Very Long Walks

In print at last

2011-11-30T15:29:00.000Z

Now available: A Very Long Walk is the published version of these articles and blogs, written while undertaking a 2,300-mile, 9-month long walk from my home in central London to Santiago de Compostella in Spain.

While Rome burns

2008-10-14T18:49:00.003+01:00

The tenth of October. I’ve just been sitting on the beach, mesmerised by the powerful white curls of rising waves that approach each time closer than the last. Around me people were stripped down to swimming costumes, stretched on the sand or tossing in the breakers. The wind was brisk but warm and windsurfers were showing off. We’ve been promised rain for days, but there was still no sign of it.

This scene is the reason we came to Barcelona: for late sun and warmth and a chance to test how small a pocket of the year my white fingers can be squeezed into.

Until we got here, that is. In this international city par excellence, English-language newspapers are everywhere with tales of economic implosion. Easy internet access leads to easy browsing of BBC headlines. And now our tenants are about to move out, leaving us rent-less. Can we really bury our heads in the sand any longer – especially in the coarse, gritty sand of Barcelona beach? Ought we really to spend the winter wandering the tapas bars where some Flamenco musician is playing the guitar – while stocks and shares burn all around?

Maybe we could, maybe we should. But in the first shocked days here, before we remembered the beach, we had already decided it was time to head for home.

Now, sitting on this beach that is warmer than many English summers, eating my ice-cream, I’m beginning to think we might have made a mistake.

10th October 2008

PS: the statistics

2008-10-05T15:33:00.006+01:00

9 months / 274 days in total

147 days of walking

2289 miles / 3683 kilometres walked

15.6 miles on average walked per (walking) day

5 pairs of boots used between us

0 blisters

12 pairs of socks used each

4 visits to doctors

5 major bug attacks, assorted

300-plus bed bug bites

3 t-shirts, 3 pairs of pants, 2 pairs of trousers worn each

17,660 photos taken

11 notebooks filled

10 items carried and never used

The end

2008-10-05T14:49:00.023+01:00

There should be moments of great emotion; revelations about life, ourselves or both. Our way of behaving in the world should, Damascus-like, be transformed. Yet thoughts and emotions rarely occur at the scheduled moments, but at the right ones.

We had all the superficial milestones: the "last hundred kilometres" post; "only three more days to go"; the "last time I need to wash out this t-shirt". Deliberately we left ourselves a long last walk into Santiago, wanting to arrive tired and feeling like we had walked a long way to get there. We woke to a perfect shimmering sunrise and strange nerves, as if it could all still spoil.

It didn't. The sun slanted through eucalyptus forests right to the city's edge. The soft sandy track had kept back some steep ascents for a final fling, which we enjoyed in our familiar quiet. Only at the approach to Santiago did the scattered individuals become a stream of movement in a single direction. Most people stop at Monte de Gozo, a giant accommodation centre that permits them to walk the final five kilometres to the Cathedral next morning, refreshed. We didn't stop, and so our final five kilometres, like the first five months, we walked alone with ourselves. In the city streets school children and workers were heading home for the late Spanish lunch. They were indifferent to us: pilgrims in Santiago are like pigeons in London.

I had expected the Cathedral and its main square, the Praza do Obradoiro, to be a noisy circus ring of souvenir sellers, cafés and tour groups. But there were none, just a scattering of other stunned people with laden rucksacks or cycles and a beautiful, reverent silence. Inside the Cathedral, too, smaller than I'd imagined, a contemplative peace wrapped around us in contrast to the chattering museums that other Spanish cathedrals have become. When I later learned this was a short-lived drawing of breath during lunch, I was even more grateful that such was our arrival.

Even so it was impossible to know what to think or feel. Numb. Complete. Astounded. Relieved. Lost. Grateful. Sad. Not sad: we had finished where and how we had always hoped to finish.

But gratitude was overwhelming. In the dark crypt with its silvered coffin I muttered a spontaneous "thanks!" David was similarly moved by the centuries-old gesture of filing past the golden and jewelled statue of our old Saint Jack to give him the customary big hug and a kiss. The feelings continued through the next day's noontime Pilgrim Mass at which a nun sang with the voice of a fragile angel and American priests made the Botafumeiro swing with glee.

