One of the joys of 52 Ways to Walk is discovering that there’s a scientific basis for much of what we’d call common sense or folk wisdom – and so much of it is rooted in leaving the house and going for a walk: getting the sun on your skin can help your immune system, and there’s nothing harmful in getting covered in mud. In fact, it can help your gut health.
At the spa, it wasn't just the fact that I was being seen that shifted my comfort level with my body. It was the fact that I was seeing the bodies of my friends and of strangers in such unfiltered glory, like I was visiting a cold plunge pool for my brain. Rewiring my assumption of what my friends' bodies looked like under their clothes, I came to understand that the comparisons I made in my head — elevating their skinniness while chastising my curves — were not just cruel, but unscientific. I could never be as skinny as my friend. Her frame is smaller and straighter than mine, genetics I can't achieve through a crash diet. Similarly, without makeup and hair products, I also could see the realities of people's wrinkles and pores, of how grooming makes smoke and mirrors of our DNA.
When I left the spa, I had super smooth skin and a full body glow. I also had a renewed understanding of what I could realistically expect my body to achieve.
There is a vivid moment in Farah Karim-Cooper’s new book where she reflects on the image of the nation’s pre-eminent playwright – how unfathomable he has seemed to artists and how his face has been conjured from a historical blur. She compares portraits and discerns a marked shift in the 18th century when he seems to become “more beautiful, symmetrical, and whiter in complexion”.
If visual art has hitherto seemed like a peripheral detail in the appraisal of his work, Karim-Cooper, a professor of Shakespeare studies, connects this paled image to a metaphorical whitewashing: the man we celebrate today is not the one who lived and worked in Elizabethan England but a reconstructed fantasy, built to serve as an emblem of white excellence and imperial Englishness.
The philosopher Nikhil Krishnan arrived in Oxford from India as a Rhodes scholar in 2007. His education there transformed him, and this book is an expression of gratitude to a movement in Oxford philosophy that had reached its peak of development 50 years earlier, but of whose intellectual legacy he found himself the beneficiary: the “ordinary language” movement, which held that linguistic analysis was the key to resolving philosophical problems.