If you think pavements are for walking on, then I would really appreciate if you could run me through how I might get from the bottom to the top of this street in Casablanca, Morocco.

I don’t want to unleash a chainsaw maniac to decapitate and then uproot all the plants, so that I can walk on the pavement.

I also don’t want to walk down the middle of the road, because there are some very easily distracted people driving lethally enormous SUVs in this neighbourhood.

And just to clarify, I don’t want to turn around and go back, or worse, stay at home and never leave my front door, in order to avoid ever having to deal with the complication of a planted pavement.

It’s possible that you consider yourself well-travelled, and yet you have never once in your life come across a planted pavement that you were forced to negotiate. But I can say that one of the first things I realised, after two years in Casablanca and then moving to Melbourne, Australia, on the other side of the world, is that there are suburbs of Melbourne where people plant the kerbside periphery of their property. It’s not just Moroccans.

So no, I’m no longer going to leave the country if I don’t like it, to find another one. This is the road in front of me and I’m going to walk it.

The most essential and obvious advantage of walking the world, as opposed to heading to the car hire desk at the airport by default, is that you see it. As opposed to a dashboard, various road signs, and some blur.

You can stop at any moment and ask yourself, why?

Why, for instance, is this man standing on a ladder and chopping all the flowers off the hedge? Are they not beautiful enough? Is this shade of pink not the desired one? Was he instructed not to chop off all the flowers, but wasn’t paying full attention?

And, how? How might I walk on this pavement? Maybe I could kick the ladder, so the man comes tumbling down, his viscious blades awry in mid-air, and then step over him and hope he doesn’t charge after me with his sharp weapon. If he didn’t comprehend the instruction not to sever all the nice flowers, what might he not understand in my perfectly rational desire to use the pavement for walking and not stepping into the road to avoid one obstacle, only to be flattened by another?

Crucially, however, I don’t want to shape a society where people get kicked off ladders, so that as well.

The world is full of these kinds of questions, and finally I’ve made the time to create this article about them.

Let me just cross here…

Now you’re standing in the heat of the mid day sun, dizzy with the dilemma of how to mentally and physically navigate these awful, life-threatening obstacle courses. You’re also feeling hungry, and maybe some back pain, and you’re nowhere near any of the places to eat that were on the blog post you saved. Let me gleefully add to this hideous cocktail of existential entropy, the toxic idea that you could have made billions of alternative choices earlier in the day. Any of them could have resulted in you living out a kind of blissful euphoria that cannot be captured. Although, maybe the idea did form from the mental capture of images and ideas you’ve seen before in various media.

Well, that won’t do, will it?

It’s a bit late to run through the arguments for and against free will. You cannot teleport. You’re here on this planted pavement and you probably should’ve read up on Stoic philosophy before coming on this trip, but since you didn’t I’ll give you the gist. It’s something like avoiding obsession over that which is out of your control.

By all means take a moment to merely look at the plants in your way. Smell the flowers, if any survived the cull, and let nature soothe you. But you can’t do that all day, so step out into the road, watching for fast drivers, and realise that THIS is your holiday.

Every weekend in Casablanca I would walk a three-hour round trip to the best bakery in the city. There were buses and taxis, as well as an adequate bakery just 15 mins away, and I knew all this. But I would walk. I usually counted the dead cockroaches on the pavements and once they numbered more than 100. Every week I considered the living population, hidden all around me.

I once ripped the leg of my trousers on some protruding metal grid that was to be reinforcement for the as-yet-unlaid future pavement. Health and Safety is less of a priority in some countries than in others.

The peach, however. The prize for most degenerate behaviour on a pavement, was a man illegally riding his moped on the pavement to avoid waiting for a red light to turn green. He terrified the dog of a pedestrian, and the pedestrian emitted noises of indignation. The man on the moped screamed back at the pedestrian, who had dared use the pavement for walking, and looked at him as if he were a paedophile.

Yet I continued walking. Breathing in the fumes of exhausts. I lived in Casablanca because I walked it. I am not Moroccan, I didn’t have a residence permit, I can’t speak Arabic. But I know what it is to be all over Casablanca.

Walking around Casablanca extensively and exhaustively for two years is like nothing I’d done before. For all the years I lived in London I had a travelcard and only did a long walk once a year or so, simply because it was summer and I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be at a particular time that Tuesday evening, so I’d walk home for 90 mins instead of taking a 30 min tube ride. It was nice, but at the time it seemed to me unthinkable to regularly wipe out an hour from a day, as I pictured it.

Then one day I had to renegotiate the lease of my rental apartment. It was a success, I actually persuaded the landlord to reduce the price! This is unheard of. So obviously I stayed there and enjoyed my victory? Not at all. This was the first time something suggested to me that I could make significant things happen myself, instead of letting other people and chance determine how everything works out. This may or may not have been delusional, but it prompted a spontaneous idea to go and live in the south of France and I decided to make it happen.

I lived in Montpellier. For four months, with a family, in their house, learning French very quickly because they didn’t speak any English. When my time there was up and I was due to return to London, I once again decided against it and stayed. It had been good for me to jump out of a life into which I had fallen without much conviction. In France I was only there because I’d barged in; there was no option of falling and being suspended. I had no job and only enough money left to last me six further weeks.

In between ludicrous attempts at finding a job (such as handing my CV into a boulangerie that was looking for a specifically female-gendered “vendeuse”—that’s France right there—and not even being fluent in French, let alone in possession of a vagina) I started to go on walks that would last the specific duration of any given podcast episode I wanted to listen to. Previously podcasts had been about 40 mins long, the right time for cooking, or cleaning the bathroom. But the emergence of 3-hour+ conversations was the catalyst that made me realise how a pair of trainers that would previously have lasted me a couple of years, could be worn out in three months. And a lot of Montpellier is blissfully, remarkably walkable.

Just in time, I found a job teaching English to children (not qualified in the slightest) but it was in Paris. I didn’t want to return to a big, expensive, stimuli-overload metropolis, four weeks after committing to trying a simple life in a small city with easy access to nature and a newfound purpose for walking. But I didn’t have a Plan B so I got on the TGV and quickly learned what a “modal verb” was.

Paris is a place I’d been to many times as a tourist. It doesn’t have beaches. I had a job to do and no idea how to do it. What was I thinking?

I decided there were three things I could keep consistent with my preferences. I could stuff my body weight in croissants; I could continue to cobble together nothing but French in conversation, even when the Parisien in question was fluent in English and couldn’t bare my butchering of their precious language; and when I received my timetable I realised I could carry on walking, because all my classes were scheduled between 1pm and 8pm, leaving time for breakfast and a three-hour walk from one side of the city to the other.

So those are all of the things that combined to get me walking.

I’ve had a driving license since I was 17. I like driving, and clearly I like going places. But unlike billions of the world’s citizens, I’ve always known that a world of traffic was not something to which I should contribute. I’m not signalling my virtue here; I love flying and will devote a whole section of this magazine to racking up your carbon footprint in the sky. Go to the other side of the world! But traffic, and multi-lane roads? I’m sorry, you lost me. Give me a magic bulldozer and I’ll have them all gone by tomorrow afternoon.

Traffic is a big problem if you want to walk. Walking into it will kill you instantly. Walking around it is time-consuming in an ugly way. Waiting for a green light is not really walking, it’s stopping. And then there’s the air and noise pollution. At the time, I thought Paris had far too much traffic. I was not prepared for Casablanca.

I’ll skip the bit where I moved from Paris to a remote part of Spain, and jump to when I eventually realised I was ready to face up to life in London again. I returned to London by Eurostar and started life there all over again. It lasted three weeks until Covid arrived.

At first it seemed like everyone was going to die, but when the concept of longevity refloated, but in the context of remote working and social distancing, I was not about to miss this opportunity. Within hours of the first lockdown lifting and borders reopeneing, I was on a plane to the south of France. Well, I could only get a flight to Geneva. So I took a bus, a plane, another bus, a tram, a train, you get the idea.

This was where the story was going to end! I was by the Mediterranean. I had work I was competent at doing. I found a place to live in Marseille, a city with a National Park within its borders where traffic is not allowed to go. Brexit had not finalised yet. Excuse my Franglais, but I well and truly bien installé’d myself.

It lasted two months. Long before Brexit would have forced me out, I met someone who suggested we should live together, otherwise he’d have to return to his life in China from which he was Covid-expelled, without me. Living together meant taking Royal Air Maroc to Casablanca, one-way. I watched the Mediterranean life of my dreams disappear from view, and landed amidst the dust and donkeys of Hay Hassani, where we would remain for two years.