For a few hours I couldn't even look at the shop windows of jewellery and gifts, much less contemplate buying such unnecessary things ever again. But after an Australian-sized tapas bar-crawl with Paul and Kim, I achieved closure - or oblivion.

Then we came to Finisterre, the end of the once-known world, and in a much anticipated moment of symbolism out on the rocky headland each burned one item of the clothes that have done duty for nine months. It is here, in the tiny, ordinary fishing town with mild headlands and blue-green seas that we have found some of the silence needed to consider our journey.

I'm not sure I can claim we have changed at all. It's rare that an experience like this changes people deep down. A frequent comment from those who completed the walk a while ago is a melancholy "I did change ... for a while ...". Nor do I expect the people we have spent time with to remain friends for long. Camino friends are not for life. The experiences that bring you together are too intense and too different to sustain into normal life. Perhaps the most we can hope for is that inherent but previously worn out characteristics become strengthened.

So I hope we continue to loosen the ties that bind us to shops and acquisitions. I hope we can lighten our load in the world.

I hope we continue to have increased respect for the environment and its resources, especially water and fuel. My repulsion in the face of some of the squalor we have encountered, even here in western Europe, makes me sure that no one anywhere should have to live with squalor. Yet I have learned that I'm not the sort of person to carry out development work overseas: better to increase the support I can give to those better able to do it.

I hope we can continue to lead a slower life with more time, daily, for each other and for other people. Even without the regular terrors and exhaustions that bred my prayers for help and sighs of thanks, I hope I'll still take time to look beyond myself. Whether you call it prayer in a Christian, Jewish or Muslim mode or the power of Buddhist positive energy, the knowledge that people were wishing me success was sometimes the only thing keeping me going. So I hope I'll find space to stop and cast a thought or two in the direction of people, known or unknown, who need the extra strength. And the first person I'll direct those thoughts to is Alan, a teacher from Kosi Bay School in South Africa. He has decided to take time for reflection by walking from Cape Town back to the school in north eastern South Africa. With nothing like the infrastructure surrounding the Camino de Santiago that is a challenge indeed and there will be times he'll need the thoughts and strength of others to help him through. Believe me, I know.

4th October 2008

The cycle of the seasons

2008-09-29T16:27:00.018+01:00

Cut logs are stacked on the back of a lorry in a lay-by on Sunday night, waiting to be hauled to a sawmill in the morning. They are eucalyptus logs, clean-smelling and exotic. But in every other was they could be lengths of pine or beech trees from the commercial forests we passed through in northern and eastern France. I watch the morning sun slice through the dangling eucalyptus leaves and a breeze move the fronds of bark, and behind them see the intense blue eyes of the woman in a wood in Normandy who first told us of the eucalyptus forests that accompany the last few days into Santiago. I've been imagining these forests ever since.

The last week of our walk, partly no doubt because our minds are tending that way, has offered us sights and smells that link back to so many moments in the past nine months. As my breath forms clouds around me, wrapped up in layers as we set out with the late-rising sun, the certainty of a warm and sparkling afternoon carries us back to the magical days of the Pays de Bray in February. Then, we rejoiced at 16°C afternoons. Now, we luxuriate in 28°C.

The acorns we saw sprouting red in the dark earth of February and March have reappeared on the trees and now are falling again to lie freshly at our feet, where carpets of autumn crocuses have replaced the spring ones we were so excited to see.

A few days ago in the last real vineyards of the trip the grapes were black and heavy, still covered in grey bloom as the crates were stacked ready for the harvest. It is surprising to realise how the seasons have passed since we walked through the dead-seeming twigs of the Champagne vineyards or the green but flower-less ones of Chablis.

In a rare excursion into a Spanish bed and breakfast in Samos, we once again find ourselves sharing a chatty breakfast with our hosts and, in an echo of Les Avettes, our hosts are beekeepers and serve up their own honey along with tales of bees confused by the weather and mobile phones, dying in their hives.

Echoes of the Auvergne lie in wait in the tiny hamlets behind herd of cows for whom we have to linger patiently for them to return to their fields from milking. Like in the Basque country, the old farmers of Galicia want to stop and chat with us, for the pleasure of meeting strangers. And yet the drinks vending machines and even outdoor internet points outside farmyards make me laugh at my surprise over the vending machine adaptability of France.

