In the Author's Footsteps - by Adam Thorpe

David's hobby was a statement, of course; Gillian knew that. If anyone asked, Gillian would say he was a hiker, that hiking was his hobby. Really, what she wanted to say was that he was an awkward sod. 

Neither of them had ever had an affair. Their marriage, to outsiders, was rock-solid. They'd both spent their lives in adult education and Gillian was a lay preacher. Devout ecologists, they knew their birds. But if David's hobby got much worse, Gillian would have to up sticks. Or, with a bit of luck, he might get properly arrested and put away for a bit, instead of being cautioned, just an embarrassment in some local rag. That would shock him out of it.

The rot started, to Gillian's mind, when David took early retirement once the kids had flown. Ludlow was too quiet, after Bracknell. Lives of quiet desperation, as Pink Floyd had put it. Gillian played a lot of her ancient, vinyl numbers while David pored over old maps in the kitchen. She wondered how she had ended up like this. Distance Learning for the Open University. No colleagues. Rain spattering the picture window and David becoming an awkward sod. She had even started smoking again, and David had banned her to the garden. One morning there was a tussle, and Gillian threw one of those books at him. It missed, but landed with a splat and a few of the pages flew out and David smacked her across the face. Or would have done, if she hadn't ducked. 

Everything at sixes and sevens, as her mother would say. 

"Why can't you just hike normally, like everyone else?" she'd asked him, one day, when he was strapping on his horrible little snot-green knapsack with those chocolate stains, bound for Telford. 

"I am hiking normally. It's the world that isn't normal," he replied. 

"Change is totally normal," she said. "Look at us." 

"I can choose to live the life I want, Gillian," he said. 

"Well, at this rate you'll live it without me, soon." 

The climax came when he brought back yet another one of those books. He'd got enough of them, now, to cram three shelves. There were a couple of local second-hand bookshops nearby: one was neat and expensive with an ex-stockbroker behind the desk, the other chaotic and cheap with Mike and his unwashed beard staring at you from the shadows. If you were prepared to spend a whole morning truffling under his gaze, the cheap one could yield some treasures. Today it had yielded David's type of treasure. 

He waved it under Gillian's nose, ever so pleased with himself. She could smell the shop off his cagoule: pipe-smoke and bodily decay. 

"Found it," he said. "At last." 

"Don't tell me. The Himalayan Trail, 1914. Maybe I'll get rid of you for a few months and then you'll fall down some post-1914 crevasse." 

"Do you have to smoke in the kitchen?" 

"Bloody hell, David, you don't mind filling your lungs with it in the bookshop, do you?" 

He sat down, opening the book. 

"Wonderful," he murmured. "This is the crown jewel." 

"Looks just like all the others. Old and sad." 

"Buckinghamshire Footpaths by JHB Peel, published 1949." 

"Exactly. Just like all the others. Walking in Warwickshire, London's Countryside, See England First ..." 

He took out a reddish leaf that someone had pressed between the pages. 

"Fifty years old, this could be. Wych elm. Look. Tragic." 

It crumbled in his fingers like dried tobacco. 

"David, that's the last damn book or it's divorce." 

"I could say the same about your cigarette." 

She hesitated. She felt the smoke in her chest. 

"Alright. We'll do a deal. Fags versus those books." 

He looked at her over his glasses for a moment, then at the book open in front of him. 

"OK," he said. "I don't need any more. This is the ne plus ultra, this is." 

"Why?" 

"Listen." 

He put a bit more distance between the book and his glasses (another sign of age) and read. 

"Milton Keynes is a homely place. Fields encroach upon the dusty by-lane, and brim over the scattered cottages. There is nothing here of the conventional beauty spot, for indeed no one seems to have heard of the place, save the handful of its inhabitants; and these think so well of it they rarely leave it. I have known and loved Milton Keynes since I was a boy, but at no time in my legion pilgrimages thither have I met a stranger. The church at Milton Keynes, which is among the finest ..." 

"I think you've made your point. You're not going to do your thing at Milton Keynes, are you?" 

"Of course. A circular walk from Newport Pagnell via Milton Keynes, Woughton and the - I quote - 'delightful hamlets' of Little Woolstone and Willen, with a detour to Bradwell Abbey and then on to Great Linford, with its single-branch railway back to Newport Pagnell. In the author's footsteps." 

"Oh dear." 

