Book review: Urban Worrier: Adventures in the Lost Art of Letting Go

Urban Worrier: Adventures in the Lost Art of Letting GoBy Nick ThorpeLittle, Brown, 254pp, £13.99

Nick Thorpe is a man at breaking point. Finding himself slumped at his desk one Monday morning, completely burned out, the freelance journalist decides that he must save himself. He must learn to relax and let go - partly for his own wellbeing, but also for the sake of Ali, his long-suffering psychotherapist wife.

It is not just Thorpe's career that has led him to this cliff edge, stressful and necessarily deadline-driven as it is. He and Ali have recently embarked upon the journey to adopting a child, and part of our self- deprecating, self-doubting, and often self-loathing narrator's anxiety is about becoming a father, and potentially failing at the biggest and most important commission he has ever undertaken.

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Given that he has hit a metaphorical cliff edge, Thorpe decides that its physical embodiment is probably the most fitting place to start his quest. He heads to Cornwall, throws himself off said cliff, and then embarks upon a day of Coasteering, "a hybrid of rock-scrambling, swimming and bodysurfing", all undertaken in what the Coastguard pointedly refers to as the "tidal impact zone".

"I'd say it's mainly a guy thing … this extreme sports malarkey," Ali tells her adrenalin-fuelled husband, in her trademark call-a-spade-a-spade style. "Men find it harder to take the risk of intimacy, so they buddy up and leap off a cliff together instead... Women just go out for a coffee and achieve the same thing."

Next on Thorpe's list of self-imposed challenges is wing-walking, and so to the Cotswolds he heads to strap himself onto the fuselage of an aeroplane and be catapulted around the skies. In rather less dramatic - although just as eye-opening - tasks, Thorpe finds himself dressing up as a clown in his native Edinburgh, attending Sweden's No Mind Festival with a bunch of New Age hippies, sharing a weekend of bonding with his brothers in the Swedish wilderness and Scuba diving off South Africa's Maputaland coast - to name but a few.

All teach him useful lessons to add to his new-found bank of knowledge about himself: that it's all right to make a fool of himself and let out the inner child; that sharing with strangers can be liberating and enlightening; that "intimacy and contentment" with those we know best is sometimes all it takes to "let go"; that immersion in the moment is often the key to relaxation and, ultimately, survival in today's fast-moving world; that sometimes the notion of letting go is no more than another anxiety to add to the list, and something we should think less about and simply do more.

But if this is all sounding a little too new-age-preaching for your liking then there's good news. Nick Thorpe is a naturally cynical, rather introverted, Scottish journalist, with a pitch-perfect turn of phrase, and the ability to make you laugh out loud

One of the most entertaining undertakings comes when Nick and Ali head off to a naturist campsite in Cornwall. Neither of them has been publicly naked before, and neither has any overriding wish to amend that record. And yet still they find themselves being addressed, unabashed, by a woman wearing only "Velcro sandals and a necklace", and learning that the "cardinal sin of naturism" is failing to sit on a towel. "Don't put your bare bum on a chair", they're advised, matter-of-factly.

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In another equally hilarious adventure, the intrepid Thorpe visits Summerhill, "Britain's freest school", out in the East Anglian countryside. Founded by radical Scottish educationalist AS Neill in 1921 on the belief in "the child as a good, not an evil, being", Summerhill does not force its children into lessons; they are not taught to behave in a certain way, but to be themselves. Thorpe is met at the gate by a child "wielding a plastic M16 … behind him, a grubby-faced kid … waving a hockey stick." "We've had a lot of visitors recently", another child explains. "Last week there were tons of Germans - we decided we had to stop the invasion."

But humour is not all that Thorpe has in his arsenal, and there are a lot of moving moments beautifully recounted here. He visits an ex-pat running a project in Durban for South Africa's street children, and finds himself face-to-face on a silent retreat in the New Mexican desert with the man he could have been if fate had dealt him a rather crueller hand. He is forced to confront his eroding faith in God, his own insecurities and faults, and to ask the ultimate question of himself - whether he is ready to be a father.

Thorpe's epiphany is profound and affecting, and it is the counterpoint of poignancy and comedy that makes this very personal search for peace so utterly life-affirming.