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Good Morning, Not being able to travel far, deprived of purpose and connection for months, being allowed to walk with one other person has been life-giving for many, life saving for some. For walking and talking is a kind of double therapy, a physical and spiritual exercise rolled into one. The walking might be limited to a certain mileage, but the talking can take you anywhere. During one of these walks my friend and I coined a new word: to strollock. Essentially a verb it means to stroll with someone whilst talking about whatever you want to talk about. It requires a pace that allows you to combine the walk with the talk, without the one inhibiting the other. And as its etymology suggests, strollocking doesn’t have to involve talking about anything of consequence; you can step through the shallows of the quotidian for miles without getting beyond the weather, what’s for dinner, or your favourite character in Line of Duty. Then again, you can be halfway through a stroll, and you might stumble upon deeper terrain; find yourself in more profound territory. For to walk and talk is to undertake two journeys at the same time; the one where your legs take you and the other where your mind wanders. On a recent walk from Richmond Bridge to Eel Pie Island, my friend and I were taking in the sights of the river; while our conversation took us from Byron Bay to the Brecon Beacons via our consumption of beer during lock down. Somewhere between the ice cream man and the coffee van, the conversation took a steeper gradient and we found ourselves discussing divorce, addiction, death and God. If our paths diverged on this last subject, we both agreed that there was something very surprising about being alive. We sealed our communion with coffee and gratitude for the walk, the talk and our recognition of the self-evident mystery of life. We’d walked seven miles, but covered a lot more ground. It was our fifteen thousand step programme. Some say that God can’t be comprehended by the finite mind, but can be known through an intimate encounter found in ordinary experience. In a famous fifteen thousand step walk, scripture reports that two men were travelling seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus. It was days after the crucifixion of Christ an event that left them disconsolate. As they walked a third man joined them and asked what they were talking about. They told him about this Jesus, about whom the stranger seemed to know a great deal. There were rumours he’d risen from the dead. On they walked, wondering if such a thing were true. Later, that evening, when the stranger broke bread with them the men realised who he was. The risen Christ had been walking and talking with them all this time. Their communion completed when they recognised the self-evident mystery of life.