Camino bore: Mind games

Meseta hovels: people live HERE, like THIS?

Camino bore: Thursday 3rd June 2010. Corpus Christi. This was planned as the day we went to Poitiers to celebrate Corpus Christi there; but the Caminella had other plans, and it reads, 'The inevitable sleeping day to follow!' David's sister lives in a lovely old place in Cherves Chatelars, a hamlet between Angouleme and Limoges in the Charente region of France, and our loft room is spacious, and sunlight - lots of it - drifts in through small apertures in a way that doesn't happen at home in our large-windowed house facing south. You get gently bathed in a special form of soft sleep-promoting light; at home it seems like a mere hand-splash by comparison. 

Meseta tree

Also resting in 2011 at the end of the second of the 'Ladies who Launch' windsurfing training days, I leaf through the 'Camino Pevsner' cultural handbook to the camino by Gitlitz & Davidson. p. 235 describes the stretch from Sahagun thus: 'In 1974 and 1979 we found this stretch to be utterly desolate. Walking for many hours on the ancient pilgrim Road with no terrestrial points of reference except the wind in the thistles and the distant tinkling of sheep bells had a strong impact on us... in 1987 we found this section had been "improved" by  bulldozing and gravelling a pilgrim path... planting trees every 10 metres...concrete benches and picnic tables. The changes made it impossible to lose perspective, and the mystic effect of the Castillian plain seemed to have been lost.' This was a bit we didn't actually walk, but got a train to speed us over some of it. However, it seemed to us that there was still some pristine featureless meseta to be experienced; having done a good chunk of it, D found this kind of terrain very difficult. He's a walking satnav, constantly calculating our speed, amount of water consumed, time we reach the next landmark etc etc; without recognisable features to compare with the map, he went into inner melt-down. And him a native of Lincolnshire; perhaps that is why.

 Mind in free fall.

It would be hard to go along the camino and not do the sight-seeing bit; the artists and architects of the past would rightly be insulted if one didn't. But a big part of it for me was the discovery of the camino as creating or reflecting a big blank space in the head, which must be 'the mystic effect' referred to above. This was unexpected. I'd found the first couple of days a bit boring, until slight disaster struck, then there was the pleasure of 'things to be overcome', and mountains are always exciting. For those of us who eschew mind-altering drugs except alcohol, an alternative if laborious way of 'altering' must be traversing the meseta, and so the paper camino has an entry 'Mind in free fall' which documents the effect. If I want to go back, it is not to see the sights better, though that would happen and not be unwelcome; it is really to have that big, BIG sheet of paper to fill with blobs.