My school career ended ignominiously when I was manhandled out of the building by the Headmaster for being a bit challenging…. by even being there! My closest friend Eddie had left voluntarily a month before me and was now working for the Port of Bristol Authority, getting rides on tugboats, andbeing paid for it! I was about leave my photographic technician’s job at the University and get a labouring job with a welding and fabricating company where I learned to weld and saw up big lengths of rolled steel joist; an occupation that has made me prematurely deaf. One of the jolly tricks the old hands would play on newcomers was to lock you inside a metal tank and then sledgehammer the sides so that your ears rang for days. The hydraulic saw that I used, threw fountains of white hot molten metal at me and sounded like the gates of hell. It was exciting and well paid but exhausting, hot and dangerous. The men I worked with were a bunch of highly skilled desperados who knew their worth to the company and taught me a number of insults so utterly disgusting I’ve had to ration myself. That phase lasted around three years and any number of jobs during which time any glamour attached to industrial life wore off. In the nick of time, aged 18, I met Madame, who was 15 and she got me a place at Tech College where I felt alive again apart, that is, from having to work nights alone in a factory cutting up sheets of polyurethane foam for the workers in the morning and with nothing but rats for company.
The reason for this background stuff is that I took A Level Sociology at college, and in my group was another student called Peter who appeared to be a different life-form from anyone else I’d ever met. It was impossible to tell whether his pronouncements were attributable to stupidity or bigotry; probably both. I write this because I often read journalists lamenting the rise of populist politics as if it started in the UK about ten years ago. In fact during the 1930’s King Edward 111 was a known nazi sympathiser. Half the aristocracy were with him and Oswald Mosley was injecting his venomous ideas into society.
By the mid 1960’s Peter was a fully formed racist, homophobic and sexist pain in the backside who had never been troubled by a moment’s reflection. How our wonderful Jewish lecturer put up with him was a mystery – but now? ……… Well we are where we are I suppose. Every way we turn, we see newly minted clones of Peter in positions of power; the fact that you couldn’t fabricate a half decent brain from a room full of them (although even a failed experiment might benefit the world), is a clue as to precisely why we are where we are.
And so to COP 28 where a non enforceable agreement to do precisely nothing has been trumpeted as a triumph by its only beneficiaries. And so, also, to Gaza and Ukraine; to Rwanda and to a prison ship in Portland Dorset, and to the homeless beggars and the hungry and impoverished children; and to the sufferers of preventable and treatable disease …… do I need to go on? Should I mention the endless waiting lists for affordable housing or the empty second homes and flats given over to Airbnb to enrich their owners? Should I mention the untreated shit flowing past our flat in the polluted river?
Even as I read these paragraphs I know in my heart that Charles Dickens could have written these words and that they would have been equally true. Homo homini lupus est – perhaps better translated people are wolves towards other people is one classical quotation you’re unlikely to hear Boris, sorry, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, using – although my sensitivity to sexist language seems a bit out of place in this context.
Truthfully, we’ve been drifting apart for years, like elves and dwarves, with the elves believing against all the evidence that decency and democracy will always win, and that the dwarves are really decent people who’ve just taken a wrong turn and to whom we should be kind in order to effect their transformation. Hm!
Am I distressed by all this? Hell yes! Distressed, angry and heartbroken. Yesterday there was a brief moment of hope that the Government might complete the task of euthanizing itself, but somehow the corpse overcame its apnoea and took another terrible gasp. My/our only solace is in the same Nature that’s threatened by them. Goodness knows I’ve preached often enough that without our mortality, love would become meaningless. But I’ve never really taken on board the fact that the more threatened the earth is, the more precious it becomes, and, for instance, the Winter Heliotrope in the photograph taken in Cornwall last January and back on the canal bank yesterday, becomes a pledge, a token of continuity in the depths of winter. We planted bulbs a few weeks ago in the little garden we’ve created outside the flats and now they’re pushing through the soil. I’m busy identifying old photographs of plants and fungi and recording them. I can already imagine the perfume of the soil in spring as it heats in the sun, and the prospect of another plant hunting season. I’ve got plans for new trips and for exploring new ideas – none of which will change the world but which are, cumulatively, a way of taking up pitchforks and cudgels against the enemies of joy and flourishing.
I absolutely refuse to be taken in by the imaginary world of dark caverns and darker threats where fear is normalized as a tool of control. We’ll fight them with carnivals, punish them with songs and drill into their little minds with poetry and drama letting in some purgative light. Oh and Peter – if you haven’t already gone to the great dictator in the skies; mind how you go eh?
After a certain amount of unsubtle lobbying, Madame bought the final two volumes of Geoffrey Kibby’s magnum opus for my birthday but wouldn’t let me open the package until Sunday morning. She is a strict traditionalist in such matters, but then we were swept away to a family gathering before I had time to settle down and look at them. The gathering was fun but only highlighted the growing generational gulf between those who play computer games and the rest of us who treat mobiles and laptops as useful tools and prefer talking to each other. It was early evening before I was alone with the books and they are very good indeed. All I need now is a good microscope and some dangerous chemicals.
However I should point out that Geoffrey Kibby took four years to produce volume one because all the illustrations were hand drawn and painted. The subsequent three volumes were illustrated with the help of an iPad and a very good computer programme in less than two years. Sadly I left the Apple ecosystem some years ago after a contemptuous young sales assistant held up my old Macbook by one corner and declared it not repairable because it was too old. At least I think it was the laptop he was talking about! With a good deal of help from my son I moved over to a Chromebook at half the price and rather quicker to begin work.
The revelation that the illustrations were done on a tablet came as a bit of a shock because they’re so good, so I’ve bought a stylus and downloaded a free programme on to Madame’s Pixel Tablet. Work has now ground to a halt because the allegedly intuitive programme looks as if it needs a degree in computer illustration before I find it remotely intuitive. Madame thinks it would be better to keep on with pencils and watercolours.
Over the last few weeks I’ve fallen in with a bunch of Natural History desperados for whom spiders are the most beautiful creatures on earth. Their Facebook group which I was invited to join outpaces the British Mycological Society postings by two to one. So a decently obscure specimen can flatten the battery on my phone in half a day. Madame suspects me either of having an affair in code or being completely mad.
