Camino bore, day 25.

Monday 24th May, Day 25,  Triacastela to Sarria.
In 2010 I woke up to find that I had been lying on top of the piece of blister that I cut off my foot, and it had been nicely flattened, and so I put it away till later, then stuck it into the 'Caminella' journal and made a pretty design out of it, cutting a scallop-shell-shaped window in the page with the skin like a bit of stained glass. A relic for the future for when I'm beatified, and hardly in bad taste compared with some of the relics that are kept. Had to laugh when I found that the book I think of as the Pevsner guide to the camino, Gitlitz & Davidson's 'The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago' ends with 'And don't forget to take a picture of your calluses, so that your grandchildren will believe your incredible tales of the time you went walking on pilgrimage to Compostela.' I think I've gone one better (or worse) than this!

The albergue we stayed in was in the upper, historic part of Sarria.

Absolute luxury!

There were more young people in this albergue than we had encountered; at times on the camino, it almost looked like a Saga holiday, with the young-retired age group well-represented; perhaps they, newly-released from whatever slavery they have endured, decide that now is the opportunity to do the camino. While I was dressing my newly-skinned foot, a kindly young American lad in a university group passed by and admired it, saying it was the worst he had seen so far since starting at Leon. I was touched; this group of young people are the kind that make you know that humanity is safe for the future, that there will always be people of good sense and good will, enough to carry us along. (I seem to be thinking a lot about safety, as the next bit shows.)

A Galician green lane. Oh... I want to go back...

Being in Galicia, the terrain has its own character, and I was struck by the fact that the paths are concave rather than the flat man-made things that had been kindly laid by the Council of Europe which has adopted the camino, and I wrote:

"Galician green lanes
The kindly path trodden by
foot with concave shape that
cradles the foot. Fallen tree
debris creates softer surface.
A metaphor for "humans have been here before
& you are safe here, the road is trodden, people
have been here before & will be others after you..."

It wasn't written as a poem, but rather it was separated into short phrases because it was skirting its way round a sketch of a lane.

My new friend Camino Ruth whom I met in Dublin gave me a poem by Neil Curry. Here is verse 1 + a bit of 'Dust':

"The rain has stopeed now that I'm in Galicia,
And the mud-ruts in the lanes are baked and dried.
Even so, I keep on seeing that same
Bootprint. All the way from Pamplona
It's been with me; sometimes so fresh I've felt
Certain to meet up with whoever made it
Over the next hill, but never have.

What's one though, when this road is deep
With the footprints of the dead?......"

I suppose we can't help being pre-occupied with feet and footprints, an image that is maybe well past its sell-by date; but not on the camino! I'll get over it, I'm sure.

What would happen if I did the camino alone and took the book of psalms with me to read a portion every day, juxtaposed with the terrain, the local people, pilgrims, experiences, hardships etc? I'm looking forward to ironing out the paper camino and seeing what is next to what, and these things pinging off one another. If the psalms pinged off the camino...... Incidentally, Wiki tells us that:
"Ping is a computer network administration utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer. The name comes from active sonar terminology."
I've got the idea of how to use this term as a metaphor... I think..... (Kev, tell me if this is right!)


Back in 2011, I've spent a week doing quite a bit of travelling in the UK & Ireland in 2011, and I find that I like the seclusion provided by that; to sit at a table with just the book I'm reading and a notebook in which to record my thoughts, and how I'm going to use them. It's like having a kind of travelling study. Solitude combined with a bay window on humanity. I get a lot more done than I do at home, where I'm prey to being, e.g. rung up and dragged down to church to help unload a pallet of carpet tiles etc etc ETC; fortunately I spent a little time putting on make-up after I was summoned, so missed that opportunity and an available Man did it instead.

Mantlepiece with the very bottle that caused my downfall.

But this is getting much too serious, and last night at our parish supper, David reminded me that in the film 'The Way', most of the characters are hoping that they will be able to kick some habit by doing the camino, give up something like cigarettes or over-eating; by contrast I was trying to get rid of an aversion to alcohol. Miraculously this happened on the first night, with the bottle of Navarran red at Roncesvalles; I sipped, and I smiled. The aversion itself was the result of too many bottles of the Belgian stuff in quick succession, which happened because I'd been brought up to eat or drink politely whatever is put in front of me. This approach didn't work very well for me when I encountered some generous friends in a Soho bar a few days before we left the UK, hence the need for the cure. I'm pleased to report that in 2011, the cure seems to be permanent.