I am usually very wary of the ‘pulled myself up by my bootstraps’ school of thought. I know damn well that I’m very fortunate, very blessed, that good things are showered upon me a long way out of proportion to my own deserving or hard work.
Having said that, I do feel that I’ve put a lot of work in this year, and I can trace most of the things with which I’m most pleased back to months or years of sustained effort. Everything I talked about yesterday, for a start. And plenty of more tangible achievements, too. For example: in September I wandered into a charity shop in Bury St Edmunds and bought a copy of Michael Aaron’s Adult Piano Course. I’m up to page 36 now, and can play Drink to me only with thine eyes more or less accurately; I’m getting on far better with teaching myself than I’d have believed possible. And that’s partly because of hard work between September and here, and partly because of hard work going back to when I was 8 and started cello lessons.
And having said that, I can think of at least a few wonderful things that just happened. Discovering Rhiannon Giddens at Cambridge Folk Festival. An experience that I can perhaps best describe by saying that it was like finding out that a friend was a long-lost brother. There are the things I found by keeping my eyes open: the swing in the giant birdcage outside King’s Cross station, the swan giving her cygnets a ride down the Cam on her back. As recently as yesterday, walking home along the river bank, seeing a succession of anglers with their rods and their boxes and there, between two of them, a heron, watching and waiting for the fish, closer than I’d ever seen one before.
Sometimes it’s been a combination of the two: an exquisite confection of a blessing on top of the cake of effort. I’m thinking now of the first day of my birthday walk. I’d gone nineteen miles, crossed the county boundary from Berkshire into Hampshire. My rucksack wasn’t quite adjusted properly, and my knee was protesting ever louder, and I got lost in the world’s most confusing field, and… I’m going to write all this up properly, but let me just say for the moment that it was not a good day.
I was hot, cross, exhausted and in pain by the time I reached my accommodation for the night, The Chapel at Little London. I can’t begin to put into words the welcome I received there. I knew that my hostess was going to cook me a meal; I didn’t realise that it would be three delicious courses. I can’t explain to someone who hasn’t done a long distance walk how wonderful it is to have somebody take your clothes away and wash them for you. I needn’t, perhaps, say how very comforting is a capacious sofa and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or how blissful it is to lay down one’s exhausted body between cool white sheets.
And this, perhaps, typifies all the treasure of 2015: I’d walked nineteen miles, and I deserved that stay; but I know all the same that I was so very fortunate for it to have happened to me the way it did. Things can be even better than we imagine.
I remember how when we came to the city
we stopped, having no urge to go further,
as though that which had led us there rested,
and there was peace there,
and rest, and time to recall
who we were, who we had been,
and why we had come there at all;
And, though they told us before we set out,
and all down the way, that we’d want to walk on
to the world’s end, west,
west, until the abyss
stretched endless, roaring, before us,
and, though we once wondered if after all
we should go there,
go on to the end, just to see what was there,
to quiet our consciences, say
we had been all the way to the edge,
we remained; we had found what we came for;
And though my soul clamours still
to walk that same great starlit way once again,
onwards, westwards, to wonder,
I don’t know that this time
(whenever it comes)
I would want to go further.
We’ll walk again.
We’ve known, between us,
sickness and fear, the madness
that makes friendship loneliness,
mislaid vocations, learned to love,
never quite forgotten that we walked
or that we’ll walk again.
We’ll walk again:
drink wine that springs from roadside fountains,
meet angels, know them by
their wire-spoked wing-umbrellas,
understand the Incarnation
eating sardines on Maundy Thursday,
hear the cock crow mid-Mass, standing
out where hands weren’t washed or wine poured,
toil across endless dusty plains,
follow the stars spread westwards, seen once,
follow the subtle trail of golden shells,
wonder how your great-grandfather
walked almost all the way up Everest
(and then, more, down again)
while your feet dissolve in friction.
I’ll turn out, another seven times,
not to be Irish,
disappoint another seven bands of pilgrims;
we’ll walk west,
catch wandering horreos,
sing psalms in kitchens so new,
so ill-equipped,
there’s nothing else to do there,
we’ll walk,
arrive,
hug, disbelieving, in the square,
pat St James
(timidly)
on his shoulder,
linger…
It won’t, of course, be like that this time,
but even so, we’ll walk.
