Saturday, in my old, pre-pilgrimage way of life, was a day in which I would generally cycle from home to Waitrose in Balham, and pick up foodstuffs for the week and a free coffee and a free Guardian. Such is the almost irresistible allure of Waitrose’s largesse.

This weekend was the first time I got back to the routine and Toto and I got soaked on a round trip.  We set off first to the local charity shop with two panniers’ of things to pass on, then the local recycling tip in hope some other things will be recycled.  The tip now requires proof of local residence, at least theoretically, in fact they didn’t check the bits of paper I’d found with my name and address on them.  Apparently this is now needed in case aliens from another London borough, or even, heaven forbid, even further away, attempt to use the facility.  I miscalculated, I’ve forgotten about British weather, and the heavens opened on us as we pottered off to those lovely locations, and Toto and were both pretty bedraggled, despite the sun coming out again, by the time we got to up market Balham.  The caked Spanish dust is slowly coming off Toto.

As I tethered him, with “two good locks”: this is London not the pilgrimage any more, a man hopped off a road bike of a certain age and tied it up next to Toto and said something obviously friendly but totally incomprehensible to me.  (I really am going a bit deaf!) I said “Sorry” in a very British sort of way and he said, more slowly this time so I got it “Have a good weekend”.  I managed “thanks, er, you too” and probably something about cycling being good despite the weather, with which he agreed.  Then I ventured, sensing he wouldn’t be offended, “Where are you from?” as the thick accent was recognisably European, and I was hazarding “former Iron curtain Eastern Europe” but nothing more localised than that.  “Poland” was the beaming answer, “Krakow” and now I could say …
“Ah, I/we have been there.  Lovely city.”
“Yes, 850 years”
“Yes, historical, very beautiful, lovely.” (OK, I’m rubbish at this conversation thing, I know.)
“Yes, 850 years”
“Yes” (OK, I was bluffing I admit it, I hadn’t a clue why 850, my recall of Krakow’s history wasn’t up to that.)
“When you there, [perhaps] you [went to?] salt mines.” (You have to hear his side of this in a really glorious, deep toned voice and a very, very thick accent, but now I’d attuned, completely comprehensible.)
“Yes!”  (With ear to ear grin on my face).  “Real tourists! Wonderful, amazing, enormous.”
“Thirty years ago I worked in salt mines.”  (I was computing that that was entirely possible from what I could remember, I’m stronger on the recent than the distant history of Krakow. I reckon it probably made him a member of the workforce that was there as they closed the mines, partly through fears that the washing out of the salt layers might be reaching under Krakow itself and be causing serious risks of subsidence.  That must have been quite a time to have worked there.  I’m damn sure he was telling me truth anyway.)
“Wow.  They were amazing.  Hard work.  That church.” (Yes folks, I think it was as staccato and disjointed as that.)
[He had huge grin now on his face too.] “Yes.  Yes. You saw that.” [Face changed, I think going back to the mines and picturing it too. I wonder how much what he would remember would match what we saw as tourists.]
“Yes. Hard work.”
“Yes” [Sounding unconvinced actually but too polite to disagree but then …] “Yes, salt mines same everywhere, Krakow, Poland, everywhere.”
“Yes.” (I’m inclined to accept that. In my view, damn hard and potentially dangerous work anywhere though I’m sure it varies a bit.)  “What are you doing now?”
“Work for Surrey council.” (Not far away, a few miles down the road.) “In Poland, I worked in revenue.”
“Ah” (genuinely interested but unsure how to move on and becoming faintly aware I needed to get a move on to get to Stratford East to meet J later.)
“Because my English not so good, I not so good job here.”
“Ah, and expensive living here.”
“Ah.  Yes, but good.  I go to Peckham Rye” (a few miles East of us and now gentrifying rapidly but until a a few years ago having been well down the social strata below Balham, or below our own neck of the woods here in South London.) “Big Indian shops. Buy five pound bags frozen mackerel for £5.  Cheap.” (Very true.  I must sleuth that out.  Maybe I should alternate Waitrose one week, big Indian shope in Peckham Rye the next.)
[Pointing into Waitrose, which for non-UK nationals reading this, is a very “posh”, and not a cheap supermarket.] “Ah, but this isn’t cheap.” (Ouch, as I write that it sounds rude, I think/hope my face was conveying what I was feeling, a complicity in self-indulgence. I think it was because …)
[With big grin on his face] “Yes, but I love Roquefort cheese!!!”
[At which we both started moving towards the entrance and he put out large hand …]
“Tomasz” (OK, that’s my guess at correct Polish spelling, I think I’ve met some Polish “Thomas”s.]
“Chris”

And then I found myself lingering, a bit stunned by the sheer pleasure of savouring such a lovely encounter, but also savouring memories of a very good work trip to Krakow, which is (and J and I have 100% agreement on this) a lovely, remarkably undamaged, truly historic city where we were made incredibly welcome by my/our hosts, Milena and Andrzej and their colleagues at the Polish Institute for Integrative Psychotherapy.

I stood there for a moment and was gazing at a wonderful, bright red bike with a full kiddie carrier at the front and onboard electric motor, clearly a pretty new Larry vs. Harry bike but my mind was miles away (just how far is Krakow?  Aha, 880.6 miles, 1417.3km  by air according to distancefrom.net, ooh, and 1,009.6 miles, 1624.9 km by road.  Aha, now that’s another nice cycle ride!)

Down tiger!  OK, I suspect my mouth was hanging open a bit, more in sheer pleasure at the conversation I’d just had, than at the bike, but not unreasonably a voice, this time with only the tiniest of accents, that might have been UK, said “Admiring the bike eh?” so I agreed (there’s only so much explaining the realities of his internal world that even this blogger will do outside Waitrose on a late Saturday afternoon in Balham).

Trying to recover my cool, I noticed that the man had a Clare Hall boat club top on.  Now, and this time not only for non-UK people finding themselves reading this, but probably for anyone who didn’t blag your way into Cambridge University, or who never wanted to, or who wouldn’t be seen dead there, Clare Hall is one of the smaller (smallest?, not quite) of the colleges that make up that august institution.  Oh and, yes as I’ve confessed before, posh person that I am, posho who shops in Waitrose, I spent three years there as an undergraduate.  Now, as well as seeing 40 films for probably about £20 in my first eight week term, and learning a bit about medicine, Cambridge was where I discovered rowing and, by a triumph of enthusiasm over any real ability, made it to the Queens’ College first eight and had great, great fun rowing, particularly in the second and third terms of my first year.  After that, sadly, I gave it up as Queens’ decided we were a good team, which we were, on team spirit again, rather than real ability, and decided that the first and second eights would train six days a week … not me mate,I had films to see, parties to go, lectures six days a week (honestly) and six training sessions a week was about two more than I wanted.  The twist was that if you’d rowed in a first eight, then the Cambridge rules of the river said you couldn’t row lower than a second eight … so, that was my short but fun rowing career over.]

So here you are.  One of the benefits of spending time recently throwing out old junk, is that I know where old junk I haven’t thrown is sitting.  So once more into the TARDIS (you did read the last blog post didn’t you?)

That is autumn 1975 and that I’m sure is the Cambridge “Head of the river race” and in there is your time challenged blogger himself with seven other completely novice oarsmen (though I have a faint memory that the cox had done his bit before at school).  That really, really is how not to row but dig those hair styles, come to that, dig that I had hair.

And this was what two further terms practice achieved.

That is the Queens’ College second eight, and yes, I’m there again, in fact I think I and that cox are the only people in common across the two ‘photos and perhaps I’m wrong about him. This crew were doing pretty well in the May bumps at the time of that ‘photo.  I’m pretty sure this time that the cox, number 8 and 7 had rowed before but the other six of us were beginners.  Hm. I can even find the names:

That’s the oar we won, well actually, you had to pay for one and it amused me at the time.  That’s not the seat order we were in in the ‘photo but I’m pretty sure that’s the right nine names.  (I’m not sitting in the seat in the ‘photo that the ‘photo has me in but someone gave the painter the wrong information including some pretty odd weights actually.  Anyone who knows me want to say which is me in the two ‘photos bearing in mind that the oar is not a safe clue except that it eliminates one seat.  Answers at the end of this blog, and a bonus point for anyone who notices anything else odd.

OK, back in the TARDIS and whizz forward about 40 years.  He of the rowing top and I talked.  I teased him that in my days, in the century before he’d been in Cambridge, I’d had the satisfaction of “overbumping” a Clare Hall boat and we immediately agreed that they were a tiny college.  [Ouch, I really believed that at the time I was talking to him, think I was muddling it with a bit of side-by-side racing we did against them at some regatta. As you can see from the information on that oar, we overbumped a much bigger college: Trinity.  How could I have forgotten that?  It was a huge feather in our caps!]

Somehow talking about electric bikes took us, via whether or not J should use one to my pilgrimage and he was enthusiastic and nice about it.  I learned what he, a Dane speaking perfect English with only that faintest of accent, was doing in the UK.  It turned out that he’d met his wife, a fellow student, I think from Spain, in Cambridge and they were both helping keep this country alive and both their children, the three year old for the kiddie carrier, and the nine month old, I am sure will do so in the future given a chance.

Damn Brexit, damn, damn, damn Brexit …. but oh boy, those were two, radically different, but lovely conversations. Both men leave me standing for warmth and willingness to launch into conversation with complete strangers. Both conversations were, I think, triggered by bikes which may be the trick to make me a sociable human being.  It all reminded me forcibly that conversations with complete strangers had seemed so mcuh to be permitted on the pilgrimage route and had all been good.  More importantly, it reminded me that the same is surely true anywhere (though I seem to need a pushbike to start the conversation).

Damn, damn, damn Brexit and, … oh boy we’re not in mainland Europe any more Toto. On which note, let’s hop into the TARDIS again and visit Krakow back in November 2010.

The main square, surely hints of Venetian gothic to the building on the left.

And, last but not least, samples of a huge table of food.

Very happy memories: thank you Tomasz.

Oh dear, this blog is getting out of order, no, not that sort of “out of order”, well, not very.  No, just in the wrong temporal order. This really should have come before the last post I put up but perhaps because it’s (mostly) about simple pleasures, I lost track of it.

