WHEN WALKING

5 days from London to Birmingham

Day 1: Moor Park to Berkhamsted – 28 kilometres.

When I was a child, the primary school was at the end of my road, but I envied my friends who walked from further away. So I started to walk to pick them up first. I walked half an hour in one direction to collect Debbie or half an hour in the other to collect Jenny, turning a 5 minute walk into an hour’s round trip. For a while now I have wanted to walk to Cath’s and see what the easier travel options were depriving me of.

So, I take the Metropolitan line to Moor Park, where I have walked to before on the London Loop, and set off. The walk is beautiful immediately, walking through woods straight out of the station, before eventually emerging on the periphery housing estates of Watford. I stop at the Watford cycle hub, where children practice on pretend roads and parents sit under the cafe parasols. The area is full of local cyclists. The project seems to be working.

After a short stretch of main road, I find my way onto the Grand Union Canal, and this will be the rest of the day for me. It is a parallel world of car-free living that stretches for miles and miles. Trees, wooden locks, waterfowl, and boats and their people. It is strange to have such different people sharing this canal life: happy families and retirees on canal boat holidays share the banks with those choosing a more permanent removal from the other world, there boats covered in plants and life supplies.

Walking along the towpath, residents sit out on garden chairs, a beautiful young man in lipstick and a dress, more elegant than I have ever been, asks me the time and we chat for a while about the new floating market that has been announced. Later, an older man with a long pipe turns down a fruit jelly, but tells me about building a Canadian canoe in his youth and being sunk by a downpour on the Brecon Canal. He has been sent to the boat by his wife to get over his cabin fever. “When I’m at home, I don’t know my neighbours. There’s not one I could go to a pub with and, the worst thing is, I wouldn’t want to”

All day I walk through places I know only as road-based towns or fleeting views from a train, but I see nothing of that. I see leaves, Victorian locks and lock houses, sun on the water, ducklings and goslings, and people sitting on the towpath happy to have a chat. It is a familiar feeling from other walks, knowing that next time I pass these places, or see them on a map, I will know them personally.

I stop at the Sainsbury’s in Hemel Hempstead and, for a few moments, I remember that whole world of cars and roads. I run back to the sanctuary of the canal. I am not ungrateful for the snacks.

The pub gardens are all full in Berkhamsted, getting ready for the football and seeing out the last day of the heatwave. So many pubs on the canal here, but I cannot stop. I must carry on to my orchard in the hills and hope I can figure out how to out my new tent up before sunset.

And here I am now, in my little tent, held up with trekking poles, looking forward to breakfast in Tring, hoping for a windless night, and so far happy to be taking the roundabout route.