There's almost a third spring here in Galicia. In the Auvergne we welcomed foxgloves, honeysuckle and clover that we had last seen around the Lac du Der. But here they are again in late September in the allegedly damp and cool north west of Spain. There are raspberries too, piled on tables outside houses for a few centimos a punnet.

The season is definitely cooler. Although the maize is fattening in fields just like under the oppressive heat of the Gers, we've often returned to our cosy way of spending later afternoons and evenings under the blankets on our beds, once the sun has dipped and we're waiting for the dinner hour. No doubt the climate here helps make it feel like home: in the green, wooded hill we walk along sandy tacks under trees, between centuries-old stone walls, and spontaneously remember the lanes of the North Downs Way.

Other things are very different but still recall the year. Where French villages are so often devoid of their cafes, Spanish village bars are alive each afternoon with old men playing cards. We always thought that Spanish dogs would be even more of a problem than French ones, as they are rarely behind fences or tied up. But freedom brings wisdom: Spanish dogs, free to roam, are peaceable creatures. They rarely bark, being mostly asleep, often in the middle of the road. And in their breaks from sleeping they meet up with friends in two or threes and take themselves for walks, along country lanes or through city parks. Meanwhile, Spanish cats procreate, and kittens abound.

The biggest contrast, of course, is the people. Just once of late we have eaten in a restaurant alone, freakishly given the hundred of people still walking the Camino at this late but lovely season. Nothing could be further from our splendid isolation in walking in England and northern France in January, in February in March. And yet, just like in south west France as we approached Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, we are drawing close to Santiago de Compostela with a small, amoeba-like group of people who we've come to know, in a way, and whose company has enhanced our awareness and enjoyment of these final days.

29th September 2008

Only five more walking days to go after today

2008-09-25T17:19:00.002+01:00

Pathetic, I know, but that's how it is. There's a dizzy, de-mob air in our bedroom. We still wash our clothes, of course, but our harvesting of the soaps and sachets of shampoo is less intense.

Green fields, tiny hamlets and clear September skies: a gorgeous finish; but we've known all along that this is where we finish, and we have other things to look forward to. As David says, if one has just run a Marathon, why would one be sad not to have another mile to run?

25th September 2008

El Bierzo

2008-09-25T16:41:00.009+01:00

Between the dry brown plains of the Meseta and rainy, Pagan-rooted Galicia lies El Bierzo. Like an emerald chalice it is cupped by the Montes de León in the east and the Cordillera Cantabrica mountain range in the north and west. In the south, the Montes Aquilianos rise up in similar, steep-sided pyramids of glacial origin to close off the hollow. The rivers Sil, Valcarce and Cúa lead the mountain waters into the El Bierzo vineyards, cherry orchards and chestnut forests. This is a region famed for its gastronomy so the restaurants proffer smoked pork sausages and sweetbreads, salt cod stew, apple cake and chestnuts with everything.

Along the lanes from Ponferrada to Cacabelos the long strip allotments roll with giant misshapen pumpkins and early on Sunday morning old men have come out to fill wheelbarrows with their red peppers, orange squashes, green lettuces and creamy beets. A woman, her blue-patterned dress two stuffed ovals like a scarecrow, squats low on a stool to methodically strip ripe white beans from their poles.

The September days are warm and clear and the climate in El Bierzo is known to be mild, almost Mediterranean. Winters are gentle, in the lower valleys anyway, where there is little snow. Only on the tops of the encircling mountains do the inhabitants see snow for much of the winter; and in these days of road improvements El Bierzo is no longer cast into immobility by snow. Yet for all the evident natural riches and easy living in the late September sun, the Bierzo region has been a poor one.

Until the 1960s the villages saw rapid depopulation: not just dying villages but dead, deserted. People went to the cities or abroad to find work; and in truth they are still going. When price fluctuations in the 1960 and 1970s made coal and steel production around Ponferrada viable for the first time since the eighteenth century, it earned a certain insouciant wealth for that village, turning it into the lively, expanding town it is today. Not until the 1980s, though, did the wines of the region - decimated by phylloxera in the early twentieth century and later replanted - improve to the point of vying with the best Riojas for quality. A secret wine, virtually unknown outside Spain.

