Will Self seems to be a keen walker.
As the New York Times reports, on a recent visit to New York, the author of Cock and Bull and The Book of Dave walked the 26 miles from his south London home to Heathrow, flew across the Atlantic, and then proceeded to hike from JFK airport into Manhattan.
The newspaper accompanied him on his trip and records it with a slideshow and a map, its reporter noting that Self "was a sight sufficiently exotic that he was tailed for a while by a black SUV". (One Self fan I spoke to intriguingly misread "exotic" for "erotic" in the line above.)
Along the way, the author finds the exact "interface" between a black and Hispanic neighbourhood and a Jewish one, when he spots "a guy in a yarmulke talking to two coffee-coloured men", and goes "off piste" to discover "a long, grim stretch of low-rise apartments, pocket-size auto-body shops, razor-wired vacant lots harbouring high-strung dogs, and a surprising number of churches".
And when a main road that he is following runs out of pavement, he baffles a passerby by asking for directions to the Big Apple.
"He couldn't conceptually grasp the idea of walking to New York," recalls Self. "I love that."
As always, Self seems to be on fine, sesquipedalian form throughout his journey.
"I am ludicrously happy. I am in a state of almost absurd satori," he remarks at one point, while the smell of the subway summons up "the afflatus of the city's bowels".
New York itself is defined as "the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes".
Self - better-known for his more unwholesome hobbies - has written about his long-distance walking habit before.
In the Independent a few years ago - in another piece in which he managed to slip in the word nematode - Self revealed that he liked to organise his hikes so that they ended at a meeting or assignment.
Then "I can drag other people into my ecotechnical world view," he explained.
"'How was your journey?' they say. 'Not bad,' I reply. 'Take long?' they enquire. 'About 10 hours,' I admit. 'I walked here.'"
And in the London Evening Standard, in 2003, Self disclosed that he had just taken an epic, three-day walk across Essex, after which he had got on a train and retraced his journey back to Liverpool Street station, London, in a mere one-and-a-half hours.
"With the pain went the gain of viscerally appreciating the relationship between time and distance," Self wrote.
"All that is required to teach contemporary urban youth about our social history, the impact of industrialisation on Britain, our environment and what threatens it is to stick stout boots on their feet, a map in their hands, and have them walk into the country."
