Peter Harvey - Looking at the lighter side of life

DO youngsters from the Sheffield area still go out into Derbyshire hiking?

Do they pack a satchel or haversack full of sandwiches and fizzy pop and set off to face the wild open country and the unforgiving elements in the Peak District?

If they do I never see them.

I see parties of elderly men and women wearing thick yarn socks, corduroy trousers and proper walking boots, some of them carrying chunky walking sticks, their faces and arms already brown from previous walks, armed with all they will need during the day, setting off for the moors full of good spirits and merriment. But I don't see youngsters any more.

Do they know what they are missing?

Have they never known the sheer, unmitigated joy of limping down from Stanage Edge, sitting on a rock at the edge of the little stream that runs not far from Toad's Mouth, taking off their shoes and socks and cautiously dipping their aching, swollen, blistered feet into the cool stream water? What a feeling that is. Or was. I can only speak in the past tense because it is a good many years since I experienced it.

Have today's youngsters not felt the tension of walking down the path from Mam Tor, into the rugged Winnats Pass, and then having to run like mad along the road to Castleton because you've only got seven minutes to catch the Sheffield bus?

Would they have the resolve, and the stamina, in those circumstasnces to cope with missing the Sheffield bus by three minutes, knowing that there won't be another for at least an hour, just as it starts to rain very heavily?

This is the very essence of hiking: meeting adversity and overcoming it, coming face to face with hardship and coping. In this sense hiking is character-forming.

You have to be able to put up with being stared at by sheep in a most unfriendly way. Or cows. You never know with cows what sort of mood they are in when they stare at you. You can't always be sure looking at them from the front, if they are cows or bulls. Bulls tend to be even more unpredictable.

When you're at the top of Lose Hill and a gust of wind blows your fold-up, half-inch-to-the-mile contoured map of the Peak District out of your hands and carries it off at high speed towards Stockport you have to be able to put on a happy face and hope like mad that you can find your way without it.

When you accidentally drop your satchel on a rock and the flask of warm tea your mother packed for you that morning is smashed to bits, and the warm tea saturates your potted meat sandwiches, you have to do two things: grin and bear it, and prepare to make do with soggy sandwiches.

I used to enjoy every minute of it. But alas, my hiking days are over now.

I have reached the age at which I am not ever so fond of blistered feet, soggy sandwiches and unpredictable bulls. My character is just about as formed as it will ever be.

And I don't, under any circumstances, run for buses.