I find that the fierce concentration on identifying specimens creates a wonderful quiet space in my head at a time when what’s going on all around is feeling like living in a psychotic vision. We’ve reached the point where I have to leave the room during news bulletins and I’ve come to think that COP 28 – in fact most of the ideas being circulated about heading off a climate catastrophe is nothing more that the usual hubristic nonsense that sees us as owners of the Earth. The Earth doesn’t need us and we can’t own it -we’re just noisy, wicked and destructive tenants and although I came to understand that – generally – the bereaved don’t follow Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grieving to the letter, I can see elements of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance in abundance at the COP meetings and in most of the planning for our (very short) future. The good news – if there is any – is that all parties could be on the same trajectory; just at different places on it. In all my experience of bereavement – and there’s a lot of it – the worst thing you could say to anyone is “time to move on”. However; that doesn’t excuse wilful and deliberately destructive bad behaviour. If the Earth is our parent – and I can’t see it any other way – then the plagues we are enduring are admonitions for our bad behaviour. I’m not turning this into a religious argument because so far as I’m concerned any chatter about God is heretical because it’s (by definition) inadequate. What’s wrong with reverential silence?
Regulars won’t need reminding that I find autumn difficult. Melancholia would be easy to dismiss as a middle class hybrid of self-pity and dark nights; feedstock for bad poems and self-help Guardian articles. It isn’t the same thing as depression – which is an illness you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. I suggest that melancholia is an attempt at a constructive relationship with the sadness that goes with shrinking days, cold, rain and the senescence of nature. In October and November I often feel that the allotment, instead of being a rewarding and inspiring place is a place where mockery reigns. Where overwintering thugweeds overwhelm the earth in order to gain a destructive head start in spring. The place of serenity, beauty and hope in Spring and early summer, grows old and dies back. Then a pause – the gap between the outbreathing of autumn and the inbreathing that powers early spring; the pause where we stand beside the beds and wonder – is that it? – will the sun ever return?
The green bag contains two fleeces for lining the hanging strawberry baskets.
Late autumn and early winter are the times when gardening becomes a test of will – for me at least. Madame is unaffected by all this; she just gets on with it and enjoys every moment and simply doesn’t understand what’s going on with me. So we haggle and negotiate an hour or two here and there and I clear one bed at a time and focus entirely on each limited job – excluding any thoughts of the mountain of other things that need to be done. And amazingly, I always feel better. Close up, I see the spring buds already there on the fruit trees. Each bucket full of the gut-like roots of bindweed removed from a patch of ground represents a tiny victory against the promiscuity of nature. I’ve now almost finished digging over the beds in the polytunnel ready to plant out and sow for the winter. The mood of the month is stolid resistance; spring song will follow.
Even more amazingly, my arthritic joints begin to unlock with the exercise – the bending and stretching and reaching across, the 50 yard and very uneven path to the top of the site feels less steep after a week or two of stopping to catch my breath. I can lift heavy bags of compost and enjoy the complex geometry of muscles and bone. My mood lifts and I catch myself gazing at the drifts of leaves scuttering down in a wind that even drowns out the traffic: gold and yellow and scarlet and brown. Who knows how this change happens? I think of the trees in their complex relationships with the soil and the fungi which we barely suspected thirty years ago and wonder what unsuspected relationships exist between the natural world and our own health. The arrogance of our modern materialistic worldview overlays millions of years of evolutionary history which our whole being expresses in the miraculous workings of our minds and bodies. Sourdough bread and live yoghurt don’t even begin to explain human flourishing.
So here’s the deal. I can’t thrive on a monoculture of allotmenteering; I also need texture in my life – time to think, time to walk, time to read and time to relax and do nothing. I need other subjects to focus my interests – field botany and fungus hunting for instance – both of them offer formidable intellectual challenges. This afternoon, for instance, Madame asked if I could identify a bag of seeds saved off the allotment. At first glance this is an insoluble problem, but knowing where to look made it absurdly simple. I didn’t know the answer but I knew where I could find it and bingo! it was Angelica – easily identified from the firework burst of its dead seed head and a quick look at the seeds. The Carrot family may all look the same in a field, but you don’t have to be particularly brilliant to tell them apart – just organised and systematic.
Speaking of which, I’ve just bought the first volume of Geoffrey Kibby’s marvellous “Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and Europe”. There are three more volumes – so I’m going to have to save up; but this is everything you could wish for in a textbook. It’s far too big and heavy to fit in your pocket, so it’s a reference book. I’m not remotely qualified to comment on its scientific status – plenty of reviewers have done that and it’s definitely a five star purchase. The descriptions and the pictures – all hand painted by the author – are lovely. But what strikes me most is what a good teacher he is. Mycology can be awfully obscure and a bit sniffy at times, but this series manages to be completely thorough without being in the least intimidating. Like all the best teachers he knows that there are challenging conceptual difficulties to overcome but he gives a reader like me – who needs a permanent bookmark in the glossary section – the confidence to think that even I could surmount them with a bit of cheerful energy. There’s hardly a page where I think – Oh I couldn’t do that! The really great experts don’t wear their expertise on their sleeve.
I think this is Laccaria amethystina – Amethyst Deceiver; but I know it’s beautiful. Found near Brecon last year.
One website I looked at today describes St Anne’s Well as “the most dangerous well in Britain” – and having walked down the now busy road from the Church towards the well, it’s hard to disagree. Nowadays it’s a shadow of its former self. The cast iron sign has disappeared with the stone surround, and if it weren’t for the fact that the sodden ground was wet enough for a flush of water from under a couple of stone lintels I’d never have found it unless I’d remembered exactly where it is. I think I visited it once with Madame in the 1970’s when it wasn’t much more than a muddy puddle filled with debris; but yesterday it was a proper spring, rather than a well.
Sixty five years ago I was searching for books on magic in Bristol Central Reference Library – this was an early teenage obsession – and I found an antique volume which referred to several holy wells within a bike ride of where I lived. So St Anne’s became the first holy well in a long succession of them, beginning a side obsession with OS maps. There is something inexplicable but deeply spiritual about wells and springs. The thought of clear water emerging from underground, often pulsing gently, must lead almost anyone to pause and reflect. Being a determinedly non competitive student I even managed to persuade Jimmy Munn our sadistic PE teacher to let me devise my own cross -country run which took me past the well and excused from him having to cope with my chaotic inability to add anything to team games. Although my knowledge of nature was as spare as it was of the offside rule, it was where I fell in love with solitary walks and natural history.
So on Friday I went back with the other two Musketeers from Bath Natural History Society to check out the the recently designated Forest of Avon (with St Anne’s well at the centre) for a potential field trip next year. It was muddy as hell, but the sun shone for at least part of the day as we searched the fields and hedges for potential bird nesting sites, butterfly food plants, plants in general, spiders and insects as well as fungi. As ever we joked and joshed our way around the site taking photos for later identification and noting hazards for the inevitable risk assessment form. At one point I was kneeling to lift a stone so my companion could search for spiders and I steadied myself by placing my hand in a soft dog’s turd! Should I perhaps put that on the risk assessment? I do wish all dog walkers would pick their dogshit up and dispose of it properly (in some other way than hanging it on trees).