Anyway, yes: continuity failure.  Toto and I clearly couldn’t have done London until he returned and caught up with me.  Oops.

Ah well.  Let’s go backwards.  Here he was after the ring on the door bell from a smiling delivery man.  (Honestly, he was smiling happily. I agree that’s not always the case for delivery people and I’m not sure it’d be my default expression were that my job.)  The cap had come back with me but I felt it belonged there for the ‘photo: it was as much appreciated leaving present before I went off, from a colleague in my last job.

The shop in Santiago, Velocípedo, S.C, who had partially dismembered Toto and packed him up, had done a great job.  As well as Toto, in the box were my mattress (black roll in next ‘photo), tent, massive bike lock, sleeping bag and liner and both empty panniers.

Toto’s was in quite a dismembered state, well, surgically, a mixture of dismembered and dislocated is probably more accurate.  The handlebars, front light and front rack were dislocated but still connected by cables, the pedals and saddle were truly amputated but everything was well wrapped in bubble wrap and attached to other things to prevent anything flailing around in transit.  Bits of old innner tube supplemented the bubble wrap ingeniously.  I love recycling.

I confess I’m not confident about reassembling a bike safely but it was all fairly easy and eventually, Toto was back in full working order.  Thanks Velocípedo: appreciated and a real pleasure to be back with my own bike available.

That was one simple pleasure of re-entry. Another was coming back to find that J had kept the various bird feeders in the back garden stoked up and the birds were flicking in and out of the bushes, to and from the feeders every bit as much as they had been before I went.  Oddly, they all look cleaner and more spruced up than they had looked earlier in the summer.  J agrees.  Odd, when do our common garden birds get a change of feathers?

Since my return the list welcoming me back is lots of great tits and blue tits, some coal tits, a few beautiful long tailed tits, one of my favourite UK birds, goldfinches (ditto) and the occasional parakeet.

OK, these were taken before I went off but they confirm the parakeet.

They’re just ‘phone ‘photos and through the kitchen window so, yes, they’re awful but as well as capturing that florid green and red acrobat, I particularly like that the second one has a typical flickering of a tit in the background. (You may have to look carefully.  It’s easiest to see on a small screen if you flick your eyes from the one ‘photo to the other and see the blur that’s in the right hand one and not in the left hand one.)

There are times when the back garden seems to have several such determined feeders zooming around continuously and they come in and out for five to ten minutes on end.  Then suddenly all will go completely dead for a while until they return again.  I haven’t worked out why the bursts of activity happen, but they’re certainly not simple statistical fluctuations on a flat base rate of visiting, there’s something more than that going on, some shared safety perhaps?

And, shoddy ‘photos thought they are, I do like that we get those technicolour exotica dropping in from time to time.  I think the accusations against them, that they’re taking local species’ food and nesting spots, feel pretty implausible.  They’ve been a slowly growing feature of London life for about 20 years in my experience and certainly they’re now pretty common, so you hear their unmistakable squawky shrieks a lot and see their purposeful green streak flight a fair bit, but they’ve hardly taken over.  I think the accusations are ornithological little Englander prejudice.  I’m sure there are Brexit voters who think President May should repatriate all parakeets as well as anyone else not “indigenous” and who like to attribute the cause of all that’s not OK in modern Britain to immigrants.

Oh dear, now I’ve gone and spoiled it haven’t I?  There I was, all happy at the simple pleasures of having reassembled Toto safely and finding him undamaged from his trip and the even greater pleasures of the bird life in our little urban back garden and I’ve gone and moaned and gotten all bitter.

I know not all Brexit voters are bitter, racist, xenophobic.  I know and sympathise that a lot were surely voting that way through understandable exasperation with London based politics so out of touch with so much of the country (trust me, pretty out of touch with much of London too).  I know the remain campaign seemed to me to be almost suicidally hopeless, as if they really didn’t want to win, just wanted to threaten people with the financial penalties of not voting for them and their smugly knowing status quo.  Who ever thought that was good lobbying?  I know a lot of the leave campaign looked jazzy, different, upbeat by comparison and, hey, it was liberally sprinkled with lies like the £350M per week for the NHS.  I guess we all have to work out how to hold onto our pleasures alongside our bitterness and anger about things. I guess I think that for some voting “leave” was one way they were getting that (and still think so, or so the Guardian tells me with a follow-up survey).

One odd ornithological thing took me two whole weeks to notice as it’s an absence not a presence.  While there were lots of swallows and swifts overhead when I went, and swallows particularly all the way to Santiago, there are none here now.  All gone, off on their migrations to Africa.   I’m fascinated that I’d had them with me all the way, in numbers and often with all the noisiness that particularly the swallows add to their aerobatics yet it took me so long to see that they had gone.

Oh well, they will return, though data on so many species numbers are depressing and clearly we can’t rely on some to return or even to stay.  When we moved into this house about 21 years ago the commonest bird in that back garden was the house sparrow and I thought they’d always be there.  We haven’t seen one in there for at least three years and I know the drop is similar in my sister’s tiny garden in North London and nearly as precipitate, and from absolute flocks of them, in my parents’ garden in South Wales.  Of course, species’ numbers fluctuate and some die out without human assistance.  However, we are now in the geological era of the Anthropocene: the one in which we as a species are reshaping our planet, and catastrophically so, more than any natural phenonenon is.  Much we must fight there.

OK.  Onward … and forgive me, because over the next few weeks here, things are going to get even more out of order here.  I’m going to go back to how it all started, back to an unfinished ‘photo tour of Chartres, the original inspiration from 1976; I’m going to go back to that first day (2/8/16) as I pointed Toto, who wasn’t even Toto back then, just a bike, out into the drizzle and the very dubious pleasures of the South Circular.  Surely some of you are “Doctor Who” fans: if that time disordered series can keep going for as long as it has, I can try to emulate it, and jump around a bit.

 

“We’re not in mainland Europe any more Toto”

Wow it’s a funny business moving on from a pilgrimage, and one you waited 40 years to do.  I have found it hard finding what I want to say here in some ongoing blog.

As I’ve already said, the first 10-14 days after I arrived back were unusual.  There was a hectic sequence of seeing both children, both off to other parts of the world (Glasgow & Moscow both being definitely “other parts of the world”), a family wedding, and then, last weekend (24-25/9/16) was a lovely reunion here in South London.  Old friends, ex-colleagues from clinical work in Nottingham, came to stay to help me celebrate, and perhaps mourn a little, my giving up the NHS and clinical work.  One of them has dubbed it “Nexit”.  I pretend that Nexit is Nottingham declaring independence from the rest of the UK when President May invokes EU Article 50 but I do have to admit that it’s a neat name in current climate, for NHS exit.

Through nearly three weeks since I returned, including those great social weekends, I’ve been getting used to being a kept man and an unemployed adult.   I’ve done a lot of long overdue tidying up in the house, 99% of which was throwing away huge accumulations of photocopied journal articles and other accretions from the last 30 years of being an academic as well as a clinician.  That reflects the simple reality that the house is overloaded, but also a recognition that much of what I had was never going to be used. That’s partly because my interests have always been so much broader than even 24*7 week would provide for really exploring them.  It also reflects that there will be a “Rexit” in time too: an end to my research and academic work.  That’s not imminent but Nexit brought that into focus and helped me realise that hanging onto old stuff isn’t going to help me do what I need and want to do.  That “need and want” is interesting: there is much to do that I owe to others, and much that is purely what I want to do.  Most of what I want to do is work I’ve only thought about, or only dipped into so far, mostly things I’ve yet to publish about at all.

The things I owe to others and the things I want to do intersect a lot of course, arguably the former is a subset of the latter as there’s nothing that I owe to others that doesn’t interest me.  These owings are all things, mostly around CORE translation work, that I got into voluntarily, and in the last five years or more, things above and beyond what I was being paid to do.

The owings and the wantings are different things though.  Some of the things I owe others aren’t my highest priorities and I don’t think any of them are scary: they’re things I know I can do, things that are a matter of finding the time, energy and concentration, mostly things I’ve done before, or have done things so similar that I know I can do them.  By contrast, some of the things I know I really want to address are scary.  Some involve mathematical, statistical and programming work that will stretch me to my limits.  (I’m not a good programmer at all sadly.)  Some will stretch me intellectually just thinking the ideas through properly.  Some involve coming out of the trenches and saying, with supportive arguments and/or evidence, that much of what gets done in mental health and psychotherapy practice, and in mental health and psychotherapy research seems to me to plain wrong.

J pointed out last week, when I was moaning and a bit down, that perhaps there was a challenge to hang onto quite an angry, critical voice that I’ve used a bit in some of these blog posts; harder to write or speak publicly like that now I’m back, perhaps particularly as I am on the verge of a paid academic post (we think).  As so often, she’s right and I know it’s easier, less scary, to tidy the house, even to throw away things that stir up old memories and cause me pangs, and I know that it’s easier to do the things I owe people that I know I can do, than it is to try to pick up some of the other things.  That’s for future posts though, posts to help me stay on that course.

Feeling the currents under the doggypaddling

Anyway, underneath this tidying, this doing, this doggypaddling, (regular readers of this blog, and a few friends, acquaintances and colleagues may have realised that I’m not very good at doing nothing) two discernible undertows are becoming clear.  One is a sort of tidal cycle, the other a steady, if fluctuating current.  The one is about pleasure and having it without too much guilt (and shame?) and the other is about that Nexit thing: the brute fact that I don’t do clinical work any more, direct or indirect.

I had some challenges when cycling but so much huge, huge pleasure.  It was a bit tidal most days, particularly in the second half of the trip: just one cycle per day, not the lunar tide’s two.  I would cycle in the morning and early afternoon, and there was much pleasure in that, but a lot of hard work. Then most later afternoons and evenings I would get to see a new place and get some food and drink into me: pure, wonderful pleasure with the guilt assuaging awareness I’d cycled hard enough (most days).  I am sure that the hard work, sometimes the screams from my legs earlier in the tougher days, and all those consecutive hours breathing damn hard, were helping pay for the the sheer pleasure of the sights and experiencing.  One challenge now is how not to lose that the sheer pleasure of experiencing and to get that locally, in the everyday world of my life back in London: to get the right cycles of work and pleasure.  I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first I know I need to deal with the undertow, the emotional tug of “Nexit”.