‘You meet angels, of course,’ someone said. Was it Marie-Noëlle at the Emaús house in Burgos? If so, we had met one only that day.
Even if not, we knew what she meant. We had met angels; ours carried umbrellas.
At Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, two days into the pilgrimage, and with the forbidding snowy bulk of the Pyrenees looming ahead of us, the hospitalero came out, umbrella in hand, into the drizzle to point us the right way to cross them – away from the Route Napoleon, towards the gentler, safer way.
At Roncesvalles, a lifetime later and somehow still the same day, with night sweeping in along with the snow, we were frozen, soaked, lonely, exhausted; we had abandoned the waymarked Camino on the grounds that the road was a lot easier to follow – and as we struggled down the last few metres into the village, a monk emerged from the restaurant, his habit brushing the fallen snow and his umbrella raised aloft against what was still coming down. ‘Peregrinos? Vamos!‘ he said, and swept us into the monastery, to shelter, warmth, and a bed for the night.
At Logroño, leaving before daybreak, and already uncomfortably conscious of our propensity to get lost in cities, we missed our way. Grey sky, grey pavements gleaming under the street lights, and rain, and a man with an umbrella to point us back in the right direction.
At Burgos, a glorious, sun-soaked Easter Day, and another city to get lost in. And another angel with an umbrella to put us back on the right path, or, rather, since we had already planned on stopping, and knew where we wanted to spend the night, an angel to read our guidebook, ask the directions for which we were too tired to think up the Spanish, and walk with us until we were in the right quarter.
We met angels.
This is what I have learned about angels, and about their habit of carrying umbrellas:
They are, as is generally rumoured, messengers and guardians (sometimes this is the same thing, if the message is what keeps you safe).
They are quite obviously distinct from you, and your needs are different from theirs. (Even in everyday life I find using an umbrella irritating beyond belief, and it would be an impossible encumbrance for a walking pilgrim; but an angel might well use one, and so might any other normal person on the street.)
They provide you with what you need (and it is not something that they lose by sharing it with you).
They do not neglect their own needs in caring for others (and this, more than anything, is where I am still learning from them).
It was about time I did another long walk anyway. Having most of a week to myself to walk out allowed me to integrate some things that were buzzing around in my head. (‘Integration’ and ‘integrity’ seem to be this year’s words; I was aiming for ‘balance’, but of course there’s an element of separation to that which turns out to be not what I need…)
Quite apart from the usual OMGWTFBBQ sea! butterflies! lizards! houses! yachts! cliffs! thing (um, God revealed in creation, you know what I mean…); also, a Non-Tame Lion, and connected spontaneous thankfulness, I did manage to get some thoughts, if not nailed down, then at least with a paperweight on them for five minutes.
It mostly seemed to be about sex and the Incarnation. I got about a third of the way through Women’s Experience of Sex (Kitzinger) – it’s very eighties and occasionally made me want to punch someone, but had some good stuff in – specifically, about letting sex be about more than genitals. And I read this post about the Incarnation and the necessity (or otherwise) of the Crucifixion, which is an elegant rendering of the idea that Anne and I ran into over pasta and sardines on Maundy Thursday in Redecilla. (Incidentally, I have been catching up on La Vuelta a España, and getting very excited when I see Camino waymarkings at the roadside. I have been looking out for them specifically, but still.)
What I have been getting from this particular combination is that I need to get my sexual and spiritual aspects meshing with each other, I think. This is yet another thing about myself of which I do not have to be frightened, but it’s not that easy. That in becoming human Jesus made the physical world good, or demonstrated that it was good. That it doesn’t matter whether he was married or gay or whatever, because just by being human he made it right to be what you are. (This makes more sense in my head.) (If anyone can recommend any reading around this, preferably something that isn’t a How To Have Good Christian Sex manual, that would be extremely useful.)