One topic of discussion among us was what precisely had introduced us to natural history. I always feel a bit typecast as a retired vicar but none of us are typically academic, all of us are largely self-taught, and all of us would acknowledge our debt to past mentors – often self-taught volunteers themselves. Of all scientific disciplines, natural history relies on a huge voluntary effort to record what’s on the ground and submit those records to national databases. The challenge these days is how to recruit enough new volunteers to track the environmental disaster of species extinctions in the hope that one day soon we can develop the tools for reversing it.
What struck me was that over the past 60 years what was once a farm has become a ‘site’ or a reserve. The thin line of trees adjoining the brook has thickened to about 20 feet wide, and the fields seemed to have been returned to a regime of mowing once a year. No grazing is going on according to a dog walker we met. Many hundreds of trees have been planted over the past 20 years or so and so the wildlife potential has improved beyond measure. We watched a kestrel making use of a power line that crossed the site and saw magies rooks and carrion crows as well as hearing a raven somewhere near. All the other usual suspects were around. My companions were getting excited about the possibility Brown Hairstreaks in the tall and thick hedges (untouched by the flail mower for years). I was thinking about orchids but loving the architecture of the skeletal remains of teasels.
Anyway, that’s enough wildlife gossip. What surprised me most of all was that in spite of our sceptical and irreligious culture, someone had built a little shrine in memory of their mother, on the edge of the brook and opposite the well. It gave us all cause for a moment of contemplative silence.
So as the title suggests, this week saw a return to the present after reconnecting my heart and my head on the subject of the walk from Le Puy en Velay to Cahors. The sediment has now settled just about enough to view it as just another few yards of life’s rich tapestry. I was pleased and rather surprised to discover that it was pretty good in parts, and I’d go so far as to say that working on the timeline through my journal and photographs as well as my memory was as cathartic and helpful as the counsellors often say.
On Sunday we laid on a family meal. With two of the boys missing it was smaller than usual. Our grandchildren arrived as high as kites – suspect sugar rushes – and our son was – as is often the case – rather withdrawn. We know pretty much why he’s in a bad place but because he’s never spoken to us about it, or invited any kind of help, it remains the elephant in the room and makes everyone a bit sad. Oh and caution stayed my hand with the sherry bottle (the children had their own alcohol free version) and it failed to reach the heavenly heights of Jill’s recipe which comprised (I may have increased the booze) – one sponge and one bottle of sherry.
However on Monday and after ten years, our daughter in law was finally granted British citizenship and there were whoop whoops galore on the family WhatsApp group. No more tasteless jokes about Australian cricket, then, but we will expect her to learn Bristolian as soon as possible. Then of course we spent a couple of mornings catching up on the allotment. If you’ve read this blog/journal for any length of time you’ll know how depressing I find the autumn. It’s like visiting a loved one who’s rapidly fading away. But Madame administers the whip adroitly and once I get going I usually enjoy it – ish! I am not going “gently into that good night” and every arthritic creak makes me froth with rage at the dying of the light. I normally love wheelbarrowing muck and hoeing weeds in, but ever since I was formally diagnosed with AF and given a pile of drugs to limit my heart rate and blood pressure, I suffer from a nagging panic about making myself ill. I couldn’t fault the doctors, they’ve been wonderful, but all they’ll say is “just don’t overdo it” . Just WTF is the difference between doing it and overdoing it? and do you have to wait until you’re in the mortuary with a label tied to your toe to find out??
Tuesday was spent on the allotment, until we were driven off by the rain. This has been a record breaking autumn with low pressure driving rain off the Atlantic and dropping devastating amounts across the country. I don’t understand the wingnuts who still think this weather falls within the normal.
On Wednesday I went off with two friends, prospecting possible sites for Bath Natural History Society to organise field trips next year. We had three sites to look at. The first had to be abandoned after our driver was forced to reverse 100 yards down a lane with a locked gate at the end and no turning place. It was very narrow, half flooded on one side and a ditch on the other – both sides within easy reach of the wheels. After a great waving of arms and shouting we half extracted ourselves noisily enough to attract the attention of the farmer’s daughter who came and took over having obviously done it many times before. She told me she would have offered to reverse the car herself but had thought her offer might offend us. I thought there was an element of sweet revenge in it. The combined intelligence of three old blokes failing to drive a car backwards was far too good an opportunity to miss for a young woman in 2023. It was only later that I realized what a daft thing it was to tell her we were natural historians; who on earth would know what that meant? Anything else could get confused with naturists; and nature lovers sounds thoroughly creepy. “No dear we always keep our wellies on” comes to mind. So what? ….. botanists? bird watchers, fungus hunters? all three I suppose. In the end it sounded more comprehensible to say we were organising nature rambles for a club.
Site number two also lacked sufficient parking although we managed to squeeze in around the back among the builders’ wagons. Most of the site was pretty unimpressive from a wildlife point of view but once we got beyond the lake we could see that great efforts had been made to create a real wildlife area. My companions, who were both birders, got excited about a pair of Scoters and surprisingly they spotted six or seven species, but there wasn’t enough, we thought, to maintain interest for more than an hour or so.
Site number three was by far the largest and most interesting in spite of being surrounded by houses, roads, an industrial estate and a railway line. There was an abundance of hedge and scrub – enough to hold a big population of birds. There was a wooded area, a stream and a lake plus a couple of large and relatively unimproved fields where we soon started to find waxcap fungi. We were all trying out various apps on our phones and at one point all three of us were using Merlin – an excellent bird ID app- pointing our phones at a noisy flock of Starlings. The apps parted company over the fungi – none of them (the apps that is) – are perfect and fungi in particular mostly need double checking in the books – for many you even need to resort to a microscope and examine the spores. So an affable exchange of emails later in the day got us as close as we could. But we came home with at least one suggestion for a trip next year. I’ve been volunteered to co-lead another in the spring and give a talk as well so things are looking up.
Thursday and Friday were swallowed up by the allotment again, but at last it’s beginning to look a bit decent. We covered all except two of the beds that were cleared of crops, and we’ve sown seeds for overwintering in the polytunnel. On Saturday we finally had our first NHS dental appointment after 7 years and 63 phone calls. No-one would take us on as patients for all that time and so our teeth weren’t properly looked after and when Madame’s gold crown fell out I tried to mend it by glueing it back in. Unfortunately I glued it back to front. It cost well over £1000 to get it fixed. The only tiny cloud in the heavens was the fact that the dentist called us both “My dear” throughout.
