"Early Memories Part Two" or "Why I Hate Walking - The Wasps, The Witch and The Wellingtons"

I’ve never understood why people walk for pleasure. For me walking is a means of getting somewhere if it’s either too close to drive or I plan on getting drunk. It baffles me why people go to the middle of nowhere and walk for fun. I can kind of understand cycling as at least there’s downhill bits that you can go fast on. Maybe my dislike of walking stems from my childhood as I have a couple of very early memories of walking that probably scarred me for life.

As a child we’d always go on holiday in England and would always end up going on some country walks. We often went to the Lake District and every time we went, no matter what time of year it always seemed to be monsoon season. One such time, my dad decided that it would be a good idea for him and myself to walk up Coniston Old Man. This is a really big hill, as a small child I was totally convinced it was bigger than Everest and even bigger than Skull Mountain, the home of Skeletor which every small child knows is the biggest mountain ever. I also thought that there was an actual old man at the top and he’d give me money or food, all old people seemed to give me money or food. 

We packed some sandwiches (I assumed this was for if the old man just gave me money) and I put on my favourite wellies (yes, wellies, the perfect walking shoe). After walking for what seemed like a few days there was a sudden change in the weather and all hell was unleashed upon us. It was like “The Day After Tomorrow” today. Whilst watching the news of the tsunami in 2004 my first thoughts were “That’s nothing, they should have been up Coniston Old Man in wellies in 1987”. We couldn’t actually see any more than about a foot in front of our face so we sheltered behind a big rock. After a very long time it stopped slightly, although it would still probably be classified as a monsoon, and we began to walk back. I actually had to stop around 37 times to empty the water from my wellies. We eventually got back and it took me roughly a week to dry off. Plus, I never got to see the old man to get my money and food.

 

My second bad experience was roughly around the same sort of time. We were once more on holiday and I was being forced to walk around miles of countryside. To be honest, looking back this could actually be bordering on abuse. After walking for a while and actually being chased by a bull and a dog we stopped for a picnic. We always stopped for a picnic. Picnics are shit. When I say picnic what I actually mean is that my mum and dad sat on a rug or a splintery bench and ate sandwiches while I spent the whole time running around a field with a sandwich being chased by wasps. After walking for what seemed like hours we reached a “tourist attraction”. This so called “tourist attraction” scared the living crap out of me. It was a weird house that was actually built into a cliff (how it wasn’t one of the wonders of the modern world I don’t know). We entered this house and were greeted by a little old lady.  She told us we could look around the house so off we wandered. As we wandered around this weird house every time we approached a door this old woman suddenly appeared from somewhere and told us we couldn’t go in there. Occasionally it was a different old woman who appeared but they did actually seem to appear from nowhere. There was also an enormous amount of cats. It was blatantly obvious to me that these people weren’t little old ladies, they were actually witches and they were almost certainly going to kill us or turn us into spoons or something. The women would be all smiley to my mum and dad and then look at me with their nasty beady witch eyes. Eventually we reached a door that looked like an exit, at this point three old ladies (yes, three, there was an extra witch, she’d obviously been working on spells or something while the other witches collected our hair and skin samples) descended upon us and made it very clear that we couldn’t leave without paying some sort of fee. My dad was about to remonstrate that there were no signs up saying we had to pay but I think by this point my mum had realised how terrified I was and made him pay. At this point you’d think it couldn’t get much worse but upon leaving the evil, scary witch house my dad got out the map and pointed out the car park that was literally just around the corner. As we approached the car park our car was nowhere to be seen and it became apparent that there’d been a map reading misdemeanour the like of which had never been seen before. Our car was actually in a car park in the opposite direction, at least an hour and a half away. I’d walked miles, been chased, harassed by wasps, scared by witches and still had to walk further after being promised the car was “just over there”.

I think these two things went a long way towards cementing my hatred of walking. (Although I would support a reality TV show featuring celebrities such as Robbie Williams, Jamie Oliver and Katie Price and non-celebrities such as the old dwarf woman who walks round near my house and swears a lot (I heard her shouting “fuckbuttons” the other day). They would have to walk a really long way and if any of them stopped they’d get shot).