There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles from a broom in his impatience to make it into a stick; Laurie Lee walking out one midsummer morning; Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed down the lane. To travel was an expression of freedom and exploration; to step out of the front door the beginning of a grand adventure.
Not any more. Travel writers now come troubled and weary before they’ve even begun. A journey can no longer be a jeu d’esprit. It has to be undertaken to expiate some trauma. It is almost as if, in today’s new puritanism, it has to be painful. One thinks of the old nursery rhyme: ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go.’
Recent bestselling examples of the genre have all followed the same principle: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found treated walking as necessary psychotherapy; Guy Stagg’s The Crossway was billed as ‘a journey to recovery’; while The Salt Path by Raynor Winn told of a couple escaping from eviction and illness.
Alistair Moffat has joined this party of burdened pilgrims.
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