I acquired a large hardcover A3 artist’s sketchbook to assist in the big-picture planning of my life. In the back of the book, I began a creative project. I set about storyboarding an epic screenplay. A journalist was on assignment in Grahamstown. Or Seoul. Somewhere far. Thanks to an apocalypse of science-fictional proportions (like fossil fuels just ending, or metals melting at room temperature) our hero finds himself stranded far from home. No modern transport works, and none but the most resilient of telecommunications systems. Overnight, we are thrust into the dark ages. Our hero decides he must see his family again, and so starts the long walk back to his home in Eryri (Snowdonia), North Wales. He happens to be an amateur camera inventor, which is fortunate because it means he can construct a solar powered camera (with no metal components), and send footage back to his equally inventive relations in Wales. And so, he documents his odyssey, and how the communities he comes upon, and seeks refuge with, are adapting to their new post-carbon, post-metal situation. There are no baddies in this Bafta-winner, no ne’er-do-wells or people out to exploit the fragile situation humanity finds itself in. No narrative at all really, and no character development, aside from the character named Society, who realises that, after such foolish taking for granted that the world would continue to give and give and give, it is the thoughtful, plodding good-life that shall prevail. By the end, everyone is enlightened. Utopia exists. 

 

I stopped writing the screenplay after two days because I realised that all the energy I had for it lay in dreaming of my own burning muscles moving me across continents. It was me who wanted to meet a thousand people and witness their ingenuity in adapting to the times. And a lightning bolt apocalypse wasn’t necessary for people to start their adaptation. We have some nice, obvious time bombs ringing their alarm bells, which some of humanity has noticed and is responding to already. 

 

So began the big dreaming, sleepless nights envisioning routes, pilgrimage stops, the friends I would wend my way to visit. I imagined a figure-of-eight looping around the whole of Europe, starting from Pandy (The Old Mill), my family’s house in North Wales, swooping down to Greece, up to Norway, down again to the base of Portugal, over the north of Scotland and then back down to Pandy. I don’t like snow and winter, so I estimated seven years, due to the length and severity of Scandinavia winters. I knew much work was to be done, thousands of pounds saved, my emotions, mental fortitude and camping skills honed, languages mastered, as well as developing the means to communicate the environmental and moral mission meaningfully. 

 

I was years off, 25 and still the beneficiary of Kitty (the pot that Dad put money in so I could go to Waitrose). Sometimes I thought I might just set off and hope. “At least she lived intrepidly,” they’d say. But the irritation of knowing my family would be consumed with worry always quelled that whim. Besides, I wanted to do my yoga teacher training, Ayurvedic massage course, go to drama school, start my own documentary festival and film education programme, do a PhD in Bantu linguistics, speak German, French and Shona fluently, and reform the education system before I left anyway. 

 

So the walk was on hold while I half-heartedly attempted one or two of the things on the list. Perhaps one of them might make me happy if I could be truly open to it. I might live ‘normally’ after all. By 2018, my Dad had died, I’d had ham sandwiches thrown at me while supply teaching, and my mum and sister were propping up a film festival which couldn’t afford to pay me properly. As I lay in bed at night, staring at the moon through my curtainless window, yoga, PhDs and film festivals began to take a back seat. Still so far off, my walk was all I could think about.

 

For an idea to be worth pursuing, it must first induce a great deal of insomnia. It must plague the eyelids and well up inside the abdomen, causing butterflies and no chance of sleep. If you wake up the next day cursing your imagination and believing you experienced a madness, then this idea must be left aside - to mature if it wants to, but without your attention. But if, in the cold light of day, you are still flooded with the rightness of the idea, then allow it to return the next night. 

 

That's what I did, and why, in 2019, with -£2,000 in my bank account and never having had the privilege of paying income tax, I went off to seek my fortune. I taught at a school in Zambia, then homeschooled in Saudi Arabia and Suffolk, counting my pennies and waiting for the moment I had earned ‘enough’ - not to cover the full figure-of-eight mega-odyssey of my early fantasies, but to get me as far as Greece. 

 

‘Enough’ is a moving target. In June 2021, I had more than enough. Right now, I perhaps have just enough. (I squandered a portion of it on a recent sojourn in Zimbabwe, as I waited for Britain’s winter to pass.) Whatever I have managed to save, I’ll make it enough. And what’s more, of all my recent decisions, knuckling down to earn a taxable income is the one I am most proud of. Repelled by the idea of paid work, I am not a natural money-maker. But for the dream of a walk, and for my family’s peace of mind, I bit the bullet.

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For the rest of the story of this walk's long gestation period, refer to the timeline that is not yet below.

(I am hand-drawing it.)