The Backyard Adventurer

"I think for people who are interested in adventure, there can be—and I’ve certainly done this—a feeling that if it’s not some really big adventure, then it’s a bit rubbish and pointless and not worth bothering with. Adventure can also be quite a comparative thing. You think, ‘Oh, what I’m doing isn’t as exciting as what Ranulph Fiennes or Bear Grylls are doing, therefore it doesn’t count and is not relevant.’ That’s really nonsense and that’s what Beau Miles talks about in his Backyard Adventurer book. He’s Australian and quite a wacky guy. His background is the very conventional, middle-class explorer adventures like me. But this book is about, after going all the way around the world and doing some really big stuff, coming back to where he lives, and finding excitement and adventure in much smaller, mundane things. He makes videos for YouTube , which are brilliant. One great example of what he’s done is run a marathon. That’s quite a good challenge. Lots of people aspire to do it, but it’s also quite hard to fit into your routine. So he decided to do a marathon over the course of a day by running one mile, every hour. So he runs a mile, which takes 15 minutes or so. Then he has a list of other jobs to do that day. So he spends 45 minutes on those. Then he goes to run the next mile. And so, over 24 hours, he runs a marathon, which is quite a big challenge. But he also ticks off this series of quirky things he’s trying to get done. It’s a challenge to be a bit more creative with what you define as adventure in your life. There are two ways of doing it. You can just go to a bookshop and buy the bog standard Ordnance Survey map for your area. Everyone in Britain is on one of these maps, and they cost about nine pounds. If you want to be a bit fancier, on the Ordnance Survey website you can customize the map for your house , so they’ll make a map for you with your house nicely in the middle. Yes. And it’s really about the constraint of saying, ‘This is all I’m allowing myself.’ For someone like me, who’s a wanderer and quite energetic, that felt quite restrictive and claustrophobic at the start of the year. But going out weekly, I soon realized that if I paid enough attention, one map is enormous. I couldn’t possibly do it justice in a year. It’s not too small—it’s actually far too big. That’s quoted in lots of adventure-type books, but for this one it felt really spot on. A part of it was this realization that I felt a greater attachment to far-off places than to my own neighborhood I live in. We’ve got to this thinking in our world that in order to have an adventure, you must spend a huge amount of money and jump on an airplane. And that seems completely ridiculous, really."