That’s probably enough brackets. Anyway, it all feels like a significant spiritual gear shift, and there will probably be more to it than that. I have been feeling surprisingly positive of late (Friday evening, big brain crash, excepted), reading all the back entries of Hannah’s blog and not feeling jealous of her for having a calling. (This is something that I struggle with more than I like to admit.) And this despite the fact that I’m slightly dreading going back to work, though going back to work will allow me to sort out some of the things that have been bugging me, and usually the vocation jealousy pops up when I am feeling frustrated when work isn’t going too well…
… is the message I am getting from this story – which is unfair both on Cameron and my PE teachers, most of whom were fairly decent sorts. However, it does seem to me that there are two competing aspirations here, both laudable, and making school sports more competitive will only work for one of them. To win more Olympic medals, and to get the nation’s children, and, indeed, the nation’s adults, more active.
Let me tell you about how I became more active.
I hated sports at school. As I have hinted above, this was not because of my teachers. It was because of me. I was unremittingly hopeless and, because I was good at pretty much everything else (Design Technology excepted) my sporting incompetence was horribly conspicuous. This held true from primary school (where I was in a year group of five) through Key Stage 3 (class of thirty, year group of ninety) to GCSE, where I was in a year group of one and managed to lose it from my timetable.
I was hopeless. I was the fat asthmatic kid with glasses (not all at the same time, I will admit – the asthma came first, then the glasses, then the fat) and, no matter how hard I tried, I was never anything other than slow and clumsy. I did try. I was a conscientious child, at least in other people’s time, and not being good at stuff frustrated me, so I tried to get better – but my classmates always improved more, and so I continued to be slow and clumsy, and increasingly disillusioned with sports as played at school, with the (apparently insufficient) emphasis on competition. I was never going to be as good as Nicky or Jack or Abby, so why was I even trying?
None of which stopped me being reasonably active. I skipped; I hit tennis balls against walls; I taught myself to ride a bike by throwing it and myself down the drive until I stopped falling off. I stayed fit despite school sports, competitive or otherwise, not because of it. (Although, now I come to think of it, I did do trampolining for a while as an after-school club; that was fun, and I wasn’t too bad.)
Then we moved to the Isle of Wight, and to a house with a much smaller garden, I moved schools three times in one year, I hit puberty (late), my parents separated, and my first bout of depression set in. None of that was much fun, and I stopped doing pretty much everything that could be even vaguely described as ‘physical activity’.
When I was eighteen I got a job at a hotel two miles away. The job was pretty grim, but the two miles was wonderful – I could walk it. Two miles of soul-cleansing cliff-top, two miles of beauty, two miles of exercise – and the first glimmerings of my independence. I started walking between my parents’ houses, four miles apart, and those four miles became mine in a way that neither house ever did. They connected my broken family, but they also gave me space away from it. And – incidentally – I was getting fit. Suddenly I had a form of physical exercise (I’m not sure one can really call it a ‘sport’) that I loved wholeheartedly. The same thing has happened this year with cycling. I’m one of the slowest things on the road – and that’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s just a thing, and meanwhile I keep cycling.
And so my point is this: making school sports more competitive may well give us our next generation of Olympic medallists, and I will be as pleased for them as I am for the current ones – but it will not get the nation fitter all round, because it will do nothing for those of us who don’t do exercise that way, who don’t particularly want to compare themselves to other people, who just want to find something they enjoy and to do it. I have found that I enjoy activities that get me from A to B and allow me to enjoy the scenery. Other people will enjoy other things. Trampolining! Badminton! Judo!
Maybe it’s the fact that it’s at school that’s the problem, the way that most people hate most of the books they had to read for English. I don’t know. I don’t think there is an obvious answer – and I am convinced that making school sports more competitive isn’t it.
(As for the private vs state school question – the GCSE years, where I managed to escape sports altogether, were at a hilariously terrible private school. I will tell you about my wacky adventures there some other time.)
I had to look it up. In London I walk north to south, Euston to Waterloo – Bloomsbury, Holborn, Charing Cross. Where I do not walk I do not know. What is the Edgware Road? Merely a notch on the Bakerloo. ‘What is the Edgware Road?’ I asked.
‘It goes whoosh to Marble Arch.’
And so I must have been there; I have eaten Tesco sandwiches in Hyde Park; I know Marble Arch. Or am I thinking of somewhere else? I like London, but it has never felt as if it belongs to me. Knowing it would take more time, more energy than I have to give it.
