The summer walk-and-read: one hill, one chapter, one bench

01The route, such as it is

We meet at the corner by the bakery at half past six, which gives us light until nearly nine and a reasonable chance that everybody has eaten. The walk goes up through the park on the diagonal path, past the old drinking fountain that has not worked in living memory, along the top where the ground flattens out, and down through the avenue of limes on the far side. It takes about fifty minutes at the pace of our slowest walker, which is the only pace we use.

Nobody is asked to have finished anything. The July book is always short and always chosen in June with the walk in mind, which in practice means a novella, a book of stories, or a slim volume of essays. Twice we have simply walked with no book at all and talked about what we had each read that summer, and those evenings were no worse than the others, which is worth knowing.

02The bench, and reading aloud on it

At the top there is a long municipal bench facing roughly north, and from it on a clear evening you can see a good deal of the city doing its business several miles off. We stop there for twenty minutes and somebody reads a page or two aloud. This was not planned. It happened the first year because a member had brought the book and the view seemed to want something said over it, and it has been the fixed point of the evening ever since.

Reading outdoors is harder than it looks. The wind takes the ends of sentences, a passing dog will reliably arrive at the emotional climax, and you have to read considerably more slowly than feels natural. All of which makes the listening better rather than worse. Several members have said that the passages they remember most clearly from six years of this circle are the ones read on that bench, competing with the traffic.

• Meet at the bakery corner, half past six.
• Slowest walker sets the pace, always.
• Twenty minutes on the bench, two pages aloud.
• Short book, or no book — both are allowed.

03Practicalities we learned the hard way

Take a jumper even in July, because the top of the hill is a good deal cooler than the street and twenty minutes sitting still will find that out for you. Take water. Do not take the good hardback, because grass is damp at seven in the evening even when it has not rained, and one of our members is still slightly bitter about a cloth binding. A paperback with a broken spine is the correct instrument for this evening.

We also learned to name a wet-weather plan when we send the reminder, rather than leaving nine people standing outside a bakery in the rain conducting a democratic debate about whether to proceed. The plan is simply that we go to the back room instead and read the same short book there. It has been needed twice, and on both occasions the evening was perfectly good, just a great deal less windy and with better tea.

04What the walk does to the talk

Conversation on a path is different from conversation round a table. You cannot address the whole group, so it breaks into twos and threes that reshuffle every few hundred yards, and the quieter members talk a great deal more than they do in a room. The person who would never interrupt across a table will happily say the sharpest thing of the evening while walking alongside you and looking straight ahead at the path. That last point has quietly changed how we run the indoor meetings too.

We now open every meeting with ten minutes of general talk before anyone says anything about the book, which is a small imitation of the walk and works nearly as well. The walk itself stays annual. Part of its value is that it is rare, and a circle that met on a hill every month would be a different circle, probably a smaller one, certainly a damper one, and almost certainly one that had stopped enjoying the hill.