“Nexit”

This has been niggling at me more since I’ve been back than it did while cycling.  I know it has, though it’s fairly subconscious most of the time but it’s there: I miss the work.  It is subconscious and only niggly and when I stare at it I know I miss the sense of doing something that seemed simply, and unequivocally, well intentioned; something worthwhile (when to a greater or lesser extent seemingly successful).  I don’t think this is about some very deeply pathological shoring up of any shoddy self-esteem, it would probably be more unconscious than subconscious if it were.  I know that my self-esteem is patchy, I can be very confident of some things but I am sure that statistically I’m below the median for confidence and self-esteem, mostly not diagnostically so.  Of course, those satisfactions of doing clinical work, occasionally even feeling I could do it fairly well, have been damn useful in countering low days.  Over the last decades I’ve been depressed at times, probably diagnostically so for periods, but I suspect that I’d have been so for much longer and perhaps more deeply had I not had a great job to dive into.

So I don’t think this Nexit is some particularly pathological thing, it’s just the transition that everyone who has cared about their job has to manage on stopping. It’s a price for having been lucky enough to have done something that was not only deeply interesting, challenging, and often hugely enjoyable; to have done something that seemed to have these moral aspects: well-intentioned and sometimes helpful to some people.  Of course, I was also lucky that it was something that paid, and paid well in later years.  (I never worked less than a 60 hour week across clinical and academic things and I mostly worked up in the 70-80 hours, like many in that line of work.  That helps not feel too embarrassed about having been well paid to do things I, mostly, enjoyed.)

I am sure that for anyone immersed in work like that will find it helps plaster over some cracks and dents in one’s self-esteem.  Stopping work, like putting an inspection light on any wall of an old building, raises questions.  I am sure I sensed that would be the case back at 19 when I hit on the idea of the ride to Compostela.  I don’t remember exactly when I hit on the idea of the later ride to Rome but by then I was either working, or well into being a clinical medical student by then, and I think that decision went with knowing that the transition wasn’t one that would be handled by one trip, that it would be a process of at least a few years.

So I find myself very aware of my wish to be “doing”, and of this stepping up now I’m home, am no longer “doing” the miles. The urge to get on with things is growing now that I have most of the tools I need for academic work (not all as being between jobs interesting cuts me off from some library and database access).  I can also feel ways in which academic work is different from clinical work and how that impacts, and I know that  don’t want to slip back into old ruts and channels of “doing” now I’m back from the ride.

I think it helps to write about this Nexit, and remind myself that it was time to stop.  I was tired in some ways of the exposure to so much deep pain and suffering, to so much hatred of self and of others.  I’m talking about others’ feelings and experiences here, not mine though the way of working I adopted, of psychotherapy and a fairly involved way of doing psychotherapy I think forces you to recognise your own feelings in those realms.  Most people who come to the NHS for help with mental health problems have deep pain, with or without deep anger.  I worked for a lot of my clinical years within forensic services and those who are forced into clinical services because they have so seriously hurt others, or so much raised the fear that they will hurt others that society trumps any opposition to be designated a client or patient: they too have a huge amount of pain though it may often be hidden by anger, hatred and/or rage.  It is enormously satisfying to find innate and then increasingly professionally developed ways to be alongside those things, to help a little.  However, it is also painful to be alongside it.  It does force on many of us in this field a need to try to lead an “examined life” (no, I haven’t read the book yet: another item on the todo list!) Trying to do that is not a bed of roses (I always thought roses were damn silly things to lie on personally but there you go).  I think the psychoanalytic and the family/systemic methods, my primary clinical theories, also force us into an “examined view” not just of ourselves but of how we organise our sociality, our societies; that too can be a grim task.

I was tired by that.  I had failed to overthrow a deep disillusionment with the NHS in particular, and it was a good time for me to go before I did any damage (probably to myself or to services in which I work, I honestly don’t think I was likely to harm clients/patients).  I wondered if my inputs to younger professionals, which I particularly loved as part of the job, were slipping toward giving them too much of my bleak view and too little help to cope and better help others.

It was also time to go because the ways I worked clinically were long terms ways.  I love the quick fix as much as anyone, and there really are some quick fixes to be had in the mental health business, but those weren’t my forte, mine were slower methods needing months or more, often a year or two to frankly a decade for real organisational change.  I was clear for all sorts of reasons that I wasn’t up for those periods at the coal face any more.

All in all, it was time to go, it was a good time to go.  I knew there would never be a pain free time to go, never not be some guilt, some shame and a huge sense of loss of something that had been so good.  However, it was time to go and not really for a moment in the last three months since stopping have I had any reason to disbelieve that.  I’d been thinking it for about three years, and I’d decided it a good nine months before it happened, I’d worked with colleagues and clients through the shared impact of the decision for between eight and three months, often hard work to share but work we did.

It’s good to revisit all that and just mark how little I’ve really missed the work.  Not once have I woken up and wanted to go to that work again, not once have I regretted stopping.  I have a lot of nightmares, some of them overtly around the decision, the loss, some less so.  That’s all as it should be and will grind on.  You don’t make big changes without these impacts, from the niggles to the griefs.

However, moving on is also about pleasure!

Pleasure

I’m determined some of the space created in my life should be followed by pleasure that isn’t just about “doing”.

Practicality meant that Toto didn’t come with me last weekend as I got to my first exhibition since my return: the Hockney portraits and still life at the Royal Academy.  It finishes today (and I won’t publish this until at the earliest tomorrow to be sure I want this public!) … so no spoilers in this.

I went to the exhibition with a great friend and ex-colleague on the tube, failing to completely to persuade her to borrow J’s bike: horrible!  Well no, actually the tube was OK and reminded me how much I like people watching. That it’s fun just being alongside some people who are visibly having a good time in the wonders of London.  I sometimes also, I confess, get a warped pleasure, or something, watching some people who either seem to me to get their own pleasure in a very warped and self-testing ways (it takes a warped eye to see a warped pleasure?)  Oh dear, yes, I confess, sometimes it’s just a pleasurable relief to see some people who are visibly miserable and even making themselves and others miserable, and to know it’s not my responsibility.  (It’s so rarely so bad on the tube or the streets that one has that “common law right”, i.e. a simple human responsibility, to try to do something just as another human being, not a professional.)  I think we all as adults have the right to make ourselves miserable, to make some pleasures a bit hard won or frankly masochistic (as long as no animals, minors or non-consenting adults are hurt in the process) and I think that denying that people have that right is silly. That means we all have to find ways to sit alongside someone seemingly making themselves very miserable, that’s just part of any of us growing up.  It can be easier to tolerate through professional training to sit alongside that but it’s something we all face when we expose ourselves to others.  Oh boy, as well as people having a lot of fun on the tube, there are a fair few being miserable too.

OK.  So I can still do public transport, when I have to, but hey, cycling is better!

The trip was utterly worthwhile. Hockney is so deft, so clever with his paint and now with his commitments, these tasks he sets himself in his later creative years.  Here his task had been to paint (79) portraits of friends and acquaintances in California (or visiting? there were was it three fellow “Hockneys”, are they all out there?)  All sat in the same chair in the same studio, all paintings took no more than three days, what he called a “24 hour exposure” with homage to my beloved photography.  (I assume he works eight hour days!)

I loved way he lights upon quirks of garb and body language that feel to have been caught with accuracy: these are unique people, no clones, nothing sliding into any sort of anonymity nor merely inot any simple shared humanity.  All are also human, clearly he respected them and invited them to participate not to humiliate or hurt.  All are engaging with him in the three day process clearly.  And that creates that lovely illusion that they’re engaging with us, or at least that we are with them.  That’s the wonderful illusion of looking at portraits isn’t it?  I was intrigued to see shared surnames and guess at relationships, to realise that one man got three portraits and another two.

Another ex-colleague and good friend joined us and we went round again and it abundantly repaid that second look.  As I wandered round the second time I recognised two laughs sharing something in a different corner of one room: my friends having fun!  I don’t know if we were the only people laughing out loud, but I’m sure we were the loudest.  Pretty much no-one there, and it was popular, had that grim “I’m deadly serious about my art and you’d better respect it” on their faces and I’m sure there really were other outright laughs and giggles.  We played “spot the psychotherapist” with what I suspect was statistically significant concordance, but also great amusement and interest too in those about whom we disagreed.  Then A (which might or might not be an initial of first friend) added the brilliant game of “oooh, imagine them as the first meeting of a large psychotherapy group”.  Genius!  We agreed on those who looked like real allies who would help the group through tough moments, all agreed on one who looked very unlikely to come back for a second group; picked up some who would be “tricky” or even “challenging” (and worse).  Hockney really is that good that we all three felt we were picking up enough about these people to support these fantasies.

Of course, like anyone else who sees them (surely?) we wondered what the protagonists had thought on seeing their depictions.  We thought some might have winced to see the end result.  I’d love to know, but I’m sure that, a bit like facing yourself after retirement, or through the acknowledged change in his powers with age, as Hockney is overtly facing, it’s not a simple thing to see yourself in his painting.  These are portraits that I suspect touch things the sitters know about her or himself, but I suspect the depictions also dig that bit deeper, into the undercurrents that we try not to see too often.  I’d love to know.  What’s not to love about living in a city where I can get this sort of experience, multiple such experiences, any day I want?

