As a Canadian living in the UK, there’s one thing I still don’t get about the British: what’s so great about trudging through a muddy field to nowhere?
There are lots of things about the British I do not understand: the national compulsion to clap along, in unison but off the beat, to any music; Mr Blobby’s Christmas No 1; the use of “quite nice” to mean “really not very nice at all”; bread sauce. Being a Canadian living in this country is a never-ending cycle of getting confused, asking for clarification, understanding, and then ending up somehow more confused.
In the heady days of our bubbled summer of 2020, when such a thing was possible, I went on holiday to Sussex with my Canadian partner and three of our oldest friends, all Brits. Having met in our early 20s, we had always been too broke to holiday together. Now we were in our 30s and affluent enough to split a cottage five ways for four nights; this was a landmark moment. Look, I could spend a lot of time setting the scene, or cut to the chase and tell you that we were there for five days and went on long, aimless walks every single day. This was how I discovered the British Walking Sickness.
One moment we were simply walking, the next ‘on a walk’: aimless, unguided, unending. No destination, only a journey
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Picnicking and sitting are forbidden. The government has spoken: we’ll walk our way through this. I am exhausted already
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