IT'S FREE:

The great virtue of walking as a serious pursuit is that it requires nothing by way of equipment or specialist kit except the comfortable and hard-wearing shoes you already possess. There are no joining fees to walk, and you certainly won't feel body-shamed by your fellow pedestrians, many of whom will be pensioners on their way to the shops. Walking is also by its nature spontaneous: you do it all the time, anyway, so why not simply increase the amount you do? The pensioners are strolling to the shops. So can you. And you can do it even if the shops are a lot further off. Which brings me to my main selling point for new-entrant walkers: its immediacy is what makes walking so appealing. There's no need to locate a venue; you simply get up and walk out whichever door is nearest. I'm fairly rigorous about this aspect of walking, and I think it's key to the success of the entire enterprise. Indeed, while I can just about accept driving to take a walk in a particularly beautiful or interesting place, for me, the really life-sustaining walks are the ones I take from wherever I happen to be.

If I'm in the country, I walk in that countryside. If I'm in the city, I walk in that built environment. And if I'm in Selly Oak on a wet Sunday afternoon in January, then I take a walk in Selly Oak. Walking is the way I bring my mind and body together through being actively in the place I am, rather than trying to avoid it by travelling somewhere else, or blot it out by filling one or other of my senses with quite other environments.

The most conspicuous example of this is music, via headphones or car stereo, so as to make a soundtrack for the film of your life - which is really, when you think about it, creating a giant, imaginary screen around your experience of the world. I know, you're thinking, "But Selly Oak (or Southampton, or Selhurst, for that matter) is pretty boring on a wet Sunday afternoon in January." To which I can only reply with one of those exquisitely annoying parental formulations: if you're bored, it's because you're boring. And by "boring", I mean unwilling to take an interest in anything that doesn't immediately appeal to you.

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Let me reinforce this with an anecdote. I once went to Easter Island, the most remote inhabited island in the world and one of the most exotic and extraordinary places to boot. The friend I went with was not a walker - though he did have other virtues - but gamely agreed, in principle, to join me for some hikes. The first attempt I made to hold him to his promise was also the last. We had driven to the north end of the island, where there's an extinct volcano, Poike. It's an extraordinary sight: an eminence of some 370m, entirely covered in grass, but with two quartz-glinting granitic outcrops on its shoulder, like epaulettes on a military officer's tunic. We parked our hire car and began walking towards it - the giant, bright-green knoll, outlined by the deep ultramarine of the mid-Pacific Ocean. After no longer than five minutes, my companion - a famous artist - groaned: "I'm bored." And I struggled hard not to pick up one of the chunks of quartz lying in the grass and use it to bash his brains in.

Which is all by way of illustrating this point: you cannot come to walking expecting some sort of quick fix. This is the ultimate slow activity. Yet once you've attuned yourself to the leisurely progress you're making, you start to appreciate the extraordinary benefits. For one, as you're not on an A-to-B journey with a specific aim in mind, you really can forget about any reward associated with arrival - such as the endorphin hit beloved of our running brethren - and instead abandon yourself to the pleasures of transit itself. In a car, or even on a bike, the world's contours are ironed out for you, but on foot there's a direct correlation between your muscle movements and your senses. The play of the breeze, the sunshine (and, naturally, the rain) on your face and any exposed flesh; the swish of grasses and other herbage against your legs; the smells and the sights - the walker is constantly surveying the territory he moves through with a full 360° panoramic viewing.

Moreover, unlike anyone using mechanised transport, he also has - returned to him, as it were - the foreground, which for most, most of the time, is reduced to a blur. The walker, if he consents not to be bored, has returned to him those vestigial senses of exteroception (the dispensation of objects in the vicinity), proprioception (awareness of the dispensation of his own body), and even interoception - that hearkening to the movements of our internal organs that, for the most part, we repress.

Furthermore, the car driver, the train and plane passenger - they all see the world around them as a series of detached views, but the walker is resolutely rooted in that world, his calves aching as he ascends a hill, his knees taking up the strain as he descends.

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