Then there’s the theatre.   J and I cycled to the National Theatre Friday night for “3penny opera” and agreed the cycling had been good (and we were lucky that it only rained while we were inside) but disagreed about the play/opera.  J loved it, I was pretty underwhelmed but glad to have seen it.  We often disagree a little, say about one part, one actress/actor, one aspect of the staging, but it’s pretty rare that we really have such different overall experiences and that too is good.  No point in going if everything is good, or if we only ever agree, no reality in that.  I ponder now how much my poor hearing (age and/or too many rock concerts) contributed to my lack of real engagement and enthusiasm.  I got to ponder the complexity of my relationship with Brecht (and Weill).  Mostly Brecht (and B&W) are up there in my pantheon of gods, but sometimes I just get left outside the experience, I seem not to be able to get on the bus. When it’s one of those, I watch and I am watching the performance, the show, I’m not having the complex, two layered watch-and-be-involved that Brecht was so clear he wanted to create, and that I think he so often got on the nail for me when I go to good performances of his works.  (I don’t think he’s easy to do well, not at all.)  Discussing it afterwards, we realised how much good Brecht we’ve seen, and remembered some that was not so good and it was all good experiencing again (and Toto had had his supporting rôle)

Then Sunday night: “Glasgow Girls” at the Stratford East Theatre (a first for both of us).  Genius.  J didn’t like it quite as much as she’d liked “3penny opera” (I think) but for me this was everthing that that had lacked: energy, political passion not lost or mangled in delivery, lyrics so well delivered I only missed the ones that were in thick enough Glaswegian I’d probably have missed them spoken straight at my ear through a loudhailer.  Brilliant.  The play/musical is bittersweet.  The central theme is human horror: about deportation of families with young children from temporary accommodation in Glasgow, accommodation that hadn’t been all that “temporary”: a number of the children in the very real life stories behind the play had been born there.  The mitigating bit is that play is about how the schoolchildren, and their school and the communities around them, had fought the deportation orders and the message about the need to come together, and to fight, felt so vital, so topical.  How do we hold onto hope and motivate ourselves even when some fights are lost: a young Celtic supporter and his mother put on the plane back to Afghanistan and danger and the loss of everything he’d known from birth.

Cycling in London was truly horrible with pouring rain at the start and I was soaked for most of the way there, and the ride back was dark and threatening all the way back, for all the welcome protected cycle lanes.  Hey ho.  J had a pretty tough time getting there by public transport from elsewhere in London (it had been a work day for her) but we both got rich reward from the performance, and from lovely Thai food from the “Pie Crust”, a walkable distance from the theatre.  Friendly Thai staff and what looked as if it had been a 60s pie and mash style cafe before that: decor unchanged.  Lovely.  Can’t give you a web site because they don’t waste time and money on that but this is link in Google maps, my old succubus.

Funny old world but London is full of such wonderful opportunities and experiences and frank pleasures, so, so much to celebrate.  Having said that, we cycle wisely in a state of significant alert for incoming danger not able to ponder as I had been for all those weeks on the way to Compostela.  We’re not in mainland Europe any more Toto!

A whole week after my last post, I finally get to attempt this one: how do I move on having come back home?

Well I can unpack Toto from his cardboard box in the hall:

Or I could try to say something about the journey back:

And I will do both those things but I think I need to try to write something to help myself move on psychologically before I do those things.

So where am I now?

I’ve been back for nearly a week.  I arrived back in time to overlap with my daughter for about 24 hours before she flew off for a year in Russia.  Having seen her off from Heathrow, J and I had an evening in rather an empty feeling house before driving up to Glasgow to pick up our son from the end of his freshers’ week there so the three of us could go across for two and a half days of a family wedding in a hotel, chapel and castle between Glasgow and Edinburgh.  Yesterday our son went back to Glasgow and J drove the two of us in a now rather empty feeling car us back for 9.5 hours.  She doesn’t much like being driven and I don’t much like driving so our driving is pretty much always that way around.  In long trips like that we find that we get more time to talk and catch up with each other than we do from week to week.  That was one part of our “divertissement” week a month ago.

All that has gone very well, it’s been excellent in fact, but none of it has been remotely normal.  Children don’t come and go that far and for that long, that often.  Similarly, I think this was the first wedding I’d been to since J and I got married ourselves and that was nearly 21 years ago.

So today feels like the start of the new “normality”, certainly the “normality” for the next year.  I’m still between jobs academically but of course I have a terrifying backlog of things to do on that front.  That backlog isn’t just from the last two months sadly.  Rather it’s a guilt and shame laden pile that has accumulated savagely over at least the last five years. In that time I had found it increasingly impossible to deal with both my clinical/NHS commitments and my academic ones. Part of the problem, as I see it has been that that the NHS washed its hands of the sort of research I think psychotherapy needs, leaving me less and less able to service both what I thought clients and colleagues in the NHS needed, and what I thought needed doing academically. The latter included quite a lot I had atually undertaken to do with people all round Europe and some further afield.  The sense of persecution and of failure that was accumulating with the “overdue work” list was one of many things that had led to my opting to give up all continuing clinical and NHS managerial work.  I hope I will have more time, more energy and, perhaps just as importantly as those logistic “more” issues, also more independence of thought and that all that “more” will allow me to do more with my academic and research ideas.  That was one of the big “pull” factors in resigning from the NHS.  There were some equally strong and darker disillusionment “push” factors too which I’ve touched on in this blog (http://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/i-woke-at-about-02-15-last-night-and-couldnt-sleep/) 

Moving on

So here I am back in the everyday world.  For a lot of the next year I will go to sleep in the same bed I woke up in; I’ll have household/family tasks that will need doing; I’ll have my own research/academic todo list and Emails reminding me that I’m due/overdue on things from that and inviting me to add new things to it; I hope I’ll have a paying job and that will add tasks to all that.

I’ll speak mainly English (oh boy did a bit of my Spanish amuse my daughter who points out that I was speaking a mixture of terribly accented Spanish and a word that is pure Italian!), and 95-99% of the time I’ll speak it to native English speakers.   I won’t work my legs and body in anything like the way I have for the last two months (though I’ll try to get it some good hard work regularly); the sun won’t blitz down on me as it did almost every day after I crossed the channel.  Most days I won’t see new and amazing architecture and other sights.  Above all, I won’t have hours pedalling along in which I can ponder, let fleeting fish thoughts come into focus and not get lost in the dazzle of the everday.  I won’t have the rather bizarre challenge I took up, of turning some of those experiences into this blog and site.

I won’t just go back to where I was before the trip.  One resolution I made months ago, as all this came into soft focus, was that I would get new experiences on a weekly basis by committing one day a week to that.  That’ll be mostly exhibitions in London but we (J and I) will keep up our love of the theatre and I hope we’ll get a bit more cinema and I or we will get some architecture and more cycling and nature.  That feels good and right and in the spirit of the trip but I know there’s a continuing task if so much that was superb (and psychologically challenging) about this trip is not to be lost: to keep up some of the reflection time.

A few times in my life I have tried to keep a diary, but only many years ago and I always failed within probably a month, possibly within a week!  I know that I fell off from the thinking and writing and that the problem wasn’t just the author, it was also the readership: I either failed to be enough audience to my own pondering in the “locked diary” model, or else I would find that I couldn’t write the “openable diary” without some sense of who might open it.

Creating this site, and particularly creating this blog, has been a different.  The comments on the blog have been wonderful to receive, all of them, and I think it’s provided the right compromise for me, a trustworthy tightrope or high bridge between the Scylla and Charybdis of narcissistic and of histrionic neediness.  As I started it, and started giving people the URL, putting it in my Out of Office message and my Email signature and encouraging some trusted people not only to read but to comment, I obviously hoped that it might amuse or otherwise appeal to some people who know me.  I’ve also had the hope that it might become a useful resource, psychologically and/or pragmatically, for anyone else contemplating cycling all or part of the route.

I have huge amounts I still want to say that came from the trip.  Some are things rooted firmly in particular places or days while other things aren’t so located but stretched across periods of time or the whole trip: ideas that kept bubbling up as I cycled.  I have lots of data that amuses me about the cycling and the geography and might amuse or even be useful to others.   I have loads of ‘photos I want to share.  I suspect that I do have quite a lot of useful bits of advice to give others.

More selfishly, I also know I have a need, or a real desire, to keep something going: so the blog is going to continue.  I think I’ll set myself a rough target of one or maximum two posts a week.  At this stage that be a challenge to restrict myself (halfway there already for this week, no, this is a “last week’s” post!), I suspect that as the months go by, things may change and I may struggle to do one or two posts a week.  I know the other pressures will impinge more and the memories of the journey will fade.  I trust that I will take up a paid, part time post and my employer will rightly expect a good return on its investment in me.  I know I will I get dug into those todo lists and persecutory piles of guilt about overdue things already undertaken.  I hope I will find time too to get into the more vague, and more personal, pile of things not even started yet nor shared with anyone, things that I’d be sad to die without having at least started.  I suspect that I will find it harder to be quite as open about myself and my thoughts as I felt able to be out there on the road.

Oh dear yes, as I list all that, I know that as it rolls back onto me and I can see it’ll be difficult to protect a day a week for more simple experiencing and for writing something.  However, I’m sure this is worth trying for my own pleasure and perhaps a bit for my own sanity.

To those who have followed bits or all of this so far: no-one needs to follow along more unless it continues to appeal or amuse you, much though the support has been wonderful on the actual trip.  I’m not really as needy as I sound, I have good friends.  AS Gregory so beautifully put it, there are fine people out there who would still like and discuss with me even if I did talk aloud to my bike, or worse, even if I did treat Toto as a sort of throne and speak with him in a sort of “royal we”!

I am back home and lucky in all I’ve got.  I’ve even got that that next cycle trip to Rome to look to when I need a bit of escapism!  OK.  I think that’s the gist of what I knew I needed to say today; I shall hit the “publish” button and move back/on to the todo lists!

[Hm.  Quite a bit of tidying up of typos and terrible grammar over a week on: 27/9/16.]

I must make this short if I can and if I can do that without disrespect to something so extraordinary.

I don’t know what they’d be like without it physically in front of you, but, as ever, I think the wikipedia pages are good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_Cathedral and I liked this by a Texan with a wry appreciation that I chimed with mine: http://www.trevorhuxham.com/2015/01/guided-tour-cathedral-santiago-de-compostela.html.  Both of those really helped me get a feel of the cathedral.  I didn’t get to go on the roof which must, as Trevor Huxham, and the lovely receptionist here both say, be amazing.  There are only guided tours and today’s was in Spanish and clearly my Spanish didn’t pass the necessary competency in the ears of the lovely ticket lady.   (I could just have looked but I thought she was right, oh, that takes me back to Samos and some near written and unposted and unwritten posts.  Damn.)

