Day 1: Cricklade to Lechlade

A good collection of kind ZANE donors to encourage us at the outset of the walk. Warm and dry and easy walking. Thames very low.

To remind readers, my blogs are my views only and do not reflect “ZANE’s” views or the views of any of the people working for ZANE in Zimbabwe or in the UK.

Six sets of walking sticks, eight pairs of boots, five walking outfits to date on ZANE’s walks.

It’s been fun so far…

Old Habits Die Hard

A 1970 advertisement for Guinness read, “I’ve never tried it, and I don’t like it.”

Bill Gates once said that his biggest problem was people not knowing how to want what he could offer them. He must have had my old aunt in mind when he said that. She hated dishwashers – they were “new-fangled” – and she was comfortable with the good old ways. Of course, she only used a dishwasher once and that was when she dropped her spectacles into its guts. Her language when she saw them vanish into the bubbles would have caused Billy Connolly to blush! Of course, it was the dishwasher’s fault, and that was that.

But it wasn’t just dishwashers. My aunt didn’t like duvets – “Sheets and blankets are best, dear” – or multi-channel TV either. It was just as well she died before the advent of mobile phones or iPads. And what she would have made of Japanese-style bum-wash toilets doesn’t even bear thinking about!

No Change, No Progress

You can’t easily teach people with ingrained habits that there is a better way of doing something. I doubt commuters would have readily accepted there was a superior way of working to commuting wearily back and forth every day at substantial financial cost and stress to family life. Many things are only appreciable in the light of experience. It was Covid that forced people to accept another way of working, and now we will never go back to the old ways.

Indeed, many good things are as unappetising in theory as they are enjoyable in practice. Re-read the Guinness advertisement at the start of this piece to see what I mean. However hard it may be to make people accept a new idea, once they have exhausted their grumbles and actually tried the new toy, that’s it, there’s no return. Take automatic cars, for example – who wants to revert to manual transmission?

Let’s see how long it takes electric cars to freeze out diesel and petrol.