Marble Arch at one end, then, but where does it go the other way? After all, a road must have two ends, perhaps more, and if you can’t say much about the one, follow it the other way. Back to the A-Z, and run out of pages at Maida Vale. Just as well: show me a map that took it further and I’d be planning to follow it.
Early to bed, early to rise, in a land that only woke properly in the evenings. I had walked for weeks, and seldom seen a true night sky in that time. I had walked for miles, through Navarra, La Rioja, Castile, and now León, from the snowy Pyrenees to the arid plain; the variation in the landscape had petered out (though I was following James), the relief of walking a flat path at last replaced by the tedium of crossing a flat plain, hundreds of feet above sea level and with nothing on earth to see.
But the sky. My God, the sky.
It was cold. I stood, bare-foot, bare-legged, at the centre of a wooden O, a tiny world, between bed and bar and bathroom, and there was the great bowl of the sky curving above me, reaching down beyond me on every side, deep velvet blue spangled with countless stars, all of space layered thick in one dark illuminate dome.
This is going to be a somewhat mixed bag. It’s all the result of (sometimes bitter) experience. Some of it will refer specifically to the Camino Francés; some to pilgrimage in general; some to any kind of long-distance walk. Pick and mix, as you feel moved. I may come back to this and add bits as I remember them.
– I think pretty much everyone reading this will already have worked this out, but it’s still top-of-the-list important, so I’m still putting it down. Know at least a bit of the language of every country you’re going to pass through. That tiny bit of consideration makes the people you meet that much more likely to want to help you. Even if it’s just to order a cup of coffee. And yes, there are still places where people don’t speak English, and yes, there will come a time when you need to ask for help.
– Rest days are important. It’s horribly tempting just to press on, because yes, I know that I can easily walk another 10km before dinner, but before you know it, it’s 30km through waist-deep snow, and you’re exhausted. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) Keeping on doing that day after day ruins your feet and your knees. There is no shame in walking only 5km in a day. Or 1km. Or not walking at all.
– You can get away without earplugs, so long as you’re always the first one to bed and are a sound sleeper. But there are people who snore at a quite remarkable volume.
– Look after your feet. My own personal routine went like this: in the evening, wash, dry, talc, sleep. In the morning, vaseline, let it soak in, socks, boots. Liner socks + hiking socks. Well-fitting boots. I didn’t get a single blister until I was actually in Santiago de Compostela, and spent too long wandering around in sandals that didn’t quite fit.
– If you have a pair of telescopic walking poles, people will mock you, but it’s worth it.
– Looking back on it, waterproof trousers would probably have been a good investment, particularly in the snow. The problem was not so much walking through it, as melted snow running off my [waterproof] rucksack cover and soaking me from the waist down.
– It’s quite nice to have a map, for moral support, but once you’re well into Spain you can just follow the waymarkings.
– Do practice walks. Do practice walks with a heavy rucksack, because that’s the part that’s wearing: it’s not the walking (well, it is the walking, but you know what I mean) but the carrying.
– Speaking of heavy rucksacks, make yours as light as possible. You do not need: razors, deodorant, bivvy bags, books, inflatable mattresses, binoculars, makeup.
– I always set out with 2l of water, which was probably too much – I only finished that on a couple of days, and I’m pretty sure we passed fountains on those days. Do take water, though.
– You will end up stinking, but so will everybody else you meet. Just don’t take clothes you’re particularly fond of, and shower whenever you get the chance.
– This is a useful diagram depicting the stuff you actually need.
– You’ll be doing a lot of laundry by hand. Safety pins are good for attaching socks, pants, etc, to the back of a rucksack to dry along the way. Not if it’s raining, though, obviously.
– Hi-tech fabrics tend to be beautifully light, but may not dry very fast. Try it out at home.
– Soap is soap. We ended up using cheapo shampoo for hair, body, and clothes – though be careful if you have sensitive skin, of course.
– Useful things: a credit card and a mobile phone.
– There is always somewhere to sleep. There was only one day in seven weeks where we had to walk on to another village to find a bed.
– Compeed is fantastic stuff, but do NOT repeat NOT put it on blisters that have burst. The result is painful.
– Don’t leave your walking boots too close to an open fire, no matter how sodden they be.
– I had a navy blue Guernsey sweater. While this was relatively heavy, most days I was wearing it, so didn’t notice. Most importantly, I didn’t have to wash it once.
