You don't wear wellies on a walk in Scotland

I love walking, but only on two conditions: the first is sunshine, the second, an entertaining companion

This time tomorrow I'll be back in London. Six weeks is a long time in retail. The first thing I do is check to see which shops have closed in the King's Road since I went away. Or opened. Wax Lyrical, the candle shop, didn't last long, nor Anoukh Jaipur, which sold brightly coloured silk dresses from Rajasthan designed less for women with fuller figures than for women built like elephants. This time last year I discovered a new Oxfam shop, yet another Starbucks. which brings the tally of cappuccino outlets within walking distance of our flat to 26, three new mobile phone shops and a boutique selling nothing but wrapping paper.

Walking distance is an imprecise measurement, depending as much on the soul as the soles of the walker, and again whence and whither the walk is planned. In London walking to the supermarket to buy potatoes or to the Post Office to pay the phone bill seem like journeys of a 100 leagues though both, in fact, are just across the road.

Up in Scotland it's no big deal to walk four-and-half miles to the lighthouse at the end of the island and the same distance back, providing, of course, that you are suitably shod. Gieppi, the Italian guest who arrived one summer in patent-leather Gucci loafers, didn't make it as far as the gate. Footwear notwithstanding, you could see at a glance that Gieppi wasn't the walking type. Peripatetic, picaresque and pedestrian were not words which immediately sprang to mind when Gieppi entered a room. He walked as little as possible and only when absolutely necessary - as, for example, from taxi to restaurant, dress circle to crush bar, deckchair to swimming pool or hotel foyer to penthouse suite.

In any case, if walking describes the process of putting one foot in front of the other to enable the body to advance forwards, Gieppi didn't walk. He minced. And mincing nine miles along a rutted track full of mud and dung in a pair of Gucci loafers is not an exercise to be undertaken lightly - if at all. Perfect hostess that I am, I volunteered to stay at home with Gieppi where, I soothed, we would while away the afternoon as best we could, trapped indoors with a bottle of wine in the reclining chairs looking out across the loch while the others had a wonderful time walking to the lighthouse in the rain.

On this occasion the others comprised a hearty couple from Maida Vale, their two fat children and sulky Spanish au pair, a severe, flat-chested young woman who advises governments about sustainable developments, and some long-lost Australian relative who turned up unexpectedly bearing gifts including a tea-towel with pictures of all the things that can kill you down under - box jellyfish, great white sharks, crocodiles, carpet snakes, etc. We entertain a cross-section of visitors up here. In the circumstances, Gieppi, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of Vatican scandals and recipes for cooking squid, was the more entertaining option.

I love walking, but only if two conditions are fulfilled. The first is sunshine, the second an entertaining companion. Not for me the solitary Wordsworthian yomp in heavy-duty waterproofs relished by my Scottish husband and his clan. I'll walk the walk as long as I can simultaneously talk the talk with a congenial partner, preferably one who can reel off fascinating snippets about the terrain and objects of interest we are passing. Hiking in the rainforests of Queensland, an expedition my husband has set his heart on, I shall need a companion who can provide the gory details about all the animals pictured on my teacloth.

People do not walk any more, which is presumably why, when they come to stay with us in Scotland, they never bring proper walking shoes with laces and leather soles that grip. Wellingtons won't do. A friend who's a doctor walks for a week every year with five fellow doctors he met at medical school in Edinburgh 25 years ago, who now live all over the world. They take it in turns to organise the walk, which is always somewhere in Scotland, around Whitsun. They'd been doing it for 15 years when, a month before the appointed date, the one who works in South Africa rang and asked if it would be OK to go from Friday to Friday that year rather than Saturday to Saturday.

Why, asked the organiser. Because, replied the other apologetically, he had to be in Cape Town by 11 o'clock on Saturday morning to get married.