NO animal,’ Kenneth Grahame wrote in The Wind In The Willows, ‘is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.’ After the exertions of the festive season, it can be very tempting to hide away in your study like Badger until the first snowdrops appear. However, conserving resources needn’t mean total hibernation. There are at least two dozen ways to have fun in 2023; to enjoy many of them, nothing more strenuous than stepping outside is required—Badger would approve—and most won’t cost you a penny. Instead, they will encourage us to slow down and appreciate what we have.
Take this list as a jumping-off point and channel the spirit of travel guides such as Wilkie Collins’s freewheeling, published in 1851. The previous year, the author and his artist friend Henry Brandling had made their way around Cornwall in a scenically haphazard fashion. Mostly, the pair walked—Collins was evangelical about the benefits of setting aside the ‘vehement bustle, business and competition’ of mechanised life. ‘Think on your tender partings nipped in the bud by the railway bell; think of crabbed cross-roads, and broken carriage-springs; think of luggage confided to extortionate porters,’ he wrote passionately, urging his readers
