The actor embarked on a walking holiday with her (initially resistant) teenage daughter. But she found you soon clock up the miles when taking in Rome’s ancient treasures, cats and couture
• Competition: win a week in Turkey
We’ve taken the children for walks since they were tiny – proper walks, with rucksacks, cagoules and appropriate footwear. And, yes, we’ve met with recalcitrance from time to time, but we’ve always managed to have enough fun along the way to edge out memories of sulkiness. Borrowing friends’ dogs has been the greatest bonus recently, but when the children were very small, we would secretly take along a favourite toy. One of us would stride ahead to hide it, legs dangling, on the branch of a tree, then we’d engineer some delay – an untied shoelace or something – to allow the kids to spot it inexplicably sitting there, waiting for them. The rest of the walk would be spent discussing how on earth that bear or pig or whatever could possibly have got out of the house without our knowing about it.
The reason it mattered went deeper than the fact that we wanted a walk and we couldn’t leave them behind. Because when you’re walking with your child, side by side and with nothing to distract you, rarely even making eye contact because you’re too busy looking at the view or the uneven ground, then you are properly together. You may share little but a companionable silence (though, in my experience, you almost always end up talking about stuff that’s big and complicated and unexpected), but you’re together. Listening to each other. Sharing an experience. Creating memories. And it doesn’t get any better than that.
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