The phrase “taking exercise” has an ambivalent ring for me. It tends to sound admonitory and joyless: you might expect a doctor or an insurance company to urge you to take more exercise. And then the word “exercise” itself, with its Roman, military connotations (exercitus is the Latin word for army), calls to mind those instruments of torture the treadmill and the exercise bike. I’m still amazed that people pay good money to yoke themselves to machines associated with slave labour. Treadmills and exercise bikes may build up muscles but could they ever restore what is far more precious and elusive, the spring in the step?

Most of us live in cities and are condemned to pound “the pavements grey” (as Yeats called them with a fin-de-siècle aesthetic shudder in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”). We might make the occasional foray into a park, which only reminds us that we are animals in captivity.