Then yesterday we were off to Tetbury with our neighbour Charlie who is an ex Director of the Welsh National Botanical Gardens and is an all-round good guy. We were invited along to a joint talk he was doing with Louise, a dyer; all about the trees and plants that are used for dying fabrics which is a subject close to my heart, and also having lunch with Geoffrey, the owner of the 28 acre site, the gardener (Louise’s husband Liam) and Charlie.
A splendid Pestle puffball – Lycoperdon excipuliformis beneath a group of Oaks.
It was a wonderful but challenging and occasionally perplexing visit to the Makara Centre near Tetbury. The cost of running it is subsidised by hosting weddings as well as a memorial garden, but you get the feeling that its real purpose is as a place of meditation, teaching and personal growth. The whole place is suffused by a contemplative atmosphere and outside there were a dozen places where you might sit quietly and meditate. There were many little water features completely naturalized with moss and ferns. But inside the main buildings were some of the most lovely human spaces I’ve ever seen. Dotted with mandalas and statues, and furnished and decorated with enormous care; there was one room in which I’d gladly sit alone for a day. Even the door frames were beautiful.
The man who goes out for revenge should dig two graves
Confucius
But finally the big think. I’ve been agonising about how to think about this appalling war in Israel/Palestine and it seems to me (after 2 weeks of violent thoughts, dreams – and frothing at the mouth on my part) that even using a term like evil presupposes that the user of the word accepts that it represents something real; not just a metaphor that gets wheeled out for press headlines. As a concept in everyday use in the West, evil has all but disappeared along with much of its supporting philosophy but we still think it’s significant enough to use on especially upsetting occasions. And, of course, all the major religions including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Buddhism – virtually all of them – separate good acts from evil acts. I’ve worked in many challenging situations and evil – when you encounter it – is utterly chilling; a trashing of every virtue; a deliberate choice for wickedness and against goodness. Surely this is a timely moment to examine our own acts; to accept our own capacity for evil and to recognise when we have fallen into it. If governments, militias, terrorists across the world chose to read their own scriptures on the subject of evil – prayerfully – and assess their own acts in the light of the scriptures they claim to follow then I’m hopeful that they would at least (grudgingly) recognise their error. There is no conceivable God worth a moment of anyone’s time – let alone obedience – who would sanction or encourage evil acts. So we can’t have it both ways. It’s hard to make a coherent argument concerning evil unless we allow that it’s a possibility for any of us, and therefore we have to accept our responsibility for the evil we do without excusing ourselves on the basis of some utterly wrong and self serving interpretation of scripture. Then; when, and only when we’ve acknowledged our own capacity for evil should we turn our attention to what the enemy is doing. I have never forgotten a sentence from my ordination sermon, preached by Francis Palmer: “Always remember that the Church can be the devil – and when it thinks it can’t be, it is!” A very old and dear friend who spent a part of the Second World War serving on the North Atlantic convoys, defending vital cargo ships against aerial and torpedo bombing, told me that on one occasion they were dive bombed whilst he was on duty as a machine gunner. He told me how, to his great shame he was so filled with hatred as he poured deadly shells at the plane, he felt he somehow changed into a monster. He was still deeply ashamed at this revelation of his deep nature fifty years later.
And here was the most unexpected outcome of our day at Makara – a sense of release and peace against all the anxieties and fears of the present moment. We talked for hours about it last night, and again this morning but couldn’t define what exactly was happening there, but this morning we went up to the allotment to clear another two beds and it started to rain; not a bit of drizzle but biblical rain roaring down on us and we laughed as we struggled to work on; digging our winter potatoes from the sodden ground. I could brag about how successful our efforts at improving the soil have been in improving drainage, but that wasn’t the point. We were just laughing about earth and rain and hard work and potatoes; the least glamorous or religious activity you could imagine. When Charlie was trying to explain what Makara meant to him he said “The place has got a soul”. He’s been deeply involved in the development of the place for years, and he and Geoffrey are old friends. Well, he wasn’t wrong.
Quite a busy week really. Retirement is not for the faint hearted !
Woke to pissing rain – so glad we’d ordered breakfast for 7.30. Packed tent wet and put on all our waterproofs to leave at 9.00am. We’d inadvertently exchanged trousers so I was wearing M’s extra large ones and his looked extremely slim and tight! Flogged up awesome track out of Conques so we were wet with sweat by the time we reached the top. Miserable cold, windy and very wet. Hard walking all the way. Decazeville looked like Blaenavon on mogadon. Dropped down 300m and the straight back up the other side. Arrived at Livinhac le Haut at about 3.00pm, knackered again. Found campsite on river but couldn’t face wet tent so we rented a caravan for the night and paid 60€ for dinner bed and breakfast. So we could dry out all our stuff in the caravan. My rucksack leaked badly at the bottom so my shoes were wet through. Slept on a bed this afternoon – bliss! Own shower own toilet. Bed 8.45
31st May 2010
Still cold, windy and pissing down at 6.30 so we discussed our options. Me very pessimistic. M (as so often) practical and positive. Shower out of gas too – so got cold and wet while I struggled with the controls and then gave up. We were the only customers at breakfast. I think the campsite has fallen on hard times. Only about 8 diners from the nearby gîte d’etape last night. Onion soup (I was so hungry I ate it) Salad of grated carrots (that’s all) chips, duck and the ubiquitous haricots verts – the French cook these with real hatred like my mum used to cook sprouts. M noticed a burned out caravan and a similar tent just left there. I expect if you looked in the orchard you’d probably find the previous owner’s body still hanging there.  Anyway I negotiated with the owner and he offered to drive us to Figeac for 50€ – so 118€ for bed breakfast evening meal and transport for 2 – deal!
Of course anyone with a grain of common sense will be asking me how I have the nerve, after all I’ve written about the church, to put on a frock and say things I’ve apparently long since stopped believing. My answer would be that I have always believed that Christianity can only be accepted as a practise rather than a rosary of written propositions about unfathomable mysteries. My biggest difficulty with the day was taking on the persona – Rev Dave – even for a few hours – after laying him to rest for eight years. I don’t believe for a moment that my blessings would twist the arm of any conceivable non material being; but I do believe in grace
13 years later
I swore I’d never do it, but when Harry’s daughter asked me I couldn’t say no; and so yesterday, for one day only, I came out of retirement and agreed to bless his grand daughter’s marriage. I owe him too much to do any other; however I named my price – that I would insist on wearing trainers – and the deal was done. It was – as I’d always known it would be, totally exhausting – but spending a few hours with Harry (96) and his family was pure joy. A haircut and beard trim were obligatory on my part- Harry is an ex soldier and retired surgeon and the man I’ve looked up to for more than thirty years; a true role model and inspiration. He was also my Churchwarden for much of that time and saved my skin more than once from a small contingent of members who wanted me out/dead/whatever …..