I think if you are planning to come here, it’s worth giving it a couple of days and going to the ticket office first thing to see what you can see while here.

OK.  No services today but still devotion.  A man in his seventies, smartly dressed, kneeling at one of the chapels, a lass in her 20s with what I then realised was a Christian tee shirt clearly happy to sit in quiet rapture for ages in one of the grander baroque chapels, the woman in front of me in the queue hugging Saint James for a long time with real passion and, as we then filtered down into the crypt beneath the altar, falling on her knees and praying silently.  These were in the minority but clearly that faith is very active in the hearts and minds of many here and I find it impossible to much fear that, or not to actually feel respect for it.  At those moments these seem very undangerous humans.  The man was thin, the suit had fitted a bulkier man and I suspected he had been ill or grieved.  I couldn’t help noticing the surgical repair over the woman’s left fibula: old fracture with pin I’m sure.  Why on earth do those markers of frailty, and perhaps of repair and survival, she had no limp at all, matter?  I guess they just do to me.

I don’t take photos of those things and was a bit uncomfortable taking the scouts yesterday but I think they were making a very public statement and none of them looked uncomfortable with that.

So this was different.  A rather grey day (and it’s just been raining really heavily outside now, late in the evening).  None of the crowds really, no basketball, no carnival, no car show.  Loads of pilgrims and quite a few locals.  The queue to snake through and hug Saint James wasn’t even out into the square so I queued and hugged him, twice, once with a rather pale facsimile of he bear hug I’m sure my ex-client had twice, and would again given the chance, have given him.  That, in some way, for that man and was that saying goodbye to doing therapy?  I think now it may have been.  Also a lesser hug from me and partly still because I know that man would have been very unhappy to have felt I’d only hugged for him.

I also tried again, and again failed utterly, to capture some of the sensational beauty of the place. This is the ceiling of one of the umpteen apsidal chapels looking over a high and pretty complete wooden barried to it.

This was the chapel before it.  Full of trompe d’oieul and OTT but really caught me.

This is the entrance to the simplest chapel of all, an original romanesque one off the north transept.

Inside it has a timber roof and is very simple but I couldn’t really catch anything worth reproducing.

And all around, these sorts of baroque effervescences.

I guess that might be 19th or even 20th Century.  Not sure.  Never seen a chandelier like that in the nave of a cathedral.

And outside, following the human chain out that threaded us through and then back under the choir and altar, moments where you can see the earlier work inside the walls around it.  This is one of my partial panoramas as we came out.  Apsidal and transept (I think) romanesque chapels:

More of those:

And turn and here’s a curtain wall onto the square, classical.

Incredible place! Enough already!  Good night anyone reading this!

 

 

You’ve probably realised by now that I like thistles, oops, cathedrals.  I was brought up on them, and castles and stately homes and have a very happy memory of going with my father to an old house in Kenilworth where we lived at the time, so I must have been under 11 years old, as it was going to be knocked down.  My vague recollection is that it was given way to a new shopping centre.  It was timber framed medieval and very dilapidated and I remember that Dad found an iron hook that would have been on the end of a long wooden pole that was used to pull burning thatch down in a fire, and an incredibly crude and simple wooden plough, probably for one person, plus or minus a horse or another person, to pull through a very small holding, hardly more than a garden I’d guess.  Oddly, I saw two men using something only a little more sophisticated, iron shod but otherwise just the right branched bit from a tree with the right angle to give the two limbs of the plough.  So I’ve been a “scientist” in many ways, but a lover and respecter of history.

Hm, running with the memories, I can also remember coming home from med school and going with Dad to a local dig where by-pass road construction had hit a burial site.  I’m not sure how old now, but pre-Roman.  I knew enough, and was enough that scientist by then, to pronounce one fairly well preserved skeleton with an essentially intact pelvis and femurs, of a young adult male.  The scientist at that point was winning over the humanities.

Well, this is a bit pertinent because the cathedral here, even after Burgos, is amazing and like nothing I’ve ever seen.  I know that as it’s the end of the journey, I had a need somehow to do it justice, to look at it and try to take it with respect and appreciation and boy it’s a challenge that’s really taken three bites, so the title here should perhaps be “Santiago de Compostela Cathedral (II)” as I actually started trying to get to grips with it in that mad arrival two days ago when the processions outside seemed far more pagan than Christian.  I don’t suppose there’s much doubt that would be pre-Christian habitations here: it’s a strategic hill and clearly in fertile countryside and sitting between the sea and the rising Galician hills I’ve come through.   However, I’ve seen no comment on pre-Christian findings.  It is known to be the third church/cathedral on the site though and it’s essentially an accretion of vast amounts of baroque and classical on top of a glorious, and huge, romanesque cathedral, with very little true gothic addition.

Yesterday I walked back up to the Obradoiro square to find that carnival and basketball had been replaced by … a classic car show.   On a Sunday, outside the most grandiose place of worship, probably between here and Barcelona!  It’s clear to me that the Spanish do things their own way and good for them but to a staunch cyclist and, to a large extent, an opponent of the infernal combustion engine, and particularly those that honk tunes as these were, it was a challenge.  However, there’s that side of me that likes to see things preserved, kept going and used and that likes to see eccentricity respected.  This had all that in trumps:

The West front of the cathedral, where Toto had cowered the day before, is to your left, the cars were lined up like some congregation but, as the day before, I think the gods being worshipped here aren’t in the Bible.  You can see the foot of the great baroque front behind this lovely little number.

In my yoof, well in my twenties, I did have a romantic yen for one of these.  I and a girlfriend hitchhiked across the channel in one years ago

Here’s the whole automobile congregation lined up in their pews.  I’m on those steps up to the elevated entrance on the west front, which is currently closed for renovation meaning that I couldn’t see the most glorious romanesque doorway which the baroque one essentially hides completely, but also, to be fair, protects.

After a bit, with a cacophony of horns, they were off:

And within 30 minutes the square was back to a completely different state. Crusty jugglers, (OK, with apologies to Hot Fuzz, I agree, they’re not jugglers.)

And exhausted but very, very, happy pilgrims.  (I am cheating a bit, this was today, but there were similar scenes, though it was almost too hot to lie down like that, yesterday.)

The original romanesque cathedral is cruxiform with an ambulatory round the choir and lots of chapels, but it has been so added to, particularly externally, that it’s at first almost impossible to feel that heart and it has more the feel of a rather misshapen huge quadrilateral affair with four squares on each face, of which Obradoiro, the stonemason’s square, is the biggest.  Yesterday I think I did a mix of cirumnavigating it and going through it.

Here’s the next (South) square:

That queue, and a lot more of it to the right, was the queue of pilgrims waiting to filter through behind the altar and hug Saint James.  That’s a monastery turned nunnery on the left and I forget what that building is opposite, the cathedral is on the right, out of shot but has glories like this:

It gives the sense of a city of towers and lesser spikes and cupolas and roofs.

See the pilgrim’s scallop shell?

And stars from the legend of the star showing Pelagius (? check some time!) the long lost tomb of James.  (Compostela could be from “field of stars” but probably isn’t, probably comes from “good place”)

There’s the heraldry that’s such a feature of gothic and later Spanish ecclesiastical (and lay grand) architecture.

And it goes on, with small hills of steps between squares (French bike pilgrims but with very little load, where had they put their things?)

Through two more, each quite different, squares.

But inside it’s very different.  It’s pretty immediately obvious that the traditional cruciform shape is there, and the main vaulting is simple, beautiful, and seemingly almost untouched, romanesque.

(The crossing is a dome, I suspect that’s later but almost all the vaulting otherwise is simple barrel vaulting.)

The place was packed and it was coming up for time for the third mass (I think) of the day, the midday mass, so I opted only to dip in feeling it belonged to believers.  I gather from my Australian friend (I do hope she got a bus to Finisterre), that had I stayed I’d have seen the famous but fairly infrequent sight of he enormous censer being swung back and forward so it is said to reach 40kph.   The argument goes that it used to be vital to drown out the smell of the pilgrims.  It’s the largest in the world and carries an enormous load of burning charcoal and incense.   I’m a little sorry I missed that but it seemed to me that most of the hundreds and hundreds in there looked like believers and I do think it was for them…

Those aren’t gun turrets just before the crossing, those are organ pipes in what seems to be a very common baroque addition in these Spanish cathedrals, often with a bizarre (to me) relocation of the choir to that point, fortunately not done heere.  However, you can see that the baroque period spared no gold paint or decoration up in the choir and on the huge altar.

As ever there are the stages of the cross and umpteen other depictions of pain, Christ’s and others’.

And there’s a, to me, disturbing theme of the martial church:

Well of course there is, that in many ways is what created the importance of Saint James and his (eponymous) location here in Santiago. That is Santiago Matomoros: slayer of Moors who was invoked in visions to inspire some of the “reconquista”: driving the Moors out of Spain.   His other forms, as pilgrim and carer/hospitaler come later.  Above that is this:

Which helped remind me that, though we seem to have a rather different Pope at the moment, the political side of Catholicism is, of course, crucial.

I came away with mixed feelings.  The original cathedral is glorious: I think it’s the biggest romanesque cathedral I’ve seen and it’s huge and, to me, harmonious, extraordinary, a testament to the beauty humans can create and to the way they can do it so it can survive for centuries.   (The main central cathedral was finished in about 1212 if I remember rightly.)

Although the classical and baroque additions don’t move me in the same way, and they do form a very odd mix with the romanesque, somehow it really seems to me to work and some of those towers and stonework from the later periods wowed even a heart hardened against their traditions and extravagance as mine is.

I also found the numbers of people there moving.  Most seemed to be there for quiet celebration but what do I know of their feelings.

There is this running current of an almost perverse savouring of suffering that sits very uneasily with me but which I also find myself respecting as not dodging that life can be full of pain and suffering for many, even without us doing anything to them or to make it worse, and also it seems to respect and recognise the truth that humans do hurt one another, horribly, and often glorify that, even, in various ways, take satisfaction, even pleasure in that.  Any world view that tries to avoid that seems to me to be cowardly and unhelpful.