In the 1990s the fashion for eco-tourism turned a favourable eye on the Bierzo. Its long hibernation left the region rich in historical monuments and pristine natural beauties. The pre-Roman site at Castro de Chano in the north vies for attention with pallozas, the small thatched cottages like stone yurts where people and animals lived side by side. Romanesque chapels line the path to Santiago and we walk past waterfalls and natural swimming pools, chestnut and apple trees and across mountain sides of heather and blackberries. Despite all this it is really only the hamlets and villages along the Camino de Santiago that have managed to revive in their quiet, pilgrim-dependent way. A few kilometres each way in the hills the villages are still deserted except for the occasional renovated family farm used only for summer holidays from the city. The pilgrim Euro doesn't scatter far.

But in El Acebo, Cacabelos and Molinaseca, in Pereje or Las Herrerías and in O Cebreiro the cheap concrete streets of much of northern Spain have been replaced by new cobbles. The walls of houses are straight and the window frames noticeably solid, fringed by geraniums. Cafés can be comfortable, even stylish, with a flair for playing with the gastronomic inheritance of the Bierzo and whether is it the supremely gentle vegetarian host of the Trucha del Arco de Iris bed and breakfast in El Acebo or the Paraiso del Bierzo hotel and restaurant in Las Herrerías, we have encountered hospitality that is genuine and generous and delivered with a modern sensibility for history and natural riches.

23rd September 2008

You can't kill the spirit

2008-09-25T16:31:00.007+01:00

Wherever a length of wire fence borders the route, pilgrims lace it with twigs or grass to make crosses. Worn-out socks, old bandages and flowers all make their appearance. It's a mania. Perhaps an uncontrollable force moves them to do it.

More than anything these fences provoke warm memories of the Greenham Common peace camp. There, the fences were strung with colourful wool and ribbons woven into messages of peace; with pictures and gifts from family and friends, with photos and soft toys. The military fence was beautified - or if not beautified, then emasculated, feminised - by the women's life-affirming symbols.

All these crosses make me ponder that the spirit of Greenham Common lives on in the Camino, perhaps seeded by the women of my generation and older who we see walking indomitably on, alone. Does it live on in the thin seam of belief in the power of love to end wars that we see scrawled on the walls of underpasses? Yet the will to decorate these fences seems like an ancient ritual that people still perform, unaware of its meaning or origins.

21st September 2008

Reflecting on Rabanal

2008-09-25T16:13:00.009+01:00

As the ground rose steadily towards Rabanal del Camino in the Montes de León our excitement rose with it. Rabanal is where the London-based Confraternity of St James runs a pilgrim hostel in partnership with the Benedictine monks next door. From the various articles we had read in the newsletter we imagined it as high and remote, a challenge to arrive at and somewhere we would stop to say hello even if, with cooler evenings and a strict admissions policy, it wasn't useful for us to stay there.

So it was a surprise to find Rabanal a relatively short and easy walk out of Astorga. Well-watered fields and allotments had lined the road before giving way to blackberries, broom and heather. A friendly little bar served us tasty gipsy toast - Spanish style, laced with alcohol - for second breakfast. And the crowds of freshly-minted pilgrims starting their walk in Astorga turned it into Regent's Park on a Sunday. More surprising still was the helicopter field on the edge of Rabanal. Not so cut off in an emergency, after all.

I guess Rabanal del Camino was one of the villages hereabouts that died out by the middle of the twentieth century, when people fled the hard winters and poverty for employment elsewhere in Spain or the Americas. But now it is mostly recovered and renovated: the streets are of cobbles rather than concrete and the slate houses honey-coloured and whole. It has a population of around fifty people that can swell by and extra two hundred and twenty or so pilgrims each night. There's no escape.

The deeply moving home-coming experience of stopping at the Confraternity hostel never materialised. Leaving aside the stern list of rules pinned to the door, the hostel was still closed to arriving pilgrims when we reached Rabanal and had already thrown everyone out and locked its doors by the time we ambled off the next morning.

In between we attended Vespers in the little village church, sung in Latin in the Gregorian tradition by the three resident monks. The reading was repeated by six or seven pilgrims in their various languages, which was impressive. Nearly everyone in the church had read that the sung Vespers experience was "special". Probably the monks are pleased to welcome so many souls each evening. It was indeed a lovely and intimate sound, and interesting to follow the Latin on paper. But as ever more latecomers rattled the door and rustled to make a space for themselves, those anticipated special Rabanal moments came dangerously close to extinction.

