In praise of … the old ways

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/the-old-ways

Version 0 of 1.

In a world where our physical mobility is usually assisted by car, train or plane, nostalgia for earlier methods of getting ourselves from one place to another is inevitable. Hence the many books on walking, swimming and climbing, on the "old ways", in Robert Macfarlane's phrase. Old ways of movement revive old ways of thinking and, indeed, subvert the notion of travel as merely motion toward a fixed point. Of course this is hardly a new genre. Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey or even Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat are just two examples from a very long shelf indeed. Some years ago the Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani chose to take seriously a fortune teller's warning against plane travel and, in spite of the fact that he was Der Spiegel's Asia correspondent, refused to get on an aircraft for a year. The result, he maintained, transformed his journalism for the better. A lesson there for us all.