Of course I was absolutely running on empty by the time we drove home, and all I could think of was a glass of wine – but having poured it out I took a sip and flaked out in an armchair. I woke almost ten hours later dreaming about David Attenborough driving children off the beach at Severn Beach (where there isn’t one) – waving a radio handset and shouting dark threats against trespassers. I’ll leave you to work that one out because I haven’t a clue. I was, however feeling unsettled and flat because I knew I was about to write about Decazeville. But Madame had a cunning plan, and – as ever – it was a good one. “Do you fancy driving up to Mendip” she asked casually after a very late breakfast.
The sun was shining, it was unusually warm and we walked in T shirts around Stockhill Plantation where last year we found dozens of species of fungi but today almost none. All of the mycology websites have been lamenting the late start of the autumn flush of fungi and they are entirely correct. It was spookily fungus free – BUT – today I found one I’ve been looking for, for ages. It’s beautiful, delicate and unusual for a fungus with a cap it lives up trees – particularly beech trees. Here it is: Pleased welcome the Porcelain fungus – Oudemansiella mucida
But there’s an irony in this excursion on to the Mendip Plateau but although I grumble about the depressing ugliness of Decazeville it shares an origin with high Mendip because they are both former mining areas and still bear the scars. Mendip was mined for lead and copper, and Decazeville for coal – an industry concurrent with the industrial revolution. I can think of walks nearer home where you experience the same disjunction between two adjoining landscapes; empty hillscapes and semi derelict industrial areas. Walking south from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) you might take the Beaufort road and, crossing the empty hills, walk downhill past an opencast coal mine and into the Welsh valleys which once powered the industrial revolution here. The same slightly depressed feeling hangs like a miasma over these post industrial towns. Our walk yesterday was through a plantation that has now pretty much covered about 24 acres (12 hectares) of what’s known locally as gruffy ground; covered in shallow exploratory pits where miners from Roman times onwards have prospected and mined surface deposits of lead ore.
The great advantage of writing up the Camino journal is that these parallels constantly crop up. Obviously being wet and miserable I failed to do justice to a little town that has fallen on hard times. I just checked the local statistics and discovered that the town has only existed for 150 years; the sole raison d’etre being the extraction of coal which ended in the 1960’s . Population about 1500, just 26 two star hotel rooms (and no others at all) and no campsite – so by inference, the Pelegrins don’t stop and spend their money here. The Transit vans and crew buses full of paying pilgrims pass quickly by to more attractive places. My strongest memory of Decazeville is the smell of dog poo wetted by the rain and the continuous procession of gigantic Renault lorries – oh and one of those very thin pilgrim ponchos abandoned in a hedge like a giant pink condom.
But why should pilgrimage be an endless sequence of more or less beautiful places and memorable stops. Life really isn’t like that and I guess I’ve waited 13 years to allow that thought to emerge into the light of day. I feel slightly ashamed of my negative reaction to Decazeville. On a sunny day and with time to explore more fully I’d probably be praising it as I regularly praise all sorts of heritage industrial remains. I don’t think Madame will be wanting to join me on that expedition, though!
Finally – to complete our afternoon on Mendip a few shots of a very beautiful Scaly Male Fern, Dryopteris affinis and a tiny lichen, British Soldiers Cladonia cristatella. Maybe the Rivers of Babylon aren’t so bad after all?
Well [the school party] didn’t quite stay up all night but the DJ had them singing all their favourite pop songs at the tops of their voices until quite late. I’d gone to bed at about 8.00pm leaving M to finish off his (2nd) bottle of wine. I always feel very anxious when he starts drinking. Slept all but 11 hours with a few interruptions. M unzipped the tent several times and told me he’d spent £40 on a [phone] call …… in the night. That’ll teach him!
Woke in the morning to the sound of 50 suitcases and accompanying children being herded right past the tent. Daren’t get up for a piss even, as they were overrunning all the facilities. When calm was restored 2 hours later I went to the toilets only to have myself photographed several times by children on the coach which I hadn’t noticed was overlooking me. Left M sleeping and went for breakfast – better than last nights dreadful pizza and chips. 2 coffees, fruit juice, pain au chocolat bread and preserves. Did all the washing in the morning and left it to dry in the sun. Dozed by the swimming pool. After minimal lunch – picnic – went to Conques.
All very picturesque but the abbey was cold and, for me, spiritually meaningless. The town itself is overwhelming but ultimately a gift shop. If you came here looking for faith I’ve no idea how you would find it. Resting again now. Meal booked at the auberge along the road for 7.30. Owner looks just like the one of the *Two Fat Ladies who died. As the days go past we just walk, sleep, eat and search for toilets. That’s about it really. What a strange way to spend a summer. Not very religious and not remotely what most people imagine we’re doing.
* well known TV chefs of the time
Journal
Thirteen years is a long time; long enough to change perspectives, long enough to be led out of Europe by a bunch of liars; long enough to see poisonous and cruel ideologies strip away our security and dignity; long enough to see our civil rights taken away; long enough to see the poisonous fruits of environmental degradation set fire to the atmosphere forcing the thought that my memories of a pristine landscape and historic culture may have already been erased; long enough to know that I’d never be able to undertake such a long walk again. In truth it’s likely me who’s disappearing and I’m finding it hard to adjust to the loss. The sense of morbidity grips like winter – grips my joints; grips my hearing and my eyes; grips my heart which is always liable to go off on a cadenza of its own devising.
This week, on the television we watched “Partygate” – the horrifying documentary that chronicles the carousing and lawbreaking in Downing Street, going on while thousands of people died of Covid. We watched Tory Party conference speeches that were psychotically detached from reality, and we watched the David Olusoga documentary “Union” which dealt with the bloodshed, greed and corruption that fuelled the union of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Any residual faith I once had in our human capacity for compassion, generosity and communal life is being slowly crushed. I was born in Bristol and raised on the horror stories told by my father and grandfathers of the Bristol riots; how the middle classes allowed the miners of Kingswood and South Bristol to fight for the reform acts knowing that their sacrifice would only benefit a couple of thousand wealthy property owners. I was fascinated by Rolinda Sharples’ painting of the trial of Colonel Brereton which still hangs in the Museum. Brereton was court martialed for losing control of the riots, but had been made a scapegoat and committed suicide before his trial ended. Nobody knows how many rioters were killed by the Dragoon Guards.
