'Why do we do it?' I asked my room-mate this morning as we peered out of the rained-up window onto the grey day.
'Because it's fun,' he said, 'well, it must be because we wouldn't do it if it wasn't,' he said. He was walking the Dales Way.
Hm, not all things have reasons. Take the moon, for example, or Hull. But there's something driving or drawing the Shackletons and Scotts of the world, and James Holman, the blind traveller. He wrote that, on occasion, when he felt the wind on his face and could smell the living Earth, he felt not so much blind as mute - that a world so brimming with sensual wonders could exist at all. (I wish I had the passage to hand). Surely it's for similar reasons, less eloquent, that the rest of us nylon-encased wanderers turn up to find something meaningful in the face of a little manageable adversity. But I wonder whether there's a more uncomfortable motive, too: that we're brought here by restlessness - the conscious manifestation of an unconscious ache to take part in the glory of life that, once tasted, forever tantalises through the hazy veil of the everyday. I imagine that James Holman, despite all his travels inner and outer, was never quite satisfied - his life's fulfillment was always just over the next hill. He felt cramped when at home in England, stifled by polite conversation and parochial preoccupations, while Creation's magnificence waited to be uncovered abroad. I can identify with that existential longing, although 'abroad' is a matter of more than geography alone. The downside of Holman's drive, then, was that he couldn't easily find wonder in the mundane everyday. I wonder whether the final frontier ends up being right where are are, finding wonder in the simplest joys and sorrows - the walk into work, or the meeting of friends - when these are all the magnificence that we need or want. But then again, perhaps that comes with the serenity of older age, not the tempestuous hungers of youth.
It's a rest day for me today. It's been good to get out of the youth hostel and go for a walk. Not only is the world a wonderful place to walk in, but I was harried out of there by some synthesised classics they played in the background over breakfast - Bilitis, Chi Mai, Pie Jesu and the like, generically known as swaying music. It seems that all the hostels in the country make breakfast the same way now: they cooked up a load of food and leave it in a bain marie to exude juices, wrinkle up, congeal and go slowly luke-warm. Bits of shrivelling bacon and crinkly sausages, a beany gloop and the one food less appealing than the space it occupies, the hash brown, sit there waiting to be put out of their misery. I can't eat most of it anyway because I'm veggie, and it costs £4.20, while the best veggie breakfast I've ever had (the other day in Meltham) cost just £3.70, cooked to order. Life's a lottery, I tell you.
Half the youth hostels have been booked out by school and youth groups for the summer. There has been 'a lot of correspondence about it', a rambler told me, because it means ramblers can't turn up and stay the night. The YHA (set up by Quakers, I believe) exists in theory to help young people of limited means to enjoy the countryside, so it makes more sense for hostels to be full of school groups than retired people in BMWs. Even so, I don't think mass bookings by schools was what the hostelling movement's pioneers had in mind. In Lynton, my room-mates wree thre lads of about 15 or 16. They'd organised their own trip together - a few days in Devon - and were just just off out to scramble up the river. Considering that these kids couldn't afford B&Bs, and that they could just as easily be sitting at home with their Nintendos, the YHA was just what they needed, but they wouldn't have been able to stay there either if a school group had booked the place out. As it was, they had to share a room with a cyclist smelling of Tiger Balm, so it wasn't perfect for them anyway, unfortunately.
Every village I've passed on this journey has its own war memorial. Most are in the same mould of a rough concrete cross - there must have been a factory mass-producing them just after the First World War. All the memorials are engraved in more or less the same way. The most striking text I saw just outside Minehead, which read something like, 'Never forget that these men willingly gave their lives that you may be free.' This is a half-truth at best, aimed not at remembering the war for what it was but at ennobling it, and thus forgetting what it was like. In fact, many of the men listed on these stones either volunteered to fight believing that the war would quickly be over, or were conscripted against their will. The brutality of the war had been obscured by the government propaganda machine. The fields of Belgium and France were not places for willingly laying down one's life for a higher purpose, but for having it savagely and ignominiously ended by the new technology of mass-killing. That is not to take away from the bravery of many men, nor is it to argue that they should have stayed at home. It is to say that we fail to honour their lives and deaths by ennobling the war and forgetting its horrors. The war was, more than anything else, a a human catastrophe for all involved in it on all sides. It was the product of choices made by men who never saw the front. By glossing over these realities, wrapping the tragedy in heroism, it makes it easier for us to go to war again. When I visited Bolton Abbey yesterday, I saw that the same text appears on the memorial inside the priory but underneath it stands a small table with a burning candle and the message: 'Pray for peace and justice in our disordered world.' For once, here was a message not only for the past but for the future too, for there is no better way to honour the lives of those who have died in war than to do what we can for a more peaceful world. It is also the meaning of the Cross, on which all these memorials appear.