However, the celebrating of that side of humanity seems to me to get woven in with hatred of the other: the crucial, crusading, side of Saint James and too much that Christianity has done.  And of course, I’m not saying that Christianity is alone in that, and we know, e.g. from the treatment of the Rohingya now, or the rise of radical and deadly Hinduism, that this isn’t the sole province of the three massive monotheisms either.  I guess I can’t complain if I’m saying these things are simply in us as we are and seem to have been for millenia.  But I long for something more benign even if that is, in my own words, perhaps cowardly and unhelpful.

I left the cathedral to the believers yesterday and came back for a second go at it today and I think I can have a stab at that before I turn in for my last night on the road.

 

This is a funny one and please take it in the true spirit  of A.A.Milne (the original author of the Winnie the Pooh stories, Disney did it later!)  Many of you will know that in my family I’m known as Eeyore (the donkey) because of my tendency to take a morose view of things.  I am definitely an Eeyore alonside thamitheen’s Tiggerish optimism!  Well today I got another name.

The morning was taken up with getting certified (no, not sectioned: certificated, given credentials and ritually counted into this year’s 100,000 pilgrims).  That was a strange affair: you queue up, yesterday when I found the office, which has moved since some guides were written, there was a queue of over a hundred people moving slowly so I was glad I could put it off.  Even this morning at 10.00 the queue was in 10s and I found myself talking, in a mix of my very few words of German and their fairly few words of English, to two German women who had met on the road from Sarria.  You go through to a line of desks with a flashing number system and of course I found myself with nice clerk who seemed to speak pretty much no English and to find my clumsy Spanish incomprehensible as I found myself in the odd situation of being able to work out what she was asking and even thinking I was answering it (how hard can “London” and “Bicicleta” be?) but it baffled her as did looking up the Latin for “Chris”.  Yes, that’s not a misprint, the Latin:

I offered “Christopher” as she read out “Christina” (perhaps I should have gone a little bit trans, as many of you know, the idea of doing psychotherapy as a man has long intrigued me as a bit gender bending in our culture).  If you look closely I’m now “Cristophorum Evans”, with no “Ch” but with a “ph”.  Hm, was that just her miscopying?  I wasn’t going to try to find out.  I also got a second certificate in Spanish with the distance on it, I felt OK rounding up the Garmin total from 2,519.5km to 2,520km knowing some 10km at least didn’t get into the Garmin for one reason or another.

That actually produced some whistles and fun from the man next to her, who clearly spoke and understood English well, and from the man next to me who had walked from Saint Jean Pied de Port.  He was from Slovenia, like so many people, about my age, and to my pleasure and surprise high fived me!  Hm, thinking about age, I think there’s very much a bimodal age distribution: a lot of young uns: mostly very late teens and 20s with a few 30s, then a lot of “we oldies” in the 50-70 range I’d say.  I confess to feeling bit choked walking out of there: such a bizarre experience and again, in those brief overlaps with the German women and the Slovene man, something touchingly simple, trusting, shared, in our brief conversations and heightened by the fact that we were all there because we had “done it”, and were all facing “what next?”

Then I was off, decamping from the one hotel, loading up Toto and getting him to the bike shop where he has even now had bits amputated and packed with the rest of him, and with some of my luggage, in a large cardboard box.  And, if an Email from the shipping company is to be taken seriously, and I think it is, he is even now racing me back to the UK.

The older man in the bike shop spoke quite a lot of English and first came to London in 1973 and again about 10 years ago and we talked about getting more people on bikes and out of cars.  He had a flyer on the notice board for just that with the slogan “global intentions, local action”.  Yes!

We talked about my fantasy that I might one day to the Camino Norte along the Basque and Galician coast and he looked grim and said it was hilly and I asked if it could be worse than the climb from Saint Jean Pied de Port and the last four days and he agreed not as high but more like the last two days, lots of  smaller ups and downs with no level stuff at all, at least, he had slipped back into Galego or Spanish and gestures for that bit but I’m pretty sure that was the message.  At that point, when I was saying I’d found the recent hills tough he switched back to English and said “Yes, I had looked at your gears and thought you must be really strong!”  (That’s a very polite bike person’s way of saying: “You’re bonkers and obviously don’t understand gearing but all power, literally, to your quads mate: you’ve made it.”  Another of those funny moments of great amusement and almost tiggerish pleasure for me.  Wasn’t there a bit in the Pooh stories where Eeyore gets complimented and doesn’t quite know how to eat it?!)

That left me needing a bag for my baggage so I would only pay one huge surcharge for hold luggage, not one ransom per pannier, so I legged it way up the bike shop road, past Bill & Ben on a balcony:

Hm.  That did need a short telephoto lens really but I couldn’t pass without snapping it.  That got me to a little Chinese run “we stock everything” store quite out of the run of every other shop I’d seen in Santiago. They indeed had a cheap sports bag so my remaining baggage, now minus the panniers which are sticking with Toto, can go in the plane hold tomorrow.  The man in the bike shop had pointed me off to the “Chinese shop” and it was odd to find it, all other Santiago shops seem either quite confidently small and proudly Galician (as was the bike shop) or else expensive looking, large, international chains.

So there I was, lumbering back with this sports bag on my back wondering how walker  pilgrims do it, when I was accosted by one.   A woman a bit older than me with huge black Audrey Hepburn shades and a pilgrim’s staff and rucksack:

Oops, no, that’s not her, that’s Audrey Hepburn herself, except that I’m pretty sure that Ms Hepburn is deceased and actually that seems to be a cat.  I digress.

I responded “Non hablo Español, lo siento.  Inglese?” in my best, well, hm, let’s skip over, that, with my best intentions.  At which the unrecognisable language that had clearly been about being lost turned into relieved and lightly accented Australian English and a request for the bus station.  (Now remember, gentle reader, that I never did see that bus station the guide book had said I had to keep on my right as I came into Santiago: these things come back to bite us eh?)  I said I didn’t know, but, rather against my base distrust of Google maps, whipped out my semi-smart ‘phone as she wanted to get the bus to Finisterre and I wasn’t going to let envy stop me helping  such a good cause.  Google maps, like me, didn’t seem to know of any bus station to keep on one’s right, but it helped us find her a nest of fairly promising looking bus stops and people.  We talked as we walked.  She’d had started in Sain Jean Pied de Port but had wisely taken the bus across much of the Meseta and, I think, some of the horrible hills of the last few days.  She claimed that the temperature on the Meseta had reached 45°C.  I’m not sure about that but maybe she’s right.  She also said, and I think this had clearly hit her that “people had been going down like flies”.  As far as I could tell she had walked alone and the last days had given her “shin splints” and she was clearly limping a bit and in pain but wonderfully determined and, like me, hugely pleased and proud to have done this and had such an experience.  As we parted she dubbed me “a camino angel” which cracked me up but hey, I’ll take any names going really.

Hm.  Beautiful day here in Santiago but I was both a bit overdressed and overloaded with experience so have returned to the peace and cool of my hotel room.  The urge to try to pull so many seething thoughts and feelings into some sort of order won out over temptations to see more buildings, to just lie in the sun somewhere and soak it it up, or to get on the bike and cycle to Padrón.

I could feel a pressure wave building: partly the sheer load of experiences, both today’s, and from the whole adventure.  Also, from the way that it’s been a chance to think back over at least the last 32 years, perhaps all I can remember of my full 59, all those experiences too. That pressure was like an humid onshore wind meeting mountainous ridges and this is the resulting precipitation.  The ridges were the graniticly hard realisation that time is precious, as it always is, but also that it was in precious short supply as geographical dislocation that has been a vital part of the pilgrimage,has only a couple of days to go; really only some waking hours left. Beyond those first ridges lurked the dark one: that mountainous reality that once I’m back, huge backlogs of academic work will impinge with no “sorry, I’m away” excuses left.

I needed to write something to capture something.

Of course, I could be writing or doing so many things to try to pull things into order: there’s a nearly finished blog post I started writing while waiting for the monastery to open in Samos, there are umpteen other blog post ideas that I’ll be sad to leave in that state, there are things l’d like to start doing with the data, with numbers, and talking of numbers, there are 2,333 ‘photos I’ve uploaded over the last 34 days, many of stunning buildings or funny sights and only a tiny fraction of them have appeared anywhere on the site.

However, I think the priority is people and connectedness.  As I said this morning, doing this alone, except for the lovely divertissement week with J, was a key part of the trip.  However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t meet people along the way.  I think literally two people have been not very friendly: the camp site receptionist near Giverny and a hotel receptionist in, hm, oh yes, Puenta la Reina.  Literally every other contact with anyone, from buying food, asking for directions, asking to stay, has been done with at least smiles and many people have been helpful and warm, way above and beyond any reasonable call of duty.

I think that’s been slightly more true in Spain and is part of, by then, my being visibly part of the pilgrim hordes (100,000 pilgrims a year currently according to the wikipedia entry on Santiago), but people were really friendly in France too.  I wonder if my linguistic helplessness in Spain has also elicited this kindness.  Hm, my competence in French is pretty low and interestingly it became worse as I got further south, particularly after leaving J and cycling on.  Accents changed and what I said, short, simple things that I’m sure were no different from the things I’d been saying earlier, got blank looks and often had to be repeated.  The process was bilateral: I increasingly simply couldn’t parse properly things that were said to me and said, embarrassingly as I look back on it now, at one point “Ah!  Un Euro vingt” in response to something I’d heard as “Un Euro vent” (English pronunciation of “vent”, not French). The vowel sound really was completely different.  I must have sounded such an idiot: an nearly monoglot Brit telling a French woman how to pronounce here own language.  She smiled aimiably enough though and just took the change!

