last. It had already nearly burned the house down twice when the timer stuck, and it had a nasty habit of trapping bread in its furnace and then suddenly igniting the whole place. One day, it did it once too often, and it was dismissed from the kitchen. For various reasons, including meanness, idleness and possibly environmental virtue signalling, we have never replaced it. And it turned out that, before it died, I would come back from my late afternoon dog walk each and every day and subconsciously make two bits of toast for myself, one with marmite and one with peanut butter. Which meant that, every afternoon, I would ingest approximately 433 calories that I never even know about, still less worried over. And if you look at that in terms of what an average adult male should eat each day, it adds not far short of 20% to it. All innocent. All while I wasn’t looking. All without me even knowing.
It has joyful consequences. Trousers that I haven’t worn for a decade pressed back into service. Teeshirts that once made me look like Family Guy now not even embarrassing. Mirrors that don’t make me sad.
All I need to do now is to string out the loss of my toaster into a full length diet book. With half the world wearing Zoe patches on their arms, and the other half refusing to eat anything that’s ever met a calorie, still less absorbed one, it will surely fly to the summit of the Sunday Times non-fiction best seller list.
Farewell nature writing. You were good while you lasted.
Old enough to know better 