19th September 2008

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory v2.0

2008-09-25T15:55:00.012+01:00

The first time I smelt crushed sap and realised that below my feet on the road's edge was green grass, I received the news like fresh water in the face: the Meseta was behind us.

Much still masqueraded as the Meseta. A straight and flat seven kilometres of road ended only when a sign announced a right-angle bend and warned local joy-riders to slow. Yet water gushed in the irrigation channels beside us to exit via sluices into small fields of tobacco and spinach. We even saw cows grazing, like a memory from a distant land. Each ditch fringed with bulrushes was a universe of shoals of tiny fish, startled frogs and mating dragonflies. The world returned to life where the fringes of the Montes do León mountains meet the upland plain.

As we walk towards Astorga those mountains which had been distant mirages easily confused with the purple clouds finally reveal their slopes of chestnut forest and cropped fields through which we can pick out the line of a road. In a day or two we will be there, in the Margaratería.

But for tonight we are in fantasy land. Every shop lining the main streets and squares of Astorga sells chocolate. Great slabs of the stuff are wrapped in old-fashioned block-printed paper that makes buying it seem a virtue of traditional values rather than a sin. Beside the chocolate are pick 'n' mix mountains of handcrafted truffles and beside them, golden pillows of the feathery sponge cakes called mantecadas.

We head for the three-roomed chocolate museum and study each grinding stone, wooden mould and metal advert with care. We read the stories on the card collections that used to come with bars of chocolate and laugh at the severe family photos of the local chocolate dynasties. One room is given over the the lithograph stones used to print the irresistible wrappers.

The "museum shop" is a simple wooden counter with a couple of dozen baskets of chocolate squares: chocolate from different countries and of different intensities. You could sample and compare to your stomach's content and the three attendants deep in their novels scarcely noticed. Our hundred grams of pure Tanzanian chocolate is a guilt (or is it gratitude?) purchase; and to avoid adding weight to our rucksacks we have to eat it in the evening sun, with the early-Gaudí, medieval-esque Bishop's Palace as a Disneyland backdrop.

17th September 2008

Facing the end game

2008-09-15T10:48:00.014+01:00

León is the last big well of civilisation before Santiago de Compostela: the last place where we'll take a day off. A small city of around 130,000 people, it shakes us up with its flair and quiet sophistication. The government of the large, wealthy Castille y León region is based here. Café society has taken over the compact old town since it was pedestrianised a few years ago. Summer has returned to find us here after the near-freezing mornings and brisk winds of the last two days. A pleasant 18C brought little children out in their old fashioned Sunday best to stroll with grandparents in the shady gardens and chase pigeons along the cobbles while their parents take a pre-lunch wine.

Ahead of us are the final sixteen days of walking. Two high mountain passes and all the foothills they bring, until the last low undulations of the seventy kilometres into Santiago. The region of Galicia, a few days away, is reputed to be green and pretty - and rainy.

Sipping a beer in the sun, it's tempting to remain here in León, surrounded by more satin and silk frocks than I've seen in one place before, and with the fascinations of the Romanesque San Isidore, the Gothic cathedral and the much more recent coloured-glass construction of the contemporary art museum. I could quietly forget to do the next sixteen days.

On the other hand, Astorgas is also still ahead of us. The capital of Spanish chocolate production.

15th September 2008

Meseta horizons

2008-09-15T10:30:00.010+01:00

For eight days the path stretches straight and flat across the Meseta of northern Spain. A wide track, usually of gravel, sometimes of earth or small pebbles. The relentless cornfields reach to the horizon with sometimes a tree or two, or a slight ridge to climb. At this time of year the corn is cut and the stubble changes from honey to grey with the light. The sky is often monotone: hot blue or cooler steel. In this near-deprivation of the senses small things and fleeting encounters are thrown into deep relief. We are excused the task of navigating: you can see the track for miles ahead. Excused too the need to watch for trips and stumbles under our feet. With a cooler, cloudier and sometimes stormy September we don't even have the famous Meseta dehydration to worry us. And so, at last, we think.

We had thought that the whole walk would be an exercise in meditation, but there were always too many flashes to look for, too many tree roots and rock, too many birds to watch in flight or trees to consider and flowers to admire. An Indian man we meet, a Hindu, explains that real meditation lies in not trying to think but in letting yourself notice the small details around you.

For most of the people walking with us now, the Meseta is the middle section of their Camino. But we feel so close to our finish that the Meseta is where our minds turn towards the future.