There were two lovely experiences in France though, both “coffee moments”.  The first was in a campsite run by Brits in Chef-Boutonne.  It was the second Brit owned campsite in a row and largely occupied by Brits and I confess I was wondering if I belonged.  I asked the couple in the mobile home if it was OK if I pitched my tent quite close to them so my extension cable would get me electricity from the electricity pump (that’s what they look like!)  I think it was Louise and Mike but I’m terrible at names.  She was effusive that of course it was fine and insisted on making coffee for me and we got talking. Mike had had MS for some years and had to stop being a self-employed electrician as a result and Louise had decided that they needed to change things, had given up working for the local public sector where she said that every time another person went she found she had more to do and no more pay.  They had bought the mobile home and had been on the go for three months and were only very reluctantly pointing back to the UK having had a tremendous. A combination of the MS and severe post-fracture arthritis meant that Mike had both exhaustion and a lot of pain and he was a lean and wrily observant to Louise’s big determination to mother anything that would let her (me!)  We talked about France, about the collapse of the morale and meaning of the UK public sector as all three of us, from very different positions, had seen it, and about loving the travel we were getting and Mike insisted on getting the electric bike he used off the bike rack on their mobile home, putting the battery pack into it, and getting me on it.  It was a scream: a real punch of acceleration and power. I think electric bikes will improve a lot more in the next year or two, but if too much hard pedalling is not your thing: give them a serious look.  Louise and Mike transformed that day.

A day or two later, in another campsite, a French man was offering me coffee again. This time I was, and I regret this now, more overfaced by the thought of making conversation with my seemingly ebbing French and his zero English and I declined but the gesture again lifted things and led to a very happy evening just doing my washing and watching French families and friends playing petanque with a real appreciation of their warmth (and some stunning skills with the boules).

I was actually reminded of how little I’ve written about people by meeting my two “Italian friends” again today.  The younger man had apparently seen me here yesterday but said I was obviously concentrating so hadn’t alerted me and I hadn’t seen them.  They still had their very nice Bianchi bikes and those still seemed untouched by road dust. They must wipe them down daily.  By contrast I’ve let Toto acquire what I see as a noble patina of dust that is probably adding to the weight (OK, just kidding about the weight, and cyclists will be glad to hear that I have cleaned and oiled the chain and jockey wheels at least twice a week!)  They had lost their bike trailer and the younger one had a top on whereas he’s more often been naked from the waist up showing off an amazing collection of tattoos including one that seemed to me to have hints of the Virgin Mary with more than a nod to much that might have come out of Hammer films rather than the Bible.  It was cool this morning, or perhaps he too wondered if it was a bit provocative for the cathedral square.  We talked again.  They’re from Viareggio and have ridden all the way from there.  They’re off by bus to Barcelona tomorrow and will work out how to get back from there, they think by boat for the next hop.  He is going to walk the entire Camino from his front door to the Cathedral here again next year.  The older man (not father I don’t think, age gap not enough?) speaks very little English but I thought the aim to walk it next year was in the singular, not the plural.  We all agreed that the last four/five days have been tough on bikes and they too got off and walked up O Cebreiro and they claim everyone does.  Not so, I’m sure my friends there, who have already figured and whom I talked to for only a couple of minutes, made it to the top without pushing but I wasn’t going to say that in our mix of English with my occasional words of Italian!

There was the lady from Madrid who was so shocked to find I was on my own and had come from London on my own even though she to was doing some stretches of the way this year alone.  There was a lady from Ireland in Rabanal.  We stayed in the same hotel and almost literally bumped into each other at the curtain into the small church with the iron gating there.  We again only talked for minutes.  She’s doing the Camino in a series of lumps, this was at least her second year, I think more.  She wasn’t too proud to have taken the bus some of the way on the Meseta she said (the proud bit is mine, she was simply straightforward about it, no sense of it having a pride/shame angle for her, just reality).  We agreed that the endless, vast, nearly flat, bone dry, dusty, cereal fields felt crushing to us.  She said she came from Irish dairy farming and found myself remembering living from 6 to 11 one house from the cattle grid to a mixed arable/dairy Warwickshire farm and how much of those years I spent wandering across those fields.

There were the Dutch men who dubbed me “yellow man”.  There was the lovely woman in the bar in St Jean Pied de Port who jumped at my questions about she and her mates at the bar talking in Basque and the politics of Basque separatism as they, (her mates joined in happily returning from their fag break outside), saw it and about how they saw its future both in France and Spain.  They felt the repression was very much not over and, though I think they thought violence was not helpful, I’m sure they wanted radically more independence.  I’ve had a similar conversation here about Galician autonomy and not neglecting the Galician language.

On the divertissement J and I had lovely conversations with two successive hotel owners and bizarrely it turned out that the first couple had stayed with the second couple before they had bought their place and when they were just contemplating running a gite (partly to esape from some horrific experiences he had had threatened, by the sound of it, by a sort of mafia in Marseilles when they had been too successful with their shops).  Apparently the local gite accrediting agency, or someone like that, had pointed them to stay with and talk with this second couple whose house J had found through no connection at all between the two.

Right back in England I had a lovely hour or so in he local pub near the camp site in Doddington with the temping barmaid doing it in her local in the summer vacation while doing a psychology degree, and with the landlord talking wisely about the challenges of being a publican and how it has changed.  He was drawing on his adult experiences as well as having been born to publican parents.  I remember passing a young woman the next morning who was my first pilgrim I think: very young 20s with rucksack and staff and something about her determination that I’m sure said she was heading for Santiago.  Boy did she have a long way to go.

So many colourful pilgrims from St Jean Pied de Port on as we became a visible human stream.  All sizes and shapes of humanity.  People walking but pulling trailers, with or wihout children in them.  People playing music (not my idea of what a pilgrim should do but I never saw frowns). I the last few days, people singing.  A constant mix of languages, most often English/American (with quite a lot of recognisable Australian and Irish accents too). Increasingly, Spanish, but many other languages.  I was hugely amused, I think it was pulling out of Carriónd de los Condes to hear an emphatic “Well, it’s not as if you love him is it?” and then I was out of earshot.

Yesterday, no, the day before, I thought I saw two people arguing, the gesticulations were quite intense, then I saw that a third was filming this on her camera and grinning from ear to ear and I was 99% reassured that they were staging something for film or photos and no real rage was being expressed.  I speeded up again feeling a little foolish.  I’m sure there have been arguments and falling out amongst groups and couples along the way, it would be quite unreal had there not been, but they do seem to have been very little in evidence.

Among non-pilgrims I’ve met the Brazilian man, in his young 30s I’d guess, who was in France having started in Lisbon.  I think he’d bought his heavily laden bike there.  He was going to go all round Europe this year and then on round the world.   I met a young Californian lad waiting for the ferry in Royan who had crossed the US by a mixture of methods I think, bought a 15 Euro bike on Ebay in the Netherlands and was cycling down to Spain to have a good time there camping rough and charging his electronics with a portable solar power panel.  He was aiming for Biarritz in two days from there.  If he did that, he’s superhuman but I think he was.  He was aiming then to go through the Pyrenees to have a birthday bash in Barcelona.  If he did Royan to Biarritz in two days then perhaps he can fly through the Pyrenees but I think the Tour de France and Vuelta a España pros might struggle with the kind of schedule he was setting himself.  He thought the Pyrenees would be easy compared with Normandy as in the Pyrenees you were in proper mountains so there would be hairpins (true but wasn’t that true for me with the climb up from St Jean Pied de Port to Roncevalles: some of that was just damn long, hard, pretty straight climbing).  Whatever he did end up doing, I’m sure he enjoyed it, he seemed to have irrepressible positivity.

I rode along for perhaps 10km south of Royan with “Brian the snail” who had given up his job as a video editor with Sky, rented out his house, and was living on the income and wondering why he’d stop doing this really.  He was camping in municipal camp sites and keeping under 30 Euros a day if I remember the accountancy rightly.  You can check his blog, and see the Brian mascot who travelled with him in his handlebar bag at http://snailpacecycling.co.uk/ .  I’m not sure if he’s on course for the birthday meet up that I think he was planning with a mate who has emigrated to Spain some years back.

All good.  No profound conversations about religion or “why”: I wonder if walking pilgrims have more time for those.  For me that would have felt intrusive as all of these overlaps have been pretty fleeting.  Hence my “profound” conversations have been with myself and mostly I think I’ve been reasonable company.  A bit moody as ever, a bit prone to panic and despair, but sometimes surprisingly observant and tolerant.  Of course, I’ve also had conversations here so some real friends came along in that way!

 

 

A good night’s sleep and one more night guaranteed in this room, then I have to move on.  It looks as if it’s going to be a beautiful, clear day so no doubt warm to hot and I had a brief pang about not doing Finisterre but it passed very quickly.  I could do a short loop to Padrón, where the stone boat that brought St. James’s body from the Middle East here, in a day or two according to the legend, beached.  That’s only 20km.

However, the first act of this new era is to do what I failed to do yesterday: go and see the extraordinary cathedral and hug Saint Francis and then present my Credencial del Pelegrino at the Cathedral, actually, at the pilgrims’ office just behind the Cathedral, I now remember. That enables me, if they deem my voyage sufficient, to get it converted to a certificate.  I think there’s important exploration left in these acts so the journey is certainly not over yet and here is my credencial.

It’s a concertina of eight pages of A6 size I think (hm, better check that, it’s about 6″ x 4″ in old units working on my old benchmark that my full hand/fingerspan is 9″).  It opens up like this:

and you can see you get stamps from places you visit along the way.

The other side has some great maps (I confess, I hadn’t opened that side ’til now!)

The criteria for a “Compostela” include having done the last 100km if walking, or 200km if cycling.  I think that’s in that second bullet point below.

I wonder if they’ve thought of electric bikes?!  Perhaps more seriously, if this is some sort of criterion of effort, I think that walking/cycling ratio is very easy on cyclists: far easier to cycle 200km than walk 100km.  Odd.  Anyway, that prompted me to check and I’ve cycled 2,519.5 Garmin recorded kilometres so I guess I pass that criterion.  I think they want to hear that there was some “spiritual” side to the journey which takes us back, importantly, to that discussion from earlier blogs and comments.