History and its relics makes fools of us all. I wonder if the only way to conduct a real pilgrimage today is to start with the pot of fools’ gold bought in the cathedral gift shop and then walk away with it into the reality of twenty first century suffering. Who knows? the alchemical work of walking might transmute it into real gold; spiritual gold.
In my twenties I went into a prolonged period of anxiety and depression and so I curse this mood as if it were an estranged acquaintance turning up out of the blue. The doctor diagnosed morbid anxiety and assured me that I would get better with a bit of human company. “Go down to the pub!” he advised. “Pills are no good”. I took him at his word, and months later I met him at a party. I was standing at the top of a rather ornate Georgian staircase. He climbed towards me clutching a large glass of wine. “Ah, I see you took my advice” – he said – and then toppled drunkenly backwards down the stairs in a well practiced cartwheel. Months later it suddenly dawned on me that – of course – I was going to die; but not yet!” Those few imagined words were what you might call a performative utterance and I got better. Ever since, but mercifully rarely, winter trees take on the appearance of blackened lungs and the feeling returns but I’m reasonably hopeful it won’t last
So possibly this wasn’t the best time of year to start remembering the Camino. On the allotment, autumn is my least favourite season because the crops are harvested and all our energy is directed towards clearing up weeds and dead plants. The Camino has always felt like a comprehensive personal failure – so much so that I can only manage writing about it for a couple of days at a time. And yet I go on writing because there’s a tiny part of me that knows the only way to move on is to turn and face the black dog. When faith becomes fetid and blocked with the debris of false belief, the clearing out has to begin. I have to drag the bindweed out of my heart.
My photographs of Conques were enough to set me off on this gloomy excursus. We came down from the Aubrac Plateau exhausted but buoyed up by the landscape we’d been walking through, and were then thrown into Disneyland; the relic of a town, dusted with cobblestones, and rolled into a preserved, boned, rolled and stuffed religious experience.
If you’ll allow me a small biblical moment, some may be familiar with the Gospel story of the Transfiguration – when Jesus goes up the mountain with Peter James and John they see him transfigured – glowing – and talking to Moses and Elijah ( a heap of theology there!). Peter, as always, gets over excited and offers to build three shelters so that (presumably) later pilgrims can return to the place. Jesus (and I’m translating roughly from the Aramaic) shouts at Peter and says don’t you effing well dare you moron – that would be an epochal piece of misdirection. Sadly, ever since then, generations of Peters have been throwing up more and more effigies, buildings and reliquaries in complete defiance of the instruction to remain silent. Now I realize that this is a very loose interpretation of some greatly loved and important verses and that some will think it’s heretical but the central idea is that God can’t be trapped in a location or a building or relic. The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.
So there’s a sense in which Conques was a kind of turning point for me. The coldness and emptiness of the Abbey exactly mirrored my feelings of coldness and emptiness. The rest was gift shops, bars and bakeries specializing in sweet treats baked with chestnut flour. We got our pilgrim passports stamped and wandered down to the bottom of the valley, knowing that we’d have to sweat it out up the other side in the morning – see the photograph at the top. The untouched beauty of the small town was rather undermined by its chocolate box alleyways and streets and oddly (to most people who don’t know me) I became fascinated by the leadwork gutters and downpipes and took any number of photographs – which I’ll spare you.
This was where the idea of walking away from the iconic place was born. Next time I’ll write about the phone call that changed everything.
Postscript
My friend Rose reproaches me mildly by sending some photographs of Fontenay Abbey which she says is “scoured free of crap” – and I agree entirely. Getting rid of the clutter, the explanatory material and all the accumulated cultus at least allows the buildings to speak. But it still seems to me that occasionally the still small voice can speak through the carnival of distraction – however I think those occasions are determined by grace and not design. So here are a couple of pieces from the past that – I hope – paint a more nuanced picture.
Celtic wayside cross – now outside the door of Gerrans church
This Celtic cross in Gerrans churchyard, (in Cornwall where we are at the moment) spent at least a part of its life on its side as a coping stone on the wall; which is a fairly ignominious fate for what must be the oldest Christian relic in the village. I have to remind myself that although we like to think that artistic, spiritual or historical value is intrinsic to the objects we treasure, it’s clear that what it’s worth is what we think it’s worth. So there were obviously times when this cross was valued more highly than it is today – and what’s more, by the 19th century it was no more than a handy lump of stone.
But hold on; what goes around comes around. What if objects, like words, accumulate meaning, and like words, also shed them. For instance while we were walking the Camino we found several enormous stone frames standing outside old farm buildings. One of them had an immensely strong looking set of straps, but I had to read some history to discover that these frames were used to restrain oxen while they were being shod by the local blacksmith. I’m perfectly content for the frames to be both redundant for practical use – because there’s not much call for oxen with shoes these days (perhaps there should be but that’s another argument); but now they are charged with meaning and resonate as object metaphors for a lost age.
Looked at in this way, the Celtic cross still resonates meanings from the past and still, if we choose to allow it, carries a kind of accumulated spiritual meaning for us. But it’s important to stress that whatever that meaning is, it will take the form of a dialogue. We take questions to these powerful objects; questions such as “what is your name?” “what was in the mind of your maker?” “what kind of world did they live in? and what were their beliefs? “What is your purpose?” Happily we know the answers to some of those questions; this stone began its life as a wayside cross, perhaps in the so-called Dark Ages after the Romans had left, taking their form of Christianity with them – whilst the Celtic church of an earlier – perhaps 3rd century – period which had been most powerful in the westernmost fringes, continued as before. The two spiritualities were very different and so too were the forms of organisation. The reason I think the wayside cross is significant is because the Celtic church was monastic and its monks were great travellers; setting up cells and monasteries wherever they could. In an age where people travelled on foot or by horse on more or less unmarked tracks and footpaths, waymarkers were vital, and continue to be so on pilgrimage routes.
So much then for their accumulated meanings, but could it be possible that the questioning I just mentioned is, in fact, a two way conversation? Would, or could the stone and other treasured artifacts speak back to us? I don’t think that’s a step too far towards some kind of wooly, ill defined spirituality. It would depend on the quality of the question of course, and the intensity of any meditation on the reply. This can sound a bit religious, but for me, the answers to good questions are almost never concrete but – let’s say – Delphic. The symbolism of the crossroads is crucial, because it involves choosing – the ultimate derivation of the word crisis is the Greek crino – to choose. So instead of answering the question where now? the function of the Celtic waymarking cross is to ask it – where now? All I know is that once I’d seen the 7′ high stone I felt compelled to go close to it and see. The stone called me.