"It's England," he said. "I've every right. Listen. The church is approached through a line of small trees, having a farm that reaches to the church wall itself, so that cows sometimes browse upon the backs of unsuspecting worshippers who have stopped to discuss the result of the Crimean War, or whatever else passes for news in this most blessed haven of pristine sanity." 

"Then you won't be wanted there, dearest. If it's a haven of sanity." 

David smiled. 

"The cows are concrete cows now, aren't they?" 

He almost made it to the end, too; he was only arrested while trying to enter the grounds of the Gyosei Japanese boarding school in Willen. 

"Willen is unspoiled because it is unknown," he shouted, waving the book about. "The cottages here wear an air of permanence; the oaks have a great girth; and old men are hale." 

The policemen had received about 100 calls relating to this bloke with his tatty green rucksack, and hauled him unceremoniously across the cycle way to the van. The fun had started when he'd crossed the M1 near Junction 14, where Mr Peel had admired the view of "innumerable drowsy villages cupped within the trees". A lorry had swerved onto the hard shoulder because David liked to think of the M1 as a phantom. He was surprised - disappointed, even - to find the village of Milton Keynes intact. The photographs of Milton Keynes in the book, showing thatched cottages humped like natural grass mounds off a dusty lane, with a church tower in the distance beyond grand elms, had nothing much to do with the clipped suburban verges and lawson cypresses of the present incarnation, but at least it wasn't under a Tesco storage depot as that ancient wood had been on the last hike.

"At the inn you will strike a footpath south-west to Woughton-on-the-Green." 

Days over old maps had established this footpath, as well as the inn. He crossed a few executive gardens and ended up inside the Asda superstore, where the route went up the Prepared Meals aisle. With the help of a compass, he followed the path with its primroses and snowdrops under oaks and elms (it was early spring) through the Chilled Foods section and on via a goods delivery bay into Dixons, which had a special offer on Toshiba laptops. He got into a bit of trouble in Top Shop, because the footpath curved into the back area where an off-duty cashier was snogging with a deputy manager. But he wasn't arrested: when he explained what he was doing, producing the book from his knapsack, they just thought he was a daftie. 

Bradwell Abbey was in the grounds of the City Discovery Centre, and he ate his picnic in peace. He had a spot of bother when the footpath, after crossing 20 mini-roundabouts, eight Redways and a multiplex car park, wound its delightful way through several offices and the gents toilets of Mercury Communications. They thought he was one of the Albanian field workers at first, until he opened his mouth. By now, he'd been tracked by a total of 243 CCTV tilt-and-zoom cameras - a brief, shadowy figure doing odd things: he was saved only by the difficulty of someone watching all 10,000 or so tapes that were on the go at any one time in the local CCTV centre. 

Once he'd climbed his way over the sea of parked cars and reached the nearest executive estate, he was again in the realm of private householder security. An alarm rang somewhere while he was crossing a neat lawn with a whirly-brick feature in the middle, and the cops picked him up as he was scaling the wall of the Gyosei Japanese boarding school a few minutes later. 

In fact, the alarm was in the form of a member of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, who thought he was her estranged husband come back to do her harm. He did not resist the police, he only quoted Mr Peel, but they arrested him anyway. Reports of a trespasser had come in thick and fast over the last hour. Several people had phoned the police from their mobiles when he'd climbed on their cars, which had been in the line of the footpath. He'd even been roughed up by the owner of a Mazda MX-5 convertible, and lost his bobble hat. The police had got fed up: they were sick of alternative theatre at Milton Keynes, all these arty bods down from London littering the public space with their Lottery-aided wank, high on wacky backy or whatever. So they hauled him in. 

But they decided he was a genuine nut, going on about primroses and elms and meandering, drowsy streams. 

"I just want to get to Great Lindford," he kept saying, "down the winding English lane and its high-banked bend, the fields studded with hedgerows. Look!" 

And he'd flash the book at them, which they finally confiscated. 

"Jesus," said one of the coppers, "what are you on, mate? Bang him up for the night, will you?" 

When they let him go in the morning, he was not charged. Gillian stopped smoking and got very crotchety. David went quiet for a while and watched a lot of television. Gillian was almost relieved when he came back one day with Rambles through Middlesex, published in 1929. She went straight out and bought 10 packets of Marlboro. 

"At least he's not a drunk," she murmured to herself, as he plotted the next hike with his old maps, his finger cutting clean across the slumbering hamlet of Heath Row.