BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, welcome to the podcast.

We thought we tell you about a new series that we're going to start running on the programme.

It's all about this time of year.

As autumn turns to winter, we wondered what you observe, enjoy and absorb when you're outdoors on winter walks.

And we're beginning the series with Rory Keneer, actor and playwright,

and the walk that is part of his everyday family routine.

They say familiarity breeds contempt.

But I've walked my kids to and from school for the last seven years of my life, work permitting,

and would happily do so every day until I died. It might get odd after a while, as my son's

60-year-old legs wither down from his equally perishing shorts, and my 57-year-old daughter

stoopes over the plastic basket of her bicycle with something approaching disgust in her eyes,

but I'd be happy, and as a parent, isn't that what's really important?

There is nothing particularly attractive about the walk, just landmarks to tick off as we pass,

a tube station inhaling its volunteers to the working day, a late-night cabab and fish bar, oil still cooling from the last of the evening's fries,

and a tiny Italian cafe, which once proudly offered a Valentine's special of fish hearts in pink cream,

and which now, perhaps unsurprisingly, is boarded up. We negotiate a bus stop, a small park and an empty playground, its only morning

inhabitants, a coterie of pigeons looking equal parts startled and glum. Finally, as we pass

a hauntingly Spartan pharmacy, we are engulfed by benevolent cloud of hello's and good mornings,

within which I fix both kids with a kiss that they generously

endure and turn and head back. It's a ten-minute walk, if that. But for ten precious

minutes, they are mine. We laugh, we test spellings, we talk about what dinner might be, we tell

...