Walking in Circles

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Our story of the week is a story about walking from the writer Niki Baker.

Niki Baker lives in Oxfordshire and divides her time – sometimes with a reasonable degree of success – between pursuing her career as an author, editing her partner’s work, running her own business, and backpacking around places that people have vaguely heard of but might struggle to find in an atlas.

Writing has always been an important part of Niki’s life. She has run a school creative writing club, won the Hummer Prize, performed poetry and self-published a collection, blogged, written stories for children and had several feature articles published as a freelance travel writer. She is currently seeking a publisher for her first full-length novel, Yelling at Cows.

Walking in Circles takes us down the winding path of a young man’s life and relationships as he comes of age.

Enjoy!

can see my own small pink fingers curling around the handle of my baby walker and feel its smooth, round coldness against my inquisitive skin. This is my earliest memory. And it is a true memory, not one of those false recollections stolen from a tatty-edged photograph or a fondly repeated anecdote.

I have wondered occasionally why this particular image should be imprinted so clearly on my mind. But then, memory is a wilful, feral thing; we can’t always choose what gets stored or recalled. I learned that fact as a schoolboy when I sat in a maths exam trying to remember Pythagoras’s theorem and the only thing my unhelpful brain would produce was the registration number of my grandparents’ car.

The baby walker is still up in the loft somewhere. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the modern walkers (which would certainly never fit through a loft hatch, for starters) – monstrous plastic structures that bruise ankles, devalue furniture and send even the boldest of pets running for cover, quite plausibly all at the same time, whilst emitting a bewildering combination of electronic sound effects. Thankfully, my walker was conceived in a simpler age.Read more…

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