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The other day I was pitching a TV commissioning editor. It had been tough to get the meeting. As a result, I had been preparing for days. He was from a TV department that commanded the really big budgets. I was pretty confident. Yours truly had repeatedly appeared in various current-affairs hotspots, which he must have known about. So this was it.
Exactly 65 seconds into my pitch the editor looked at his watch. ‘Let me stop you there,’ he said with a smile. ‘And before I say anything else, allow me to say what a wonderful job you guys do over in current affairs.’ He gave me both thumbs up. ‘Yeah — risking your lives for stories that deserve to be told. And I’m really pleased that what you do is ring-fenced and doesn’t depend on how many viewers you get.’ He now turned the two thumbs towards himself. ‘But what we’re trying to do over in our department is get millions and millions of people to watch our programmes.’ The pitching meeting was over.
I could live with being treated like a miserable imposter if I was appreciated back home in Kenya. A big fish in a very small pond — I can live with that. Yet if anything it’s worse in East Africa. Black and Asian Kenyans immediately assume I have just arrived off British Airways and know nothing. They say things like, ‘Are you taking your holiday in Mombasa? That’s on the sea. It is very beautiful. Hakuna matata. Yes.’ White Kenyans, on the other hand, assume I must know all the masonic handshakes. They turn sour when I apparently do not. ‘What the bladdy hell are you up to? I had an investor who was going to come in with 20 million until your last story spooked him. Now it’s all gone chapalanga, man. Balls up.’ Being lambasted for reporting on the alarming things I see at home disheartens me particularly because these same people attacked me when Kenya’s troubles erupted in January. They’d stand at the bar and give me Tusker beer squinty frowns. ‘What were you up to? Kipping, man? Why didn’t you bladdy see this coming?’
I was looking at trail running shoes in a specialist running shoe shop, intending to buy. The young woman who sprang forward to assist was fit, lean and agile. She exuded tiptop mental and physical health. Helena she was called. She was Czech. I, on the other hand, was crapulous and reeked strongly — even to myself — of the odours of the tavern.
‘How far do you think you will be going?’ she said. ‘Between 50 and 100 miles,’ I said. ‘Running?’ she said, impressed. ‘Walking,’ I said. ‘Along long-distance footpaths in the south of England with a rucksack.’ She looked disappointed. Obviously one of those fanatical runners, she found it incomprehensible that people walked when they could be running. ‘Won’t you feel like running — even just a little bit?’ she said. ‘For instance, when you come to a nice downhill field?’ I told her I doubted it.
We studied the shoe-lined shelves in the shop together. We started off, at my suggestion, with the lightest pair of shoes in the shop. A new generation of technologically advanced camping materials on the market means you can equip yourself with tent, mat, cooker, sleeping bag and rucksack with a combined weight of less than David Blunkett’s diaries. The same applies to walking clothes and footwear. You can buy a windproof jacket weighing 80 grams, and sturdy, waterproof trail shoes weighing no more than a pair of carpet slippers. After reading the advertising literature for these ‘ultralite’ products, your main worry is being blown off course by a puff of wind.
Helena looked sceptically at the fluorescent-blue ballet-style shoes I’d chosen. I travel light, I told her firmly. Lightness was all. That much was non-negotiable. Her scepticism deepened as I removed my shoes and socks, revealing my startlingly slender, flat, etiolated feet. ‘Are you used to walking a hundred miles?’ she said. I admitted that I was not, but what I lacked in experience, I would make up for with determination, I said. She led me outside the shop and I hobbled out after her.
A light drizzle was falling in the alleyway outside the shop. ‘Just walk away as you would normally for a few yards and then come back,’ said Helena. She was going to study my gait and footfall and assess whether the feather-light trail shoe I’d chosen suited them.
As I looked down the wet alley before setting off, miserable memories of the last time I’d paraded my gait under a woman’s close scrutiny came flooding back. We were lying in bed. She was telling me what was wrong with me, starting with my feet and working her way up. My feet were like flippers. How could she go out with someone with feet like flippers? She moved up to my legs. Like a sparrow’s, she said. She could barely bring herself to look at them. Then she told me to get out of bed and stand next to the window. Obediently I got out of bed and stood naked beside the window awaiting further instructions. Right, now walk across the room, she said. I walked across the room. Now walk back again, she said. I walked back. Her violet, skunk-clouded eyes followed me back and forth. ‘And you walk,’ she said, ‘like you’ve got a stick up your arse. How can I go out with a bloke that walks as if he’s got a stick up his arse? What would people think of me?’
Acutely self-conscious, I lit out across the wet pavement. After 20 paces, I turned on my heel and returned. Helena had pulled her hood up over her forehead and she was hugging herself against the wet. And she was laughing.
‘That’ ;s how you walk naturally, right?’ she said.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘I walk like I’ve got a stick up my arse.’ She waggled her head, humorously, as if trying to decide whether I was the kind of person to whom the truth can be told. ‘You’re an overpronator,’ she said. ‘I know that much.’ More insults, I thought. ‘I’m a what?’ ‘You overpronate. It means with every step you take, your foot is still rolling inwards when it should be pushing off again. Don’t worry. It’s common.’
The principal causes of my overpronating, she said, were my flat feet and my knock-knees. If I was going to walk 100 miles, she recommended a sturdy shoe with plenty of support. Or better still a boot. ‘A surgical boot, I suppose,’ I said. Then this picture of health led the spavined old jade back inside the shop to look for something more appropriate.
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