Inside Gerrans church there are other speaking objects. A 14th century font carved from granite – Cornish stone; 15th century pew ends bearing the pineapple crest of Katherine of Aragon; the remains of candleholders from the early 20th century, Victorian floor tiles – and so it goes on. But the church is on its knees. The systematic withdrawal of support from these little parishes towards the centre exactly mirrors the social depredations of successive governments. Oblivious to the cultural and social significance of village churches they are being allowed to close.
As we went into the church I read the notices and after we left, I googled up their web page and it was enough to break your heart. These parishes with their 1500+ years of history are being abandoned. Here there are three voluntary churchwardens, but no licensed lay minister and no priest helping to keep them alive. You might think it seems as if the Romans are leaving all over again – which could, just could, lead to a rediscovery of Celtic spirituality. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our tired and bankrupt churches gave up trailing thirty years behind secular fashions and arguing about challenges long-since settled by the rest of us; gay marriage stops being a “problem” when marriage stops being a property relation; women as priests and bishops stop being a “problem” when women stop being a problem.
So there’s a huge opportunity to rediscover the hospitality, the creativity and the profound love of nature exemplified by a Celtic spirituality that’s open to all and most importantly refuses to define itself in a series of attempts to imprison God into a linguistic cage. There is no theology beyond poetry, song and music.
So where does this all lead me?
18th March 2017 – the Wye in flood at Hay on Wye
This is going to be a hard one to explain ..
I had to give up my futile search for some kind of overarching meaning on 18th March 2017. I know it was that moment because I’d taken this photograph and I just knew it was over. We turned our backs to the river and then I turned back for a moment and said goodbye to God. Then I waited for some kind of catastrophic reaction – the full Kübler Ross experience; anger, denial, bargaining and depression followed at a decent interval by acceptance. No such thing happened because I went straight to acceptance, feeling nothing but a sense of relief that at last I could stop trying to hold the tectonic plates together. What I didn’t realize until this week was that the flooding river wasn’t moving away from me; it was offering me an object metaphor which I could return to six years later with a second piece of the jigsaw – the Celtic wayside cross – with which I could continue the journey in the right direction. The river flows, which is the state of everything in nature. I could go on for ever embellishing and working up the idea but that won’t do because it’s the dreary job of theology to explain, when what the river demands is wonder, that’s all. I filled the ensuing years with the allotment and with learning the plants, and intellectually as well as physically it was absorbing and rewarding – but there was no music in my life; I wasn’t singing any more. My sense of wonder couldn’t tolerate being spread so thinly.
Which was certainly why, on walking into Gerrans church I felt the most extraordinary sense of peace. How strange and how unexpected?
The wayinclines but never compels. (To steal a phrase from the astrologers)
Writing up my notes on the Camino we walked in 2010 has led to some provisional insights among which is the understanding that the full Damascus Road experience isn’t really what it’s about, and also that that once you’ve signed up and set foot on the path, you’ll always be on it whatever happens on the way and however far you ranged in search of an easier route.
The initial landscape on the Aubrac plateau before it morphed into woods.
For a long while I’ve had a set of photographs taken in Estaing that I couldn’t place anywhere in the walk, and so finally I’ve gone back to the map and figured out that it’s a fairly short walk beyond Espalion, and so we didn’t hang around apart from a coffee, I think, somewhere down near the bridge and the river. Then we pushed on. So having finally got this piece into the jigsaw I could see that – far from leaving the hill country behind we were still in the thick of it. Unlike the Aubrac Mountains, this landscape was heavily wooded and the footpath – marked all the way, I’ve never mentioned before, by white and red posts- balises was mostly easy to follow.
And there we are – I’ve probably tried to say everything and actually said nothing.
27th May 2010 ctd:
Bed at 9.00pm. It rained at night and it was raining when we set off so M was pissed of with the extra weight [the tent weighs half as much again when it’s wet]. Turned out to be a monster day again. Following the River Lot but crossing 3 tributary valleys so climbing maybe 1000 metres. 27K in all. M a bit hypo and cross. Found campsite in Golinhac (650m) very good. Pitched tent and had a couple of coffees before walking down to the shop to buy picnic tea. Sadly I’m too tired to eat so we’ll have to make up in Conques tomorrow. Easier day I very much hope.
Transhumance is about as ancient activity as human culture itself, and being so ancient means that it’s encoded with a wealth of cultural meaning. The cattle or sheep and indeed goats are moved up to mountainous grasslands where there are rich wildflower pastures that cattle understand and select from. These cows were the happiest and healthiest I’d ever seen.
Typically unprepared we hadn’t grasped that the late night drinking and music were connected to an event – transhumance – which may be associated in these parts of France with Pentecost, bearing in mind that Pentecost, being linked to Easter, and consequently linked to the first full moon after the equinox has a bit of a six week wander around the calendar from year to year. Pasture, on the other hand, pays no attention to such cultural frills and will burst into life when the weather and daylight conditions are right; so as we are discovering on the allotment year by year – spring is driven by weather and pays no heed to gardeners’ and farmers’ careful plans.
So let’s imagine that there is a solemn congregation of pastoralists in Aumont Aubrac that – after a long meal and a good deal of roughish wine – each year decide when the animals will be moved to the hill pastures whereupon plans are made, cellars stocked and musicians booked for the parties in the local villages. The huge circular stone watering ponds that speak of bigger flocks and better days are checked and the best animals are selected for a bit of dressing up.
Because, of course the transhumance isn’t just about good husbandry; it encodes meaning, history, poetry and relationships . In the way of these things, it’s important because it encodes a whole bunch of stuff that the governments of the day – or indeed the landowners – may not be so keen on. Oliver Cromwell was at least right in the reason he gave for banning music, carol singing, Christmas and dancing which were dangerous to the powerful because they embodied that thread of life-giving energy that gives the marginalised people of the earth hope for better things. And so these ancient festivals are greeted with suspicion by the powerful because they simply don’t get it. On the downside there’s a lot of potential for these ancient festivals to become overwhelmed by extreme right populists who feed on the anger of the marginalized whilst stoking up anger for their own reasons which are rarely to improve the lives of the poor. I remember well the St Paul’s riots in Bristol when the extreme right laid on a coach to take the local Southmead lads – who had a well deserved reputation for flaring up and rioting – down to St Pauls. I was working in Southmead as a community artist and I knew them all well. But they refused point blank to get on the bus because they saw immediately that this was not about St Pauls and neither would it help Southmead but an obvious attempt to use them to stir up trouble. I’m pretty sure that, had they got on the bus, there would have been photographers from the right wing press waiting at the other end to photograph them as they got off it. On another occasion our local community policeman came to see me with an inspector in tow after a flare up on the estate. The inspector – not a sympathetic man – said that it was the worst riot he’d ever seen in Southmead. Henry, the community policeman reprimanded him and said “that wasn’t a riot it was a carnival!” It reminds me of the time a bunch of Hell’s Angels turned up at a local village and behaved themselves impeccably. Then reporters from the News of the Screws turned up and offered them £1000 to kill one of Lord Methuen’s peacocks – an offer which they politely declined. Well perhaps not politely!
