Laurie Lee captures a moment of being fully alive and fully alone, during his long, hot walk across Spain in the 1930s at the age of 18. 

Alone, not lonely.  As you know, you can be happy in solitude, and lonely in company. 

The book is a wonderful evocation of walking, freedom, and youth, and Lee writes with the same richness, easy erudition and bountiful originality as Patrick Leigh Fermor. 

‘I was perhaps never so alive and so alone again.’ 

See also Lee’s comment on being fat with time and freedom. 

Source: Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Penguin 1971, p.96

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