22/03/19: Tony Hobbs – One Pair of Boots: Land’s End to John O’Groats (2000)

I was very keen to read about a journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats (a.k.a. the LeJoG), but this wasn’t quite the account I was hoping for. The author generally fails to inspire with his descriptions of the physical feat of undertaking the walk, which he completes slowly over nearly 15 weeks. Nor does he especially engage the reader with descriptions of people and places along the way, although it’s touching when he seems to make a friend called Nicky:

“She was tall, with a mop of thick light brown hair, spoke with a soft Devon accent, and was reading John Paul Sartre’s Nausea...In the dark we left the pub and walked the half mile to where Nicky was camped. She held a torch while I put up my tent, and then we looked at the stars, she pointing out the Plough and North Star.”

You wonder if he is somewhat smitten, although he misses the chance to use an obvious joke about carrying a torch.

His interlude aside, the book, like the journey itself, seems to lack passion and purpose. There’s a charity angle (£2 goes to the MS Society for every copy sold), but this is only mentioned when he’s close to finishing. It’s not presented as a motivating factor for his walk. He visits a lot of churches and takes a lot of wrong turns, but you don’t really learn how he feels about anything.

For a narrative like this to succeed, it cannot simply be a list of places trudged through, meals eaten and places camped at. It needs to do something with that information to give you a reason to invest your time in the story and experience it for yourself. He could have taken one aspect – such as the fact that he “consumed 285 pints of beer of 83 different varieties” – and framed the entire narrative around that. It could have worked so much better as Land’s End to John O’Groats in 285 Pints.

But despite all this, I grew to like the author and found myself wanting to get to the end to see him finish his journey – even if the huge achievement of his reaching that point fails to even warrant a new paragraph in the text. There’s something about the sheer ordinariness – the complete lack of pretension – that makes this book difficult to dislike.