And that’s the other side of “it’s not over”.  I’ve touched on this before but the cycling has been amazing, gruelling at times, and a vital and central part of this, as have all the sights and experiences, particularly the architecture.  However, another side of this has, I will argue if they do want to explore it, undoubtedly been for me “spiritual” and a wonderful time to think and experience things like hymns and songs coming into my mind that weren’t random.  I never thought I’d have a conversion experience and I haven’t I remain, as I sometimes used to put it “a confirmed agnostic”.  I am musing still on something that struck me a few years back: that if I’ve had a belief system, a religion of sorts, it was a belief in the NHS and a commitment to it, and now I’m sort of lapsed NHS believer.  That’s not true, I’m still a believer, I just have a deep disquiet with where the “organised church” of the NHS, actually the “organised church” of absurd faith in “market forces”, is taking it.

The whole process of digesting 34 days on the road (counting today and omitting the “divertissement” week with J) will take 34 weeks or 34 months, a lot of time certainly.  Some of today’s continuing musing will be very much about how best to do that, or how best to let that happen.

OK.  I’m off to find the cathedral and a quiet coffee somewhere (I just don’t do hotel breakfasts!) and see what happens.

 

 

 

I made a fairly late start, gone nine, and the one way system in M (see, I am obedient, I obey one way systems!) led me a funny route but did show me this:

I don’t know how visible it is, but there’s quite an old two storey stone house in derelict state between some late mid/late 20th Century buildings.  The effect is, to me, strange:

And oh boy, to me there is no doubt which are the aesthetically more satisfying constructions and, I suspect, which, with some care and attention, would/will last centuries and which won’t.

It also brought me past the big church from a different angle and it felt nice to wave it goodbye again.

Then I was out into the country. This is one of my partial panoramas.  Sadly, the ‘photos don’t catch the warm colours (in fact, they give a rather grey feel which was how it felt on the skin and muscles!)

In fact the light on the far hills was lovely.

This was a very mild uphill spot, I stopped for the light, not a breather!

And I also liked the stone in this view:

The whole day was going through mixed farming countryside and small woodland.  The farms are small and many had that sort of mix of wood and stone “fencing” and gave me the feeling that the stones had been there for a very, very long time.  Some of the houses were lovely but the cycling was grinding and I didn’t stop for many ‘photos.  I regret that I didn’t now.  There was one tiny but lovely looking chapel with marble vaults on each side of it (like the ones next to Santa Maria yesterday). The vaults were as high as the very low walls of the single nave so the church looked bizarre, as if someone had built two high blast walls on either side of it as you see in the transformers in electricity transmission systems. They must have been within under 10m of the chapel walls and appeared to be as long as the church.  These aren’t   something I’ve been seeing until now.  Are they a local fashion in how to be buried?

There were lots of lovely horreos, many modern concrete built but some clearly much older, stone built and one had the door open revealing that it was half full of bright yellow maize heads.  Lots of eucalyptus trees but also some lovely chestnuts and lots of oak.  And quite a few of these:

What does he mean?  Houses in a state of decline?  Well, yes, there were lots of those and I think more ones like this, not  that old, than really old ones.  No, I’m referring to the metal globe thing.  I’m 99% sure they’re water tanks, often, as I think this one is, with added TV aerials.  They seemed rather like things from 40s sci fi movies though and again, they’re not something I’ve seen elswhere. Surely the water will be hot in summer if it waits up there for any length of time?  What creates these local fashions?

After some slogging, and here I was quite happy to stop for a breather, I had this:

I think you can just see a “blue man” on a bike vanishing in the distance.  I’d seen him earlier, stopped picking blackberries (a lot of pilgrims do that: hooray for use of otherwise wasted good food, I confess I never stopped for them feeling I would grudge the time too much).   He was about my age I was guessing.  I took another ‘photo just to confirm how close I was getting:

He’s gone.  In fact, about 2km further, after a bit more up and down, I got worried that I might have missed a turning as he really had vanished.   I hadn’t and forgot about him once I’d looked at the map and convinced myself I was on the right road but I did think “Boy, I am sluggish today.”  Well, that was true, I just didn’t seem to have much oomph but I was hugely amused, probably two hours later to see him in Compostela and realise that he had an electric bike!!  I’d seen quite a few in France and even had a brief go on one (that’s a story that should have made a post and will some day) but I hadn’t seen any other pilgrims with one.

One odd thing, that contributed to my feeling I might have lost my way was that the lovely white arrows on the road, and the occasional funny faces simply stopped about there  and we were still, well, 33km from Compostela.  Very oddd and it also contributed to this:

Yes, bushed at the top of a really foul long climb with massive road works going on about 10km from Compostela I’d followed the sign across the roundabout and about the time that sign made it blatantly clear, I realised that I was on the approach road to a motorway into Compstela: NOT right!

I was only 100m down so a quick, rather embarrassed pedal back up the hard shoulder the wrong way (as I say, I like to be obedient) and then: no other obvious way to Compostela off that roundabout until I   realised I had to go a couple of hundred metres back down the foul hill and come off it to join the walkers’ path, which led, quite quickly, to an older main road and I was fine again.  But where had my white arrow painting angel gone just  when I had most needed him/her?  The complete absence of arrows continued all the way into Compostela and you’ll be expecting a proper narrative approach shot here. Well there isn’t one because there wasn’t one, there was a brief flash between trees on a descent which confirmed what the Garmin distance count and the last signs had said and showed a big, grey town under a now drizzling and completely grey, dark grey, sky. Sorry, no, I wasn’t hauling the brakes on, backing up some metres, risking my life in a gap in he traffic, all to get you a grey on grey approach shot.

The outskirts of Compostela go on for kilometres and  are deadly dull I’m afraid.  My guide book told me to keep using the signs for the historical centre, all well and good, and, rather bizarrely, to keep the bus station on my right.  Never saw a bus station and the historic centre is actually quite big and now white arrows, no nothing.  Like a lot of other cyclists, I fudged and most of us ended up opting to join the walking pilgrims who had at least a few yellow arrows.  So we came into the cathedral square down a flight of stairs!!  Serves us right I guess.

And I arrived to this:

 

Heavy police presence and an extrordinary cacophony of drugs and hand bells that was getting louder and louder making it quite impossible to hear or think much.  It gradually became clear that I had come in one corner of the square (down the stairs) just as a huge carnival procession came in another corner.

And some basketball with only one hoop per court, I think sponsored by local banks was also taking up half the square:

You see: there really is only one half court.  I wonder if it’s a game of “one half”?  (OK, I know, that’s terrible.)

And the procession kept coming and coming:

And oddly, more and more cycling pilgrims seemed to appear from nowhere, more than I’ve seen at any previous point.  I guess I’d expect a lot bottled up here but they weren’t already there, they were suddenly flooding in.  Two men, I think the ones who dubbed me “yellow man” arrived on their bikes and one, bless him, took out a proper hairbrush after taking off his cycling helmet and brushed his enviable amount of snow white, rather fairy tale beautiful, hair … and then what were I’m pretty sure, their wives arrived and the self-care looked touching as were the hugs and congratulations and suddenly I was noticing that some of the walkers had arranged rendezvous too, and others who had travelled in, or formed, packs were hugging one another and jumping up and down for cameras.

And they mingled with the procession and much dancing and taking of selfies was going on everywhere you looked, and you still couldn’t hear yourself think for drumming, bells and, wait for it: bagpipes galore!

And just as I thought it couldn’t get any more exotic and was shrinking back against the cathedral wall, well actually, that and the foot of its scaffolding, and as I was rather prosaically, and tiredly, thinking that I wouldn’t mind squatting down but everywhere I could see to do that had clearly been marked by dogs peeing competitively telling each other that bit of the cathedral was theirs … along came this:

Yes, men and women on horseback with bed rolls in front of their saddles and nasty looking swords.  Toto and I shrank back into the wall,well, tried to, and both wondered who’d spiked our water bottles and what on earth had been put in them. Surely this was no ordinary psychotogenic influence? We were supposed to be at the end of a solemn, Christian pilgrimage.  (OK, agnostic, but very solemn I’m sure you’d agree.)   This was mayhem and some of it transparently pagan:

And then, in the space of another ten minutes or so, they were all gone.  And here’s Toto looking a bit, well, like a bike ought to after a long trip.

And then, as if Lewis Carroll had been scripting it all along, came the white train (and yet more cycling pilgrims):

Toto and I decided that the cathedral would wait for another day and I felt I couldn’t leave him in this dodgy arena and gone and hug Saint James (I’m not making that bit either: that’s what I have to do at the end of all this) and we crawled off, now pretty damn cold, to find something to eat.

And this, gentle readers, is Gallician soup:

I’m not a fan of cabbage and bean soup but this was cabbage and bean and potato and a very little bit of cheese soup and it was absolutely delicious and warming and was followed (from the English language menu I confess) “Toast with Gallician pork rind and cheese”:

Yes, I had simply chosen the two things that said “Gallician”.  When in Gallicia, do as the Gallicians.  It was actually pulled pork and cheese on toast, very high on protein, carbohydrate and fat and just what I needed.  And we found a hotel that would take us, and it was one with lovely receptionists.  Then, after quite a while in the room, unpacking, uploading ‘photos etc, I opened the net curtains and found this:

There’s a milky way leading from my window to the cathedral:

OK. It just leads to a wall and a dead end but that’s real life Toto.  Actually, this is Toto safely locked up in the boiler room.

Anyway, here we are, I’m stocked up with food from the supermarket and we’re not going to Finisterre and we may go home a day early so I might see my daughter before she goes, later than planned, for another year abroad.  And all’s well with the world.  OK, I made that bit up too, as far as I can see, the world’s still in a very mixed state, frankly parlous in many ways, but boy am I happy to have made it and had such an adventure.

And lovely people have followed this mad blog so that we didn’t feel too lonely.  Actually, I promise, I have no “we” delusions, I have some respect for Toto as a bike, and like HG Wells, I think bikes are pretty good things, but I don’t talk to the bike.  I do occasionally talk to my legs but that’s only a bit mad.  This would have perhaps been quite a lonely experience, despite the miracles of modern ‘phone contact with my family, had I not created this blog and, to my immense pleasure and surprise, found that people were reading it and commenting.  It won’t stop here but I think this will do for tonight.  Reviews on Google maps say the café/bar about 100m from here is great so I’m off to get a beer and raise it to everyone!