People have exclaimed that we will find it hard to return to daily life after such a year, and perhaps we will. But it seems more that there is a natural turning towards the next stage. We are ready, like the natural readiness a pregnant woman feels in the last week before the birth. Beyond the certain relief that the physical and mental challenges will be over, there is an excitement.

But it is not simply to return straight into the old life. First we will allow ourselves a transition, a necessary period to absorb and understand what the walk has given us. Whether in Barcelona - as planned, although the Spanish language continues to bemuse us - or in the easier south of France, we hope to incorporate a sense of space, a facility for slowness and time together firmly into life: A chess set, and evenings teaching me how to play. Our days will be spent consolidating the creative results of the year: printing pictures and laying out books, crafting the stories the walk has given me.
It helps that we like our life. At the San Bol refugio, the Dutch hospitalera draws energy from the Milky Way and the sacred spring on which her house is built. We could assure her, sincerely, that a return to the city won't be a torture for us. Even when we do return to work, the value of a break is that it allows you to view work as play, as pleasure. Not as a master. We draw much of our energies form the people we work with and the challenges they invite us to share.

13th September 2008

Sketches of Spain

2008-09-15T09:37:00.032+01:00

She - or he - was thin and fine-boned in the Asian way, hair close-cropped and androgynous. We had only two words in common: "Korea" and "England", and the waggled fingers to signify walking. While the rest of us were lumpen and wrinkled in our assorted waterproof trousers and flapping ponchos, she - or he - was serene in a Burberry mackintosh, long to the shins and carefully belted.

***

Thirty pigeons wheeled from the tower as the bell clanged for Mass. Inside the green-frocked priest read the lesson in Italian, then stepped forward and smiled hesitantly. His address was in English: "This reading is important because it says if two or three are ...." he circled his arms "juntos? ... then Jesus will be there: Well, we are more than three, so Jesus is here listening!"
He sighed in relief and looked towards the front pew. His eyebrows and his mouth asked "Was that alright? Did they understand?" Then he looked back towards us and beamed. Like a proud parent at the Nativity play, I wanted to clap.

***

Eighteen scarecrows to guard a small plot of vines isolated amid the cut corn of the Meseta. Each one the deep blue overall of labourers bulked out with the ever present straw; their heads slanting white plastic bags like the headscarves of Russian peasants. Each marched across the landscape, leaning into the wind.

***

Ahead as the track unfurled downwards from the ridge two far off ovals separated and one came towards us. The stubble gleamed a grey yellow under the slate sky, but not so brightly as the glint form the approaching figure. Closer, the glint became the brass name badge of Alejandro, "Friend of the Pilgrims of Boadilla del Camino". He is short, but with a military style in a belted blue jacket and green cravat, a red bag slung bandolier fashion across his chest. He wears his metal pins on the Camino like medals. He has walked out here every morning for seven years since he retired, to sit on the ridge and greet the passing pilgrims. He took our names and our photo to add to the pile "so high..." - measuring half a meter from the soil - which he already has. And, he mentioned with a wicked smirk, all the lady pilgrims give him a kiss on both cheeks...

***

El Burgo Ranero. A frontier-feeling village where the most exciting thing is watching the straw-and-mud houses slowly dissolve in the rain. Inside the steamy bar, once all have eaten their hot dinners, the afternoon passes with the harsh snaps and dry rumblings of dominos on formica, as the eight old men in flat caps and Arran-style sweaters keep their wits alive.

***

As the carved wooden Virgin on her throne was borne shoulder-height away from the sunken chapel, the women of the village followed behind, singing hymns. The priest called for them to slow down while a tiny woman in a blue two-piece suit was helped up the steep stone steps to the road. And off they went, to the main church up the hill, whose bell clanged them in. It was important for the old woman to follow the Virgin. I expect she had done so on this date all her life. A neighbour came out of her house to lend an arm: But where the hill started, the old lady waved the others off and inched back to her home by the chapel.

***

Leaving Burgos in the aftermath of rain we passed an oddly-assorted couple and predicted archly that they wouldn't last long: one of the random pairings that happen between people walking the Camino alone. She was small and blond, with a rucksack nearly her own height; and she walked quickly with a tall stick in one hand. He was tall, lean and dark. He wore jeans and carried a tiny day sack over one shoulder, a large camera over the other. She stopped periodically to gaze back at where he had stopped for yet another perfect photo-op. Later, we saw that they had exchanged rucksacks. "That'll curb photography's hold on him," she must have thought. Later still we saw the lad being carried back along the track, riding pillion on a trail bike. The girl was nowhere in sight.

