Long-distance walking

Long-distance walking is all the rage these days. There are all-nighters staged by charities, for instance the annual MoonWalk in London, which raises funds to fight breast cancer: participants of both sexes walk marathon and half-marathon routes wearing bras. The outfits might have changed, but when it comes to foot-slogging, long-distance has a long history.

Charles Dickens liked a nocturnal ramble. He did it to combat sleeplessness, and on one particular night in October 1857 walked the 30 miles from his house in Tavistock Square to his country home in Kent. In the essay Night Walks he describes passing Bethlehem Hospital (the psychiatric institution from which we get the word ‘bedlam’), and wondering how different its inhabitants were from the rest of us: ‘Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?’ At dawn Dickens would head for a railway station to watch the mail come in.