In my late teens and early twenties I read a lot of Charles Dickens. In Peter Ackroyd’s (unabridged) biography Dickens (1990), I learned more about the man behind the writing. An aspect of his life that really fascinated me was the long nocturnal walks Dickens would take to try and deal with insomnia and the racing mind that gave us Scrooge, Jenny Wren, Uriah Heep and hundreds of other characters. Dickens wrote about these night walks in a collection of essays first released in his weekly magazine All The Year Round, “To walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and bemoaning the present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would take it, and would make my houseless circuit of the Bank, and give a thought to the treasure within; likewise to the guard of soldiers passing the night there, and nodding over the fire. Next, I went to Billingsgate, in some hope of market-people, but it proving as yet too early, crossed London-bridge and got down by the water-side on the Surrey shore among the buildings of the great brewery.” These are now available in a volume titled Night Walks. I had intended to begin Project Pedestrian by retracing a Dickens’s night walk, but our dog Marlene had other ideas, so that trip to London was postponed. Perhaps some day.