Who better to encourage a spring in your step, than former TV fitness personality Joanna Hall who has created the Walk-Active programme.  We are publishing our 125th Talking Walking episode, with an interview of Joanna in her home town of Bishop’s Stortford.  She can show in a few minutes just how your stature and stride can be improved, and it was quite a challenge to keep up with her when recording the interview!

As May draws to a close, we in London have been having a bout of thunderstorms, but fortunately, this year’s Urban Tree Festival, for which we welcomed being back outside for many of the events, managed to avoid most of the rain.  Not poor Greg Packman from this year’s Festival’s Steering Group, seen here giving a tour of trees the Royal Parks.

We had taken a step back this year, from being at the coordinating centre of the Festival, but retained our role of running the poetry and flash story writing competition, the winners and runners-up of which were announced at the online WRITE ABOUT TREES showcase expertly compered by poet Sarah Westcott.

Winners M.L Grieve (for her poem “Mama had Hair of Silver Green Leaves“) and Joanna Wolfarth (for her prose piece “The Survivor Tree“) each received the accolade of Writer in Residence for the 2023 Urban Tree festival and artwork created by illustrator and publisher, Alban Low.  At the showcase all 12 shortlisted authors read their pieces – more details about each of them and their pieces can be found here on the Festival website. The Showcase was preceded by an invitation-only nature Writers’ Circle for each of the 12 competition shortlisted authors, who were joined by special guests, Chris Cuninghame (out going Festival Writer-in_Residence), Sophie Austin, Amanda Tuke and Thomas Kaye.

Why not indulge yourself and purchase a souvenir from the Festival?  Copies of Canopy 2022 can be purchased from the Festival shop at £4.99 plus p&p

All about walking blog posting is unpredictable – if it’s raining biblical downpours then a blog post is more likely to appear, in most other weather conditions we are out walking and not blogging on a keyboard…..