1. Easy walks are becoming more elusive; well, let’s face it, they were never always easy. A friend of mine was out on an easy walk with a friend in flat suffolk last winter, both were around the age of 80, on a lane that runs beside a river. a car came along, and my friend stepped up off the road onto the bank, and into the river, which was deep, dark and cold. She had boots on and was carrying a backpack. Her friend struggled to pull her out, She struggled and swallowed water. The car stopped and the couple in it got out and tried to help, but they were also old and not very strong. Just in time another walker came along, a young person. They managed to pull my friend out of the river, an ambulance came, she was taken to hospital, revived. They let her out of A and E that evening and she got a good night’s sleep at her friend’s house. In the morning she got up to find her friend lying at the bottom of the stairs, having taken a fall in the night. So it was back to A and E, and another recovery.

2. I’ve always believed in effortful walking, a virtuous struggle which makes reaching the top rewarding. I never liked first getting as close as possible by car, avoided those popular alpine resorts where you can fly up from a green valley through the air in a cable car and step out into rock and snow. Too easy. But time changes me. And what a trip it is to take a train, which connects to a bus, which connects to a cable car, in Switzerland, and it’s not cheap, but it’s cheaper than a broken leg. Then you can stroll about on high ridges, away from the mountain bikers and the truly unadventurous who all cluster around the cable car station; in a few minutes you can be out on the mountain almost alone, and you have the rest of the day to walk gently down. see on Piz Nair. So exciting to give up being a puritan, at least for a day. But I’ll always miss that climb from the Gasterntal up to the Lotschepass and its hospitable refuge. And then, having struggled up, nearly everybody goes straight back down the other side, to the Lotschental! Don’t do that! Stay for at least one easy, spectacular day; you can walk up – well, I don’t think I could even do that now – up the Hockenhorn, one of the easiest climbs of a mountain over 3,000 metres in the alps at the refuge on the pass you’re already at 2800 metres – though it’s still a little bit of a scramble, for amazing views, and glorious little flowers in a wildly rocky landscape. If you can still get up even a moderately high scottish hill, you could do it, and you could manage the first day up from the valley to the refuge too if your lungs and legs are still working fairly well. Take it slowly, take all day over it, you can do it! I still don’t think I could do it again though. The climb up involves an ascent of about 1300 metres, and I was greatly helped by my companions, my niece and her friend, and it was six years ago. Six years already. But that day up on the broad saddle of the pass, after the struggle of the day before, was glorious.

Last year I kept wondering if I’d ever be able to walk all the way up Mount Olympus in Greece. I’ve been half way up, to the first refuge, and come down again that same day. Could I stay at the refuge and then make it to the top, through what is said to be one of the most wonderful flower filled mountain landscapes? I sometimes believed I still could. If I ran 50 yards to catch a bus I felt convinced I couldn’t. But then towards the end of the year I had the first of several acute breathing crises, like an asthma attack, brought about by my copd, and instead of wondering if I could get up Mount Olympus, I was struggling to get to the bathroom. But I got better.

3. Hard to imagine an easier walk than the path that leads out of Ely beside the Ouse, through the rough meadow that lies between river and railway line, unless you’re scared of cattle. A small herd of heifers graze there, and they were a little frisky in the spring, but they’ve settled down now. There’s a spot where dogs like to swim. Elegant, long necked crested grebes swim there too, on the river and beneath it. They are the cover girl of the RSPB book of british birds. Now in autumn they have lost the crests which used to cost them their lives: their feathers were used to prettify women’s hats. Fishermen are stationed there beside piles of equipment, large bodies on little camping chairs. Occasionally they catch small fish. Girls and boys scull up and down, the best of them nearly as silent as a diving grebe.

I have to quote from said RSPB book: ‘Courting pairs also make synchronised dives followed by the pair emerging holding water weed and engaging in a short ‘weed dance’ as they rise out of the water. Small young regularly ride on their parents’ backs to protect them from predators such as pike. The young of first broods sometimes help to rear small young of second broods.’ Remarkable, but not as remarkable as poor grammar makes it. To be protected, surely, unless the young ones are riding shot gun.

Anyway, yes, a dead easy walk. And even though it goes through wet country, the path is on a bank, gravelled, almost always dry. But the other day I pushed the twins in their pram along there; the hardest part was squeezing through the kissing gate. I stopped to throw a stick into the water for the dogs taking my hands and eyes off the pram for a second and when I looked back it had tipped over, down the bank, and lay upside down in mud and reeds, wheels in the air, babies underneath, screaming – Of course it’s not that the walk isn’t easy, we make difficulties for ourselves. In the end the worst part of it was walking back with pram and babies layered in mud, deeply smelly river mud, trying to avoid people. One old lady smiled myopically and said, ah, sweet! The remarkable thing was that as soon as I turned them the right way up and struggled up the bank they stopped crying straight away. I wiped most of the mud off Eli’s face and he smiled at me as I took this photo: