Escape!

"It was one of those days," a friend said, "when the only thing to do was read John Buchan."  I knew at once what was meant.  We all know days when the small irritations of life conspire to prevent one settling to anything.  There is work to be done but no motivation, arrangements to be made but no impulse.  Letters lie accusingly unanswered.  A vague sense of unease pervades one's being.  An inner voice tells one to snap out of it.  The will to alter one's mood is inexplicably absent.


There is a very English recipe for dealing with this condition - fresh air, physical exercise, direct contact with nature.  Getting out of oneself is the cure, particularly to hills, cliffs, high tops, where the turf is springy and the views stretch to the distant, blue horizons.  Oppressive days come, however, when such escapes may not offer.  City streets and crowds surround, unyielding pavements meet one's feet, horizons can only be imagined.  At such times, Buchan opens the door to the world one's being seeks - a world of thickets refreshed by a recent rain shower, of streams tinkling over boulders smoothed by uncountable winter floods, of the sharp cry of an unseen bird in a bush, of peat smoke rising lazily from a cottage chimney in the calm evening air, a world of nature utterly at peace and yet - here is the key Buchan ingredient - tinged with the menace of man the enemy."


Sir John Keegan
Introduction
to John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps