I had always thought of myself as a “good walker.” I walked farther, more tirelessly, more willingly than most people I knew. If I went out walking with friends, they’d be ready to go back long before I was. I didn’t have Will Self among my friends, but I knew he was part of the Iain Sinclair psychogeography brigade, breezily undertaking thirty-mile walks, leaving unwary companions limping and bloody. So perhaps I wasn’t as good a walker as I thought.

While living in London and New York, two of the great walking cities, I’d walked every day as a way of getting around, and as a means of urban exploration. Later, when I settled in L.A., a city where nobody walks, I continued to walk as best I could, but it was an effort, a deliberate decision to go against the prevailing culture. It seemed unnatural, an act of protest or eccentricity, but I wasn’t protesting anything and didn’t want to be willfully eccentric. I just wanted to walk. And so I found myself wondering why I wanted that, what walking meant to me, what it meant in history and in the contemporary world. These questions ultimately led me to write a book titled The Lost Art of Walking.