I’ve been walking for almost four months and the stress and churn of the first two months of this journey have finally settled down into a rhythmic pulse of walking and sleeping and feeling calm.

There’s a lot that’s different about this one, my third long distance walk. It’s not just that I’ve kept a home this time, so the paper flappings of bills keep following me, or that I’m following a rigid schedule of bookshop visits, rotating my time around a hundred small deadlines. There is always a performance looming, something to pull my energy together for, condensing myself out of the diffuse space of walking where I am dissolved at the edges, where the creativity comes, hazy sight looking into the trees and thinking big thoughts, must instead pull back and focus on faces, sharpen herself to exist in public.

The experiences of this walk are whooshing past me and I feel unable to grasp them. I think it’s partly something to do with walking in Britain. I walked for two months across Ukraine and to me, the tourist, it was all just Ukraine. 

Here in England, I’ve walked from Wiltshire through Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and into Leicestershire and that’s all in the last two weeks. This country contains a lot of history in a very small space.

There’s something very different about knowing all the accents, about understanding where in the country someone is from by how they speak and what that might mean about them. There’s so much more I should know in order to represent my story of this walk to people who also know this country intimately, who won’t be satisfied with a surface level tale containing a few cliches about prosaic peasants or cosplay Cossacks.

Maybe I don’t have to grasp this walk, maybe it can float past me undocumented. Not all of my experiences are worth representing to an audience, it’s only the plated dinners of Facebook and the GetReadyWithMe dress up videos of Instagram that have made me feel this way.

Sometimes I’m writing a book in my head and sometimes I’m just lying in my hammock staring at dappled light on leaves.

Will I be able to write a book about an experience that I haven’t kept any notes of? Only one way to find out I suppose.

So here I am, halfway into a journey. I’ve walked the gentle ripples of Devon, Somerset and Oxfordshire, and I’m coming towards the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and then Scotland. People joke about it being the uphill direction,but soon the hills will get higher and I’ll be working harder.

I’m enjoying it.