THERE are few, if any, better people to take advice from than John Buchan. In fact there is a good argument that The Complete Richard Hannay contains more and better lessons in life than all the self-help books ever written. The whole premise of John Macnab is, after all, a cure for middle-aged futility, while The 39 Steps is a rather radical solution for ‘the best bored man in the United Kingdom’.
My favourite advice, however, is delivered by Hannay’s friend Tom Greenslade, the local doctor, at his Cotswolds home, Fosse Manor. In , Hannay and Greenslade are faced with a particularly impenetrable conundrum and the doctor resolves to solve it through the medium of walking: ‘At ten o’clock precisely I start on a walk – right round the head of the Windrush and home by the Forest. It’s going to be a thirty-mile stride at a steady four and a half miles an hour, which, with half an hour for lunch, will get me back here before six. I’m going to drug my body and mind into apathy by hard
