The Big Read: Walking to the moon and back

Now, I'm sure that there are things going on the world but I don't know about them and therefore I am happy.

I'm also happy because I'm walking. If there's one thing I wish I'd learnt sooner, it's walking. When I was a fashionably young man I was prone to gloom and fits of ennui, susceptible to dark thoughts and creative blocks. None of these things pertain to the walker.

Bruce Chatwin believed that Homo sapiens was in fact Homo ambulans: walking man rather than thinking man, although I personally don't think there's much difference between walking and thinking.

Nothing so clears away the scrips and scraps and sniping noise of modern life and our footling preoccupations, and sets the mind working more deeply and effortlessly and insightfully than the simple act of walking.

There's no personal or emotional or creative problem troubling me that I haven't instantly resolved on foot at an easy, lazy pace. It's a secret weapon, a superpower, available to all of us. The average white-collar worker in an industrialised country will walk 185,000km in their life, roughly halfway to the moon. I started late but I intend to make it to the moon and back.

I'm currently walking through the Sabine Hills, just about an hour outside Rome. I walk each day from one ancient hilltop town to another, along cowpaths and shepherd's tracks, down into river valleys where clear water runs over white pebbles, and up through green forests and olive groves and pleasant meadows. At night there are fireflies.

I am, I thought yesterday as I walked, a lucky man. I'm lucky because I'm healthy and my legs will carry me. I'm lucky because I can afford leisure. I'm lucky in all the ways that lucky people are lucky.

My day's path took me briefly along a tarmac road through a small village outside Misciani, on my way to Mompeo. I was walking alone and happy as a cloud until all of a sudden I wasn't.

A chap materialised beside me. This man was walking, but probably not because he was lucky.

He spoke to me in broken English. He wanted to know where I was from, and where I was staying that night, and if I had a car and if I had any money. It was the question about money that unsettled me.

He told me he would walk with me to the next village to show me the way and keep me safe. I assured him I didn't need anyone to keep me safe, and he laughed at that as though I had made a good joke which, as he settled into my walking pace and eyed me appraisingly, seemed an increasingly sinister response.

As we walked out of town towards a mountain slope that seemed suddenly alarmingly remote, we passed a small church. You pass many small churches in rural Italy, but I noticed this one because there was a funeral just ending. There were mourners standing around - half of them in black, half in a kind of Italian semi-casual style - and a coffin being carried out to a swish-looking hearse.

The sinister stranger stared at the coffin and the hearse, briefly troubled, then gave a little chuckle. "Good luck to see dead person," he said.

"Only if it's going in the opposite direction to you," I said.

"Mmm," he nodded, frowning at the hearse. The hearse wasn't going in any direction. It was still being loaded up.

I was remembering a short story I'd read when I was a small boy, about a kid who encounters a tramp who follows him home and terrorises him in a variety of ways, psychological and physical. At one point he had to kneel in front of the tramp and lick his shoes. Odd, the sorts of things that they used to let kids read. I eyed his footwear with apprehension.

How do you shake a slightly menacing Italian highwayman who doesn't want to be shaken, when you are also stricken with the social dread of being rude? Hints don't work. Stopping to slowly re-tie your laces doesn't work. "You know," I said at last, "I would really rather walk alone." He laughed as though I'd made another joke and complimented me on my shirt.

And then as we trudged along, both of us no doubt silently pondering personal techniques of violence, a car drove past from behind us. It was the hearse from the church. We looked at it.

"It's bad luck when it goes in the same direction as you," I said.

He chewed his lip and scowled at the hearse disappearing ahead of us down the road. Then he smiled and slapped my shoulder and turned and walked back in the direction from which we'd come.