I had a stroke of luck today when I found my original notebooks among a box of old files. I still use the boots on the allotment so they’ve lasted around 14 years of hard work. Still waterproof too!
Three questions, then – but not all questions have the same dangerous forensic quality or indeed the same capacity to disturb a night’s sleep. When I formulated them it seemed likely that – at this distance in time – they’d be easy to answer but – well, it seems not. You’d think, wouldn’t you, why then? would be simple; I was due a sabbatical, so who wouldn’t?
Why then?
The Church can be the devil, and when it thinks it can’t be it is!
Canon Francis Palmer in an ordination sermon.
On the one hand, I was an enthusiastic walker and I’d become fascinated by the idea of pilgrimages. I’d even invented and done a two day, forty mile walk from Malmesbury Abbey to Littleton on Severn, following the most likely route to be taken by monks travelling to one of my churches. An old legend told the story of one of my predecessors being murdered on the way to take a communion service, and having the chalice he was carrying stolen by robbers. It was said that a nearby spring turned red every year to commemorate his death. An alternative legend claimed it was the Saxon anchorite St Arilda who was murdered by a Roman officer called Nuncius when she refused to submit to him. I designed the walk to pass both churches dedicated to her as well as my own, and also the spring named after her – which involved a bit of mild off-route trespass. It is thought that the occasional red colouration of the water is due to a micro-organism.
Much earlier in my life I’d managed to include St Ann’s well in Syston into a cross country run which I invented to keep a sadistic PE teacher off my back. It’s difficult for much younger people to understand that we boomers – apart from all the good things like education – also had to put up with a significant percentage of our teachers suffering from PTSD after war service.
Anyway, aside from my interest in pilgrimage and the availability of the sabbatical there was something else. As Francis Palmer warned on the day I was ordained, the church is a dangerous institution. Bullying is endemic. Both congregations and senior clergy are all too willing to destroy, or encourage the destruction – physically, psychologically and spiritually – of anyone who challenges their authority or orthodoxies. I had to cope with a group inside the church who constantly belittled and challenged me; but also a local head teacher who attempted to destroy my career by making false accusations against me. The accusations were easily disproved but the church legal authorities refused to intervene on the grounds that he was clearly mad. We had church members on the doorstep shouting abuse at me or whoever answered the door. We were about to begin a major refurbishment of the church which was overwhelmingly supported by all but a handful of vocal diehards. Yet I was very close to burning out after approaching twenty years of constant headwind in spite of which we increased the congregation, built up a vibrant music group and extended our outreach into the village. Francis Palmer was right, and so was Dom Edmund Wheat who once said to me “always remember that availability is an ascetic discipline”. I no longer knew what, if anything, I believed in any more – apart from believing in the congregation who had stuck with me. I may have thought, without ever articulating it to anyone, that I might, just possibly, find God again out there in the wilderness.
So I filled in an airily optimistic proposal for some funding without mentioning any of what I’ve just written, and it was approved. I was awarded a few hundred pounds most of which I spent on an amazing Hilleberg two person lightweight tent because I thought that was how everybody else conducted long pilgrimages. Then came the maps, the guidebooks and spreadsheets and time ticked on as I bought essential boots and equipment and carried out long training walks.
Why now?
So why am I writing this after so many years? I can think of two possible answers. Firstly, and without any provocation from me, the thought that I might try and walk to St David’s Cathedral popped into my head last time we were in Pembrokeshire. To be clear, I would walk to St Non’s Well not the Cathedral which is 3/4 hour walk further on but far too noisy and full of tourists – and I would do it in short sections, over a period of time and preferably with Madame somewhere close.
The other reason is because I’ve been worrying that the wheels are increasingly wobbly and may fall off before I’ve accomplished a couple of goals. Nothing immediately life threatening is happening but I seem to be taking a lot of medication and visiting the hospital more and more. Bless them, they’ve done wonders, but it seems to me that it’s time – and this is a lovely euphemism – to get things straight; and the Camino is one of those life events that I need to straighten out while I can still put one foot reliably in front of the other. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I’m still post-Christian and I’m still hoping, still looking for an answer.
The second goal – and this is pure hubris – is to finish writing a million words in this blog, about being human, or being virtuous I’m 80% there now.
Why me?
Well why not? However most of my life has felt as if I was being called to do or be something but I never found out what it was! Vocation is exactly that kind of thing which happens when you go for a job interview and protest that you haven’t seen a job description. At the risk of sounding psychotic, words sometimes land in my heart that are incapable of doubt. There’s a form of utterance in grammar that’s called performative. So these performative statements land without warning and because of their nature, what is spoken just happens. Mercifully they’re vanishingly rare in my experience, but it’s odd when the words “It’s alright” plop into your heart and immediately everything is alright and all melancholy and doubt fly away. There was another one – a bit cryptic but I knew instantly what “clear the decks” meant for me.