– Take as few valuables as possible, and keep them with you. There are no safes.
Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies,
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For we’re under orders to sail for old England,
And we may never see you fair ladies again.
One is meant to hug Saint James – his gilded, pilgrim-clad statue that stands behind the altar in his cathedral – but I couldn’t quite work up the courage. I patted him on the shoulder, instead. I did hug Anne, though, just before we went in. It was a quite remarkable feeling, having got there, having got there together, being in the place we’d been aiming at for so long.
Black Madonna in Santiago cathedral
We wandered around the cathedral in a bit of a daze. It’s a remarkable building: a lovely Romanesque structure encased in a baroque exterior (the latter adorned here and there by various forms of plant-life, which was not what we were used to). The famous botafumeiro, the giant thurible, hung at the crossing: we’d just missed mass for St John’s day. I’m told that it’s quite spectacular in action.
Having gawped at the cathedral, we toddled off to the pilgrim office to have our passports checked and our certificates awarded. Since we counted as ‘religious/spiritual’ pilgrims (as opposed to sporting/cultural/other sorts of pilgrim) we got Latin compostelas. On our way out, we saw Gillian again – she’d had her hair done as a celebration, and she looked fantastic.
Anne and Gillian outside the pilgrim office
We meant to go to Finisterre. We really, really did. We were in Santiago in good time to set out for Finisterre and return to catch our train (not that we’d booked a train, but we had a pretty good idea of when we’d need to hop on one, and that time was several days away). When it came to it, though, we just never left. Didn’t want to. We were in Santiago de Compostela and that was good enough for us.
Instead, we spent the time exploring the city. We left the refugio we were in and booked into a guest house in the old town – very reasonably priced for a twin room with a balcony, and much less guilt about taking up beds that other pilgrims might be needing.
We went to the midday mass every day. Admired the singing of one particular nun, and despaired of that of everyone else. Met new friends and re-met old ones. Returned to the sundae bar for chocolate con churros – the thickest hot chocolate, by the way, that I’ve yet seen. Mocked (at a distance) tourists in the cathedral shop who were telling each other, ‘well of course, in the olden days people actually walked here, on pilgrimage, you know?’ Visited the Museum of Pilgrimage, learnt about the jet trade. Bought scallop shells carved in jet. Explored the cathedral, including its crypt and chapels. Bought skirts – after seven weeks in the same pairs of trousers, these felt like a real luxury. Went to the final of a Galician folk music competition with the Ely Four (gaitas very much in evidence; also the percussive effect of a bowl of water.) Ate all the things we’d been craving that were impossible to carry. (Watermelon. Jelly. And so on.)
We met the Ely Four again. How did it feel, we asked John and Linda, to finally be at Santiago, having stopped and started again so many times as they walked a few weeks at a time? Very odd, they said. Very odd.
And we found perhaps the most hilarious translation blooper in the history of the Camino. Speaking of a cad who was so bold as to attempt to make off with the cathedral bells, the English version of the ‘Legends of the Camino’ book we had in Spanish proclaimed, ‘Some type of divine punishment receives Almanzor, because your horse dies exploded after drinking water from a fountain.’ To this day, ‘your horse dies exploded’ proves a handy filler for awkward gaps in conversation.
So we passed our time in Santiago de Compostela. The day before we were due to leave, we wandered down to the station to buy tickets to Ferrol. No such luck. We could only get tickets that went as far as A Coruña. No matter. The trains we were aiming at, running along the narrow gauge Via Estrecha from Ferrol to Santander, only left a couple of times per day, so we would have plenty of time to sort out the next leg when we got there.
Loco commemorating Holy Year 2004 in the forecourt at Santiago station
After all, we were in no hurry. If we had been, I wouldn’t have planned a rail journey that took two days; as it was, taking our time over the return seemed fitting, even if we were no longer walking it. And I’d been promised that the Via Estrecha was as spectacular a train ride as any in Europe.
It took the best part of a morning to get from Santiago to Ferrol, changing in A Coruña (which, at least in our admittedly transitory experience of it, bore few signs of Sir John Moore’s dramatic end). We ate lunch in Ferrol, making the most of the hour’s layover, then boarded the little train for the antepenultimate leg of our journey.
