Walking with Plato (3 page)

I had always assumed that Epicurus’s ability to enjoy a modest diet came about as a result of mental discipline, that he had somehow
willed
himself to appreciate it. But, no. It was a natural consequence of his back-to-the-land, hard-working way of life.

That night, cramped up in our tiny backpacker tent, we examined Wendy’s feet by torchlight.

Her blisters had ballooned so much that the two smallest toes on each foot looked like fluid-filled sausage-skins with toenails glued none-too-securely onto the ends. It was clear that it would be an act of folly to squeeze them into hiking boots and beat them against an unforgiving road any time soon. There was nothing for it but to hole up in Dunbeath and let Nature practise her healing arts.

The next morning, as I sat in Dunbeath’s cosy little tea-room, eating jam-and-cream scones, I couldn’t help but notice a certain restiveness about Wendy.

My first thought was that this was because our unscheduled stop was taking us off timetable and over budget. So I felt a twinge of irritation. Why couldn’t she just relax and enjoy the moment?

But then I fancied I caught a look in her eye, which aroused my sympathy.

I have a distinct memory, from when I was about eight or nine years old, of standing at the window, at home, looking out into the street, and longing – literally
longing
 – for someone to play chess with.

I had recently learned how to play, and had borrowed a bunch of chess books from the library, but I had no one to play
with
. And it was torment.

Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that Wendy, as she gazed out of the tea-room window, was feeling the same way. Not that she wanted to play chess, of course. But she was longing to be
out there
.

The nineteenth-century American psychologist and philosopher William James wrote:

I have often thought that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me!’

If that’s true – and I believe it is – then it’s the easiest thing in the world to define Wendy’s character.

Wendy is, at heart, a wild woman.

She is never more active and never more alive than when she is striding along a mountain track with the wind in her hair.

I often think that what she really ought to be doing with her life is digging wells in Africa, or rehabilitating gibbons in Thailand, or fighting bush fires in Australia. But instead, she’s a teacher. She’s a committed one, and a caring one, and a good one. But, in my opinion, it’s not really her.

And there she was, after five years cooped up in a classroom, longing to roam, and having to sit cooped up in a café, gazing out upon it all.

It was four whole days before she was ready to walk again.

That was fine by me. We had arrived in the far north of Scotland in the middle of a heatwave, which was as conducive to lounging around on a campsite as it was non-conducive to lumbering along an A-road.

I remarked earlier that the End to Ender gets little time to explore the museums and harbours and beaches along the road from John o’Groats to Inverness. But we had oodles of time to do those things at Dunbeath.

We picnicked at its sleepy little harbour, mooched around its sleepy little museum, visited its sleepy little heritage centre, and drank real ale, each evening, in the Bay Owl’s sleepy little bar-room.

I enjoyed it all immensely. But for Wendy’s sake I wasn’t sorry, on the fifth evening, when the Bay Owl’s landlord asked, ‘Have ye no’ gone yet?’ to be able to respond, ‘No. But we’ll be leaving in the morning.’

When we eventually hit the road again, we understood our limitations. We weren’t yet strong enough, or tough enough or fit enough to string together twenty-mile walks. Not with backpacks, anyway.

So we scrapped the punishing schedule we had set ourselves, and opted instead for a few days of short sensible walks: eight miles to Berriedale, then eight miles to Helmsdale, and then nine miles to Brora.

We walked the first section, between Dunbeath and the tiny village of
Berriedale
, in reverse. Keith and Rona, the retirement-aged proprietors of the Inver Caravan Park, drove us to a layby on the A9, just past Berriedale, and from there we returned, on foot but without backpacks, to the campsite in Dunbeath.

Apart from an outrageously steep section of road just north of Berriedale (a 13% incline over 0.8 miles), and the fact that it poured down with rain whenever we
weren’t
wearing our waterproofs and turned hot and sunny whenever we
were
wearing them, it was a nice easy reintroduction to the trail.

The following morning, Keith and Rona drove us back to the same layby, and waved us goodbye as we ventured onwards – this time, alas,
with
backpacks – to the fishing port of
Helmsdale
.

The A9 hugs the side of some coastal hills here, which makes for some pretty scenery. But it was wasted on us. We were too busy hopping on and off the narrow, litter-strewn verge, dodging traffic, to take much notice of it.

There’s no campsite at Helmsdale. So we had to splash out on a B&B. This was a splendid treat even though we couldn’t really afford it.

From Helmsdale we walked nine miles, with the sea to our left and moorland hills to our right, to a beachside campsite just outside the village of
Brora
.

It’s impossible to walk along the A9 and remain interested in the world around you. Your eyes get drawn downward, to the road.

And when your eyes are drawn downward, your thoughts turn inward. This is all very well if you’re the cheerful, happy-go-lucky type who thinks cheerful, happy-go-lucky thoughts. But if you’re the brooding, introspective type, it can be a problem.

Personally, I’m the brooding, introspective type. So my natural tendency, when my eyes are glued to a tarmac road, is to depress the hell out of myself.

I’ll look back at every dumb, misguided thing I’ve ever done, and I’ll replay it and replay it. Then I’ll replay it some more with variations – usually involving a wiser, better me who does everything so much better, second time around.

It’s a bad habit. It’s unhealthy. It’s unhelpful. It’s depressing. But it’s strangely addictive.

Bertrand Russell discusses this kind of introspection and its pernicious consequences in the opening chapter of his 1930 book
The Conquest of Happiness
. He opens the discussion by describing how unhappy he was as a child:

At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.

By the time he reached adolescence, he hated life so much that he often contemplated suicide. But, despite this inauspicious beginning, he learned to enjoy life as he grew older, and attributed this largely to a diminishing preoccupation with himself. Whereas in his youth he would brood upon his faults and failings and make himself thoroughly miserable, as an adult he learned to fix his attention on external things such as world affairs, various branches of knowledge, and other people.

He writes:

External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self.

I know from my own experience, and not merely upon Russell’s authority, that external interests are key to happiness, and that the times when I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into computer programming, or teaching, or philosophy, or writing, or even chasing a rubber ball around a squash court have been the best times in my life.

But, unlike Russell, I never did kick the habit of brooding. In fact, as I have grown older, I have found myself, more and more, whenever I have leisure to think, ­ruminating upon my faults and failings, and falling prey to self-­disgust.

So, for me, pounding along the A9, staring for hours at a ribbon of tarmac, wasn’t an uplifting experience. Nor, I’m sure, did it make me the most pleasant and stimulating of companions.