So moving on we’ll come to day one of the actual walk:
20th May 2010 Yesterday – bit of a slog (that’s an understatement). We seemed to be climbing all day – could only get a coffee in St Christophe because the (food) service was finished. Got to Montbonnet and decided to push on to St Privat d’Allier – which turned out to be all uphill. Arrived at the Camping Municipal (very good) at 6.30pm. Feasted on the weirdest and thinnest cheese omelette ever + chips and lettuce leaves. Bed at 8.30pm. Up at 6.00 and faffed about until 8.00 so we could stock up on pain au chocolat at the boulangerie.
This is a detail of the tympanum of the abbey in Conques – much further down the path
19th May 2010 Leaving Le Puy now. Cleaner at the cathedral asked me if my water bottle was a respirator!
Journal
The preparations for the Camino took months. I was overdue a sabbatical in any case – I’d missed the previous opportunity because I could foresee that any progress we’d made in moving forward would be utterly undermined by a small conservative faction in the congregation who still thought my job was to chaplain the status quo.
Looking back, I was preparing for a pilgrimage that never was, never would be on offer. Pilgrimages were the package tours of the middle ages. They were fuelled by the fear of hell and the sheer difficulty of forgiveness; and the USP was the odd idea that kissing or touching a gold reliquary containing a dubiously authentic body part – let’s say the foreskin of the martyred St Superfluous – would confer bankable spiritual benefits. The early church must have been populated with a great number of genetically strange saints with a dozen hearts, twenty five fingers and innumerable other dangly and easily removed bits for sale on the open relic market. I’ll come back to what my motivation was further down the road; but rest assured that relic reverencing wasn’t part of the plan.
Anyway, moving on rapidly, the 21st century pilgrim can call upon a well resourced network of comfortable overnight stops and small cafes, not to mention the Transit vans which – for a tidy sum – will carry your luggage; transport you over the hard bits and even meet you with a picnic lunch.
Our budget, on the other hand, was 30 euros a day to cover everything – and as the journey unfolded we quickly realized that this wasn’t remotely enough. We had planned to carry everything we needed; tent, sleeping bags, bivvy mats, clothes, cooker – kitchen sink etc. Being completely self contained would mean we could wild camp with occasional nights in a campsite to grab a shower. Having spent the night at the youth hostel in Le Puy en Velay we set out to buy gas for our hideously expensive skeletal titanium cooker. I’d been assured by the good folk at Snow and Rock that suitable gas canisters were universally available across Europe. It seemed, after a fruitless trudge around Le Puy, that this was not the case. Before we had taken a single step along the Camino we had to accept that there would be no cooker; no warmed-up tins of soup or early morning brew ups. That was the first disappointment.
At the cathedral, where we needed to get our pilgrim records stamped, a friendly nun asked my companion if he was my carer and the cleaner expressed interest in my respirator (drinking water bladder). With that cursory medical out of the way, we staggered down the long flight of steps with much heavier rucksacks than were sustainable for some of the days we had planned. If that was a portent we ignored it, fiddled about with the straps – as if that made any difference – and set off, followed with quizzical regard by the locals who obviously thought we were rather odd. Within a couple of hundred yards we were slogging up a steep hill having learned our first pilgrim lessons. France is not wild; you shouldn’t believe everything they tell you in camping shops; and this was going to be painfully hard. Our first glimpse of La France Profonde was a small industrial estate where one of the units made paté. It smelt like Brain’s pie factory from my childhood.
Tomorrow I’ll perhaps write a bit more about the kit as we tackle our first really hard day.