***

The hospitalera of San Bol is everything you think a young Dutch woman should be: tall and blond with slender bones and clear grey eyes. Able to speak several languages well, and idealistic, she took over running the 8-bed refugio just three weeks ago. She has walked 4000 kilometres along the different routes to Santiago, but this, she thinks, is the only true route. It follows the Milky Way and draws strength from the millions of people walking the same soil for centuries. So San Bol, she hopes, will be the place she finally feels at home.

She led us to the fresh water spring in the grove of poplars, and while we filled our bottles where the water ran into a large concrete bath, she washed her dishes where it left the tank and created a stream. "Every morning, when the sun rises, I have my bath here. A cold bath feels less cold than a cold shower, I think. And then I do my exercises under the trees." She smiled serenely and I hid a shudder. Perhaps in the height of summer it would feel different, yet she intends to continue here in the winter.

Back at the little building, she persuaded David to lie on the ground between the bunk beds and experience "the strange calm and strength of this special place." I settled for a herb tea and conversation. The girl wore a draping lilac skirt held up by a knot. With no electricity, the dark room was kitchen, dining room, office and store, and hung with crystals and dream-catchers; and clear plastic freezer bags filled with water to confuse flies. No one knows how it works, but as she slipped into Spanish with a Mexican boy and French with four pensioners, everyone agreed it is an old wives' cure that seems to work.

***

There's a tall, austere man stalking this part of the Camino. In military green and with a bald head under his beret I take him for a veteran of the Foreign Legion. He carries a sleeping bag under his arm in a supermarket bag and the rest of his possessions in an old canvas knapsack held together with safety pins. Sometimes we see him sleeping rough, washing in the village fountains: At other times, maybe when rain threatens, he's in the hostels, sitting slightly aloof among the chatter round beers in the bars. But at other times he beams toothily and approaches any new stranger to present them with a religious or uplifting tract scrawled in pencil on a sheet torn from an exercise book. That usually ends his conversations, but we chose to speak, and he wrote us messages in French and English too. I still have them. He is possibly one of the more cultured, intelligent people we have met. Growing up in Blois, his family moved to Madrid where he still lives. He loves the Prado but is looking for somewhere smaller to retire to. His brother, now dead, went to London and our pilgrim sometimes visits his nephews there. But for now, we track his passing by the familiar scrawl on school paper on bar counters and reception desks along the route.

11th September 2008

Oasis

2008-09-13T18:24:00.022+01:00

The Meseta is a giant lurking in the legends of pilgrims, just like the Roncesvalles pass. It intimidates with tales of dehydration and sunstroke and the even tougher mental anguish of boredom. There are endless kilometres of flat, distraction-less tracks, clear, straight and hot; and many are those who give up along the way and catch the bus to León.

We, however, were gifted with possibly the best of seasons to cross these eight days of cornfields. There were pink sunrises into which we inserted ourselves in a long line of ones and twos, planning to avoid midday walking. But the famed heat rarely arrived. This September has started with cooler breezes spinning off from storms across the Atlantic, and a sun that warms rather than bakes. Mackerel clouds have shrouded the sun just when it might have become too hot, and if rain or morning mist have sometimes taken us by surprise, they have served to add texture to the flat monotony.

But there was always that section. The one people use to define the Meseta. The one that, knowing little in advance, grows to be the character of the whole Meseta and causes advance sales of spare water bottles and parasols. Seventeen kilometres without shade or a single water tap, much less a bar in one of the villages that regularly punctuate the way. The thought of that Meseta has lain in my mind all year, along with the mountain peaks, as a challenge to which we had to rise.

It begins after Carrión de los Condes, which doesn't mean, as we imagined it does, "carrion for the eagles". Carrión is a pretty little town an hour from where we had slept. Oddly, for late morning, dozens of pilgrims were sitting in bars or on park benches, shopping for food or simply putting off the moment of setting out. The night had ended with a giant thunder storm and lightening that led to downpours and turned the tracks to mud. People were shaken from their rhythms. But now it was clear, and they seemed destined to wait for late afternoon to set out.

