Getting out in nature is good for your head

It's a solid gold fact

We’ve got a track record of getting out of our heads, but these days we’re being drawn more to getting out for our heads.

Our pal Stan* organised a stout six mile hike at the weekend and we went with him. It went up and round a big hill at the most miserable time of year with gales, rain, hail and snow. Strange as it seems this was all to raise our spirits, as well as raising money for the suicide prevention charity CALM. It stands for the Campaign Against Living Miserably (which is a gloriously funny name in itself).

Get support, take action, donate - find out more about CALM here.

35 people went for a walk together and between us we raised over four grand for the charity. There were all sorts there. Tattooed weirdos, bikers, outdoor enthusiasts and Hipster Twats. There were many people who had been affected by suicide.

In this photo brant is standing next to a man wearing a bin bag as his weather protection. The woman didn’t even have a bin bag, although later on she pulled a dry pair of socks out of her bag to replace her soaking gloves.

brant is wearing a £366.66 mountain coat from a snazzy outfit called HebTroCo. He stayed dry and warm and was happy. The man and the woman had fairly unsuitable coats but they were happy too. It’s nice to have a nice coat but there’s more to happiness than just having a nice coat. Going for a walk helped us all to be happy. Amen.

Kinder Scout, where we walked, is a steep sided rocky plateau in the Dark Peak in Derbyshire.

It’s famous as the spiritual home of the now mythic ‘Kinder trespass’ that along with a great deal of campaign work, led to us common folk being able to have access to our own countryside. It also marks the brutal start of the Pennine Way (which along with national parks also comes out of years of campaigning for public access). Apt then that we walked here just as the courts decided to allow a wealthy landowner to ban wild camping on Dartmoor, a gentle right that has allowed people to get out into nature cheaply to unwind for decades.

These wild places and experiences are vital to the mental wellbeing of the people of this country.

We need to love these resources and defend our rights to spend time in nature.

The beautiful open places of our country should be for the many and not just the self appointed few. You might want to find out more from the Right to Roam movement, who are fighting for these rights in a wonderfully anarchic British way:

www.righttoroam.org.uk

That’s enough preaching, now it’s time for some boasting. Obviously a charity walk isn’t a race but we’d like to point out that even though we were the oldest people there, we were the first to finish the walk. That means we technically won. We await our medals.