Do you write while walking? Do you walk to write? Has walking overtaken writing as your Number One Love?

I used to walk around 4 km a day but a few months back I read something about the 10,000 step challenge and upped it to a min of 8 kms. I also read that walking/exercising more often throughout the day is better for the bones, so some months back I started on morning and evening walks.

After lockdown restrictions were introduced in late June, suddenly everyone in my inner city suburb was walking, jogging and skateboarding their way to Sydney Park, a lush 41.6 hectare green area of man-made hills, lakes, waterfalls and forests, which fortunately sits at the end of most of our  streets. That’s where we all head after a day of online meetings, wrangling the kids into home schooling or the simple need to get out of the house. At first it was alarming to see so many people so avidly exercising. Where do they walk (do they even walk/run) when we are not in lockdown? But masked up and distancing we were behaving well and I worked out if I stayed  later and later and did another lap of the faux countryside of this wonderfully reclaimed garbage pit, that the crowds would thin and I could enjoy the sunset, the moon rise, and the simple pleasure of being serenaded by frogs and night birds and three-sixty views of the glimmering city.

Was I writing while walking? Often I was listening to podcasts, my faves of the moment: This Jungian Life, Monacle Meet The Writers, Coffee Pod/cast,  The New Yorker Fiction and Siarad, a collection of performed poems by Caroline Reid.   I was coming home feeling totally stimulated and inspired, euphoric even, and thankful that even in these very difficult times where uncertainty abounds, there is so much inspration to draw on.

In the dark it is not so easy to write in little notebooks as I have in the past. This park, btw, is where in another era my novel Take Me To Paradise was born. But it turns out the memo function on my phone is a perfect dictaphone.

So if at dusk you come across a hatted and masked woman of a certain age, talking, intoning, improvising, singing into her phone as she up and downs the hills of Sydney Park you will know — tis I.

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