There really are no words to describe the Via Estrecha. One doesn’t hear much about the north coast of Spain, and I have no idea why, because it’s utterly beautiful. For almost all the way, the railway runs as close to the sea as it can get, albeit about a hundred feet above sea level, clinging to the cliffs, in and out of tunnels. Through the afternoon we travelled through Galicia and into Asturias. (In Asturias the horreos are different – larger and squarer.) As night fell a bevy of teenagers joined the train, dressed up for a night out in Oviedo. We also alighted in Oviedo, but in search of a bed rather than the bright lights.
My anxiety about finding somewhere to sleep, never quite alleviated on the pilgrimage, went into overdrive now we weren’t on the Camino Frances. However, even from the station we could see a sign advertising camas (beds), and, despite the relatively late hour (it was gone nine o’clock) we had no trouble getting a room in the building to which it was attached.
The next day we breakfasted at the station before setting off again on the narrow-gauge. The landscape was not quite so spectacular, but all the way the presence of the sea on our left told us: we were on the way home.
Today our objective was Santander – the end of the line, and the last stop in Spain. We had booked our ferry tickets home when we booked the tickets out, so the sailing was a fixed point. No danger of missing it, though: we had almost twenty-four hours in Santander. I put the hotel bill on my credit card, and we set out to explore.
Santander is a pleasant town, if not wildly interesting. It being a nice sunny afternoon, we wandered along the seafront, vaguely considered a boat trip, thought better of it, and bought ice creams instead. A small child in the queue tested out her English on me, much to Anne’s amusement.
And then we went back to the hotel. Showered. Made use of the more frivolous toiletries we’d acquired (i.e. more frivolous than plain soap – these included razors). It may or may not have been due to the fact that our room had no windows to speak of, but we discovered we were utterly exhausted, and went to sleep. This meant that we missed dinner, but that saved having to think about it.
In the morning we checked out and hauled our rucksacks around the town. A little more wandering took us to the cathedral, which reminded me agreeably of Portsmouth in its mixture of ancient and modern, and nautical associations. At lunch we discovered further hilarious translation errors (‘Galician Octopussy’ – ‘Hake of hook to the Roman’) which, together with the people ordering in English and not even trying to speak Spanish, reminded us that we were in a port, and, more to the point, in the port on the way home.
About the voyage home, the less said the better. It was the one and only time I’ve ever been actually seasick. We didn’t even attempt the reclining chairs this time round, and bagging a decent spot on the floor was definitely a good move. It still didn’t improve matters much. And then the only available reading material was the Daily Express. The Madeleine McCann case was just breaking, and so was the ‘silver ring’ test case.
All in all, sleep was a blessed relief, and I didn’t wake until the call came over the ship’s tannoy that we would soon be docking in Plymouth. ‘Soon’, in this case, meant ‘in a few hours’. Ironically, we’d dissuaded my boyfriend from driving down from Exeter to Plymouth to meet us on the grounds that he’d have to go far too fast if he didn’t want us to wait around for hours. In the event we were about an hour getting off the boat, so he would have made it easily, but really, getting the train was hardly going to kill us.
The Exeter train was quite full, and our bags were large. Anne and I lolled in the vestibule, and grinned at each other in an accomplished, tired, contented sort of way.
Niton. Portsmouth. Caen. Saint Palais. Ostabat-Asme. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Roncesvalles. Viskarret. Larrasoaña. Cizur Menor. Puente la Reina. Estella. Los Arcos. Viana. Logroño. Navarrete. Azofra. Santo Domingo de la Calzada. Redecilla. Villafranca Montes de Oca. Atapuerca. Burgos. Hornillos del Camino. Castrojeriz. Frómista. Carrión de los Condes. Ledigos. Bercianos. Reliegos. Arcahueja. Virgen del Camino. Villar de Mazarife. Hospital de Orbigo. Astorga. Rabanal. Riego de Ambros. Cacabelos. Villafranca del Bierzo. Vega del Valcarce. Hospital de Condesa. Triacastela. Sarria. Portomarín. Ligonde. Palas de Rei. Arca. Santiago de Compostela. A Coruña. Ferrol. Oviedo. Santander. Plymouth. Exeter.
Kathleen Jowitt 
