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husband of forty-seven years, slumped face-first in a bowl of Rice Krispies. H E WAS HAVING A STROKE! Harold was rushed to the hospital but critical minutes had been lost, and now he is a VEGETABLE who spends his afternoons watching Judge Judy. Don’t let this happen to you!!”
    I don’t actually need memos to know that things are not going well with my body. All I have to do is stand before a mirror, tilt my head back, and look up my nostrils. This isn’t something I do a great deal, you’ll understand, but what I used to find was two small, dark caves. Now I am confronted with a kind of private rainforest. My nostrils are packed with fibrous material—you can’t even really call it hair—of the sort you would find in a thick coir doormat. Indeed if you were to carefully pick apart a coir doormat until all you had was a pile of undifferentiated fibers, and shoved 40 percent of the pile up one nostril and 40 percent up the other, and took the rest and put that in your ears so that a little was tumbling out of each, then you would be me.
    Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It’s like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you, as if he is saying, “Well, Bill, the bad news is that from now on you are going to be barely continent, lose your faculties one by one, and have sex about once every lunar eclipse, but the good news is that you can braid your nostrils.”
    The other thing you can do incredibly well when you are old is grow toenails. I have no idea why. Mine are harder than iron now. When I cut my toenails, I see sparks. I could use them as body armor if I could just get my enemies to shoot at my feet.

    The worst part about aging is the realization that all your future is downhill. Bad as I am today, I am pretty much tiptop compared with what I am going to be next week or the week after. I recently realized with dismay that I am even too old now for early onset dementia. Any dementia I get will be right on time. The outlook generally is for infirmity, liver spots, baldness, senility, bladder dribble, purple blotches on the hands and head as if my wife has been beating me with a wooden spoon (always a possibility), and the conviction that no one in the world speaks loud enough. And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s if everything goes absolutely swimmingly. There are other scenarios that involve catheters, beds with side railings, plastic tubing with my blood in it, nursing homes, being lifted on and off toilets, and having to guess what season it is outside—and those are all still near the best-case end of the spectrum.
    Unnerved by my dossier of stroke warnings, I did some research and it appears that there are two fundamental ways to avoid having a stroke. One is to die of something else first. The other is to get some exercise. I decided, in the interests of survival, to introduce a little walking into my life. And so it was, the day after my trip from Bognor to Hove, that I was to be found fifteen or so miles to the east wheezing my way up a steep hill to a breezy top called Haven Brow, the first in a series of celebrated eminences gracing the Sussex coast and known as the Seven Sisters.
    The Seven Sisters is one of the great walks of England. From the top of Haven Brow the view is just sensational. Ahead of you stretches a hazy infinity of rolling hills, each ending at the seaward side in a sudden plunge of limestone cliffs. On a sunny day like this one, it is a world of simple, bright elements: green land, brilliant white cliffs, deep blue sea, matching sky.
    Nothing—and I mean really, absolutely nothing—is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized—more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railroad tracks—and yet