Anyway, to return to Aumont Aubrac; aside from the noisy parties and the menacing drunks passing our little tents we had no idea what was going on and so the photographs I took of the herding of the cattle were taken from half a mile away. They’re at the top of this piece and you can – if you inspect the photo carefully -see that some of the cattle are decorated with a French Tricolour (see above) and some with less potent symbols. We only noticed them at all because of the clanging of their bells, and the sound of some kind of band coming up behind, and I’m pleased to say that no government officials were harmed in the course of the transhumance – any sore heads were most likely self-inflicted.
But there was another transhumance going on at the same time; the relentless passage of pilgrims in search of some other kind of rich pasture but nonetheless inspired by the ancient culture of pilgrimage. Some, very few, were doing it the old way but others, and I suspect that this group of walkers is one of them, were making use of the huge infrastructure that’s grown up around the pilgrimage. Transit vans, cheap (not that cheap) beds for a night and basic food every day.
Since I didn’t have any idea why I was there it would have been churlish to take a position on their efforts. One person in particular has stuck in my mind. He was German and with our Serbian translator’s help, we discovered that he was walking from Rome to Santiago and picking up a stone at every place he slept. His wife, in Berlin, was dying from cancer and this was his desperate supplication to save her life. Sometimes crazy and beautiful flow together in the same stream and I hope, against hope, that he was choosing small enough stones to get there and big enough stones to impress God.
I wrote earlier about some of the kit we assembled to take on the Camino and you’ll know – if you’ve been following this thread so far – that it was far too much and far too heavy. No complaints, though, about the little Hilleberg tent which was super light, stormproof and very comfortable; nor the Thermarest inflatable bivvy mats which were brilliant too, and the Mountain Hardware down filled sleeping bag. There’s nothing more cheering in the world than feeling safe, dry and warm when you’ve finally found somewhere to pitch up and you’re cold, tired and hungry. I love the sleeping bag so much that when I was driven back sedated from an endoscope exam I preferred to sleep it off in the sleeping bag. As I looked at the kit just now I thought to myself – why on earth didn’t we do the South West Coast Path? or the Coast to Coast?
With a little time for reflection, that turns out to be a pretty serviceable question. What, if anything, is the difference between a pilgrimage and a long walk? I’ve already said that before we left I felt I’d lost my way and that any sense of vocation that I once enjoyed was worn down by conflict and self doubt. I think that, at the time, I just hoped that I might find some kind of illumination by walking the Camino.
But there’s absolutely nothing about going for a long walk that prevents anyone, religious or not, from experiencing numinous moments that could fairly be categorised as spiritual without buying into the whole supernatural apparatus. The sense of the spiritual could derive from the emergent quality of a random conjunction of material factors – the sound of cowbells on a distant pasture, the smell of the spring air, the wild profusion of spring flowers experienced in a strange place that makes us feel how beautiful the earth is, or how small and vulnerable we are; or it could also be explained as a reassuring hug from an immaterial universal force. Does Gaia do hugs? Maybe it’s our attitude to those experiences that frames alternative answers, and perhaps on reflection a walk can turn into a pilgrimage or a pilgrimage into a walk. In the end; does it even matter?
There’s another possible answer to the question what’s the difference between a walk and a pilgrimage? when we look at it through the lens of some sort of virtue ethic. Going for a long and possibly arduous walk might call into play some or all of – let’s say – the Buddhist virtues; generosity; proper conduct; renunciation; wisdom; energy; patience; honesty; determination; goodwill and finally equanimity – but that wouldn’t be the objective of the walk. However reflecting on those virtues as the walk unfolds and deliberately putting them to use, frames the walking differently, allowing us to reflect on bigger questions such as what does it mean to be fully human? how do I distinguish between flourishing and just getting by? Maybe the objective of the walk is not so much simply to arrive at some kind of holy place – although that certainly adds a layer of meaning – and it should never be an opportunity for suffering for the sake of it because that would be a display of ego and self importance, but perhaps it’s the manner of the journey that matters. Perhaps it would be better to keep quiet about it. The one thing I am quite sure about is that pilgrimage in order to gain posthumous benefits – a get out of jail free card to be traded in against today’s willfulness, is just wrong! A pilgrimage, then, pays more attention to inner change and that’s why it’s hard to do well and easy to get wrong.
My first and finest lesson in equanimity came while we were at art school; Madame studying sculpture and I was studying ceramics. Quite in alignment with my personality I took up two ceramic disciplines that demanded spontaneity and risk – raku and salt glaze. I had made a kiln load of pots to fire in a self built salt glaze kiln, and spent 36 hours firing them in the corner of the sports field. When the kiln was opened it was dramatically overfired and everything had sintered together in a lump that could only be removed with a crowbar. I knew, as I stood in front of a month’s ruined work. that this was a critical moment. I could walk away and try something less risky or embrace the failure as a profoundly important life lesson. I chose the second option and ate it up -and it’s fed me well.
But back on the Camino, did we really need the lean-back chairs? No, of course we didn’t and they – along with most of the redundant or unusable kit – were sent later on to a friend in Bordeaux where we hoped to pick them up later. The improvised clothes pegs are free and available underneath most conifers. The giant scallop shell is the symbol of the pilgrimage for complicated reasons accompanied by pretty far-fetched yarns but it serves as a badge of sorts. Oh and the cheese comes later in the walk but it’s a reminder that if you’re actually taking part in a pilgrimage rather than a mobile supper club, you have to eat when you can, and put up with being hungry when you can’t: it’s all part of the process. Our worst ever meal was a shared tin of cold (we had no stove) cassoulet complete with the layer of fat on the top, but if you look at the top left photo you’ll see the two trees above us in which a Nightjar sang (or rather churred) gently all that night. I had never heard it before or since. When it all boils down, the biggest load you carry on a pilgrimage in any case, is the mental baggage.
