27 Apr, 2025

Apparently it is 20 years since YouTube was launched but it’s also the 20th anniversary of the last time I owned a car, that I had inherited from my father who died in 1997. As I was working for a local authority at the time, and running a travel awareness campaign discouraging people from driving cars, I garaged it and drove it very little.  It’s also 35 years ago this month since I gave up smoking. I was in introduced to someone who was on an iron lung and that was enough to convince me to give up.

We’ve just concluded the 39 Steps writing competition. It was 110 years since John Buchan’s novel with a similar title was published, and 90 years since Alfred Hitchcock made his first movie interpretation of it. I don’t think these anniversaries made much of difference to the appeal of the competition, however, we still had plenty of 39 word story submissions from which our volunteer judges are choosing 39 stories to be published in an illustrated chapbook. We will be announcing the 39 Stories on Sunday 11 May have a public showcase with the authors reading their work on Sunday 22 June.

Creative writing and walking appear to go well together. Coming up early in May, as part of the Beach of Dreams coastal art festival, there is an all day creative writing event taking place on Dungeness beach, perhaps better known for the small wooden cottage that film producer Derick Jarman owned, than the power stations for which the tide undermines twice a day. Sophie Austin, one of our community and a volunteer juror for the Sound Walk September Awards is running the event and you can find out more details here.

Our recent Walking Writers’ Salon guest Alan Cleaver whose recently published book The Postal Paths about the last rural postman and women, and their walking routes has written a new blog piece for us, with details of his book publicity tour, so perhaps you can catch up with him in person, and if not you can still watch the video from the Salon here.

We’ve got three Salons coming up and the next six weeks, the first of which is the postponed Walking America with Janice Deal and Sharon White, hosted by Ann de Forest on the Wednesday 30 April. Ann is back in June with Ernesto Pujol and Susan Schultz in discussion about walking with dogs.  Sandwiched between the two, on Tuesday 6 May, we have the remarkable Phoebe Smith, broadcaster, adventurer, travel writer and mum, who spills the beans about her own life in a compelling book describing walking journeys she made along Britain’s oldest pilgrimage routes - booking details here. 

This brings us to a request. This autumn we are planning a series of online events around pilgrimage and would like to hear from you if you have undertaken a pilgrimage yourself or have suggestions of people whom you think would make engaging guests - please just drop us a line.

A couple of other items I would like to mention. The UK’s Urban Tree festival runs in the third week in May, for which event booking has now opened, of which there are many taking place around the country.

And finally we are celebrating a new trail that’s been developed that links significant points in the life of walking poet William Wordsworth (in honour of the 255th anniversary of his birth).  Here is a recent piece published in The Guardian about it. It includes a visit to the house in which he lived at Rydal Mount. The property is up for sale and there’s a campaign to save it for the public. Should you be able to put your hand in your pocket… they need just £2.5 million.

Keep walking and writing and celebrating anniversaries

Andrew Stuck Co-founder of walk · listen · create

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