It’s two weeks since we got back from France. At first I was just confused, feeling terribly guilty and carrying a huge sense of failure. Of course everybody made the right kind of noises, being very affirming and saying they’d have done the same thing under the circumstances but it’s been very hard to shake off the feeling that I somehow wimped out. Since then I’ve been suffering from elective agoraphobia – not wanting to meet or talk to people, and skulking in and out of the village taking the quick way out onto the A38. I kept myself busy at home, installing a mobile phone repeater amp and helping the boys to decorate a bedroom, but I knew I was avoiding the issue. The fact is, my sabbatical project has gone down in an ignominious defeat, I’ve been sponsored for something I couldn’t finish, and I’ve got two months off with zero sense of what to do with it. On the other hand I can’t sit around forever feeling sorry for myself – and I did learn a lot even from the shorter walk. On the plus side we walked 350K and across the 4000 foot high Aubrac Plateau in really tough conditions and carrying everything we needed – so we walked further than Offa’s Dyke Path (283K) The Coast to Coast (307K) and the vast majority of other UK trails. The problems we encountered were mostly our own fault – not least a hubristic view of our capabilities and a failure to look carefully enough at the facilities we needed. This led us into some mammoth 35K walks carrying far too much weight. We also failed to realize that many French campsites only open during the school holidays – and many of the ones we stayed in that were open had not finished their winter refits – restricting facilities greatly. The one factor we couldn’t have foreseen was the exponential growth of assisted and guided walks along the route. We were constantly surprised at the number of people who seemed to be carrying next to nothing. It took several weeks to realize that their belongings were being shipped from place to place by transit van. Sometimes we would find a large group sitting in the middle of nowhere eating a picnic that had been driven out to them. On one occasion one such group took over the only restaurant in a small village in its entirety. Naturally the infrastructure has followed the money, and so the facilities (which are expanding rapidly) are not for solo walkers and campers but for paying groups. Consequently many of the gîtes d’etape were being swamped by large groups – a problem which could only get bigger as we approached Spain. If I was ever to attempt such an ambitious project again, I’d calculate the ratio between load and distance more carefully. To do the whole Camino carrying the loads we had – i.e. carrying tent etc. would ideally break down into daily walks of 20K maximum – 17K would be better. That would not be possible due to the uneven distribution of suitable campsites. Wild camping gets less and less possible as you move into more populated areas and it’s illegal in Spain. That inescapable limitation means that the only way to do it in less than 4 months (allowing one day off a week) is to ditch the tent and stay in gîtes d’Etap or B&B. This would increase the daily budget dramatically – from 30€ to as much as 100€. Even taking into account the shorter time it would still be twice as expensive and wildly more than I could afford. Looking back on my notes now they seem unbelievably brief, often missing out great chunks of stuff that seem far more important on reflection. I’ll be adding to them and matching them with photos over the coming weeks. Watch this space.
From my notebook
Well that was then – 13 years ago, since when the photographs were gradually dispersed over three incompatible laptops, the original notebooks (which fortunately I transcribed soon afterwards) are somewhere buried in the strata that constitute my filing system and I’ve done everything I can to forget the whole thing. The sense of failure never left me and cast a long shadow over the following years. But gradually – and then suddenly in the last few weeks – I began to see a way to reconnect the threads.
Of course writing history, even the memoir of an event in which I was a participant, is a dangerous game. The temptation to gloss the hard parts; fill in the missing bits with fiction; to inflate or deflate those aspects of the narrative that suit purposes which I don’t even fully understand myself; or just to self-justify; blame someone else and whinge on about the blood, sweat, tears and blisters; all of which happened but all of which were mitigated by unexpected moments of grace.
So having spent a week organising all the written material I could find and united the photographs into a single and accessible library I’ve also got an idea (untested until today) of how to proceed. I’ll use the contemporary and unedited written notes and photographs to evoke some sense of our failed 1000 mile walk; then I’ll add some reflections on how we got to where we found ourselves; what we learned from it, how it’s played out in subsequent years; and to start at the beginning, the very first note which absolutely nails our unpreparedness :
18th May 2010 Couldn’t sleep so up at 4.00am. Stella drove us to Parkway. Saying goodbye was unbearable – I was praying she wouldn’t cry but she did anyway! Then it was just endless trains all day. We only just got to Paris Gâre de Lyon in time because I misread the tickets and forgot to advance my watch by an hour so we had to run up the stairs with our rucksacks on. People must have thought we were mad. Two hours wait and a grotty pizza at Lyon then the most beautiful train journey up the Loire valley: (I only worked out it was the Loire Valley when the conductor gave us a map). The first conductor out of Lyon was a beautiful black guy with a lovely smile. SNCF staff seem to wear whatever they like with one badge of office – often a cap. Spent night at a youth hostel in Le Puy after arriving at 9.30.
WTF did I think I was doing? Subsequently Madame has wasted no opportunity to tell me how completely out of character it was for me to just clear off for three months, and she’s right. I don’t think I gave a moment to imagine how lonely and distressed she would be. I was just obsessed with this batshit crazy plan to walk across France and Spain to Finisterre – the end of the earth. My companion (Modestine? – he often carried part of my load) was someone very close to us whose marriage had just broken down and who was compensating by drinking far, far too much. I asked him along because I wanted (needed) to stay close and look after him. It certainly added another layer of madness to the adventure.
Much more to follow, including a reflection on this whole pilgrimage business – what it’s about and whether some sort of immaterial and supernatural God has any part in it at all. I’ve never felt so nervous about pushing the publish button before!