It was half past eleven when we moved on. The trailing breeze from the storm balanced the sun and even through the middle of the day kept us from overheating. Along the track beside an old country road there were frequent trees to give moments of shade, and there were even stretches lined with poplars for rustling refreshment. After an hour, the ruined Franciscan abbey of Santa María de Benivivire peeped like a shy country estate from its grove. Then we were onto the Via Aquitana, a straight, flat Roman road used to carry gold from Astorgas to Bordeaux. In the straight, flat, Roman way we could see our path, unchanging, for many kilometres ahead and behind, and count the other pilgrims who had risked the high sun: three.

For over two hours, then, there really was no shade to walk in. We picnicked sitting on rolls of straw and two of the three fellow walkers passed us by with grunted "Buen camino"s. Further on, a slab of shade from a collapsing barn might have saved lives; but the combination of tree, concrete benches and tables and a tap serving "unclean" water might have taken lives instead.

As the ground, impossibly, became flatter and more featureless, the horizons stretched so far that they ceased to exist and the monotony ground its way into our spirits. Though we weren't baking, a quiet desperation burned its way into our minds. And as we walked, the breeze turned to wind, blowing storm clouds to circle around us. Our hostess of the night before had spent breakfast spinning stories of the girl she had seen killed by lightning, and the deadly storms on the Meseta earlier in the year. I eyed the towering clouds, calculating the moment to fling my metal walking sticks far from me.

Three hours after Carrión and after three false mirages, the church tower of Calzadilla de la Cuerza came into view. But in these distances, things take a long time to arrive. Nearly another hour passed before the little village suddenly revealed itself in a slight hollow. Rarely have I been so pleased to see such ramshackle buildings.

The hostel had announced, nine kilometres earlier via a yellow-painted message on the single, deserted road we had crossed, that it possessed "an animated bar". No wonder. If everyone arriving had the same intense relief as I had, there would be a party indeed tonight.

9th September 2008

Little people

2008-09-05T18:00:00.006+01:00

The Munchkins have come to Burgos. Little people with square cheeks and the deeply chiselled bronze faces of years in the fields. They giggle and sigh in their matching lime neck scarves that announce them to be on a pilgrimage to Burgos from their home in Avisto - wherever that is. Pilgrimage or coach trip, we're swept up in their stream through the cloisters of Burgos Cathedral, bobbing above them like fishing floats. Later, free range Munchins can be detected in most bars of the city centre.

A friend once told me that in his Spanish wife's family, the parents and grandparents were tiny; but with the generations raised from the waning of the Dictatorship onwards, her relatives were all giants in comparison. Could good nutrition and freedom from poverty really have such an impact in a single generation?

5th September 2008

Castles in Spain

2008-09-05T11:14:00.025+01:00

We had expected a southerly progression of Gothic architecture as a theme of our journey, given that the Santiago pilgrimage's popularity and consequent wealth-generation reached its height during the period of Romanesque and Gothic blooming. But now our heads are spinning and we don't understand.

In France, that southerly drift of building materials had made sense, from the northern pale and hard stone to the dark granite and basalt of the volcanic centre and thence into the soft red bricks or sandstone of the south. We plotted the logical and techno-logical development from Romanesque to early, classic, rayonnant and flamboyant Gothic styles as the architects' confidence grew. We could sympathise when, in the far south, they turned their backs on Gothic's conceptual origins by making windows small again, shutting out the punishing light.

Yet beyond the mountains it all goes opaque. So many of the churches doubled as fortresses, lending bodily as well as spiritual protection. Could that be why we're so lost? Or is it that the buildings leap straight from the Romanesque into Baroque, ignoring evolution with just an occasional toe on the stepping stone of very late "florid" Gothic. We try to read the cathedrals and monasteries as a textbook of building, just as we could in Normandy and Picardy, but we are left perplexed. Guide books use terms like "herrerian" and "plateresque", words which mean nothing to us. There are blind west ends that have been built into the defensive walls, blind clerestories and chiselled stone balustrades for galleries where no gallery should be. Side chapels have domes or unnecesary vaulting and in many churches the choir - traditionally associated with the high altar at the symbolic 'head' of the church, part of the sanctuary separated from the public area - is to be found at the back instead, sometimes above your head in a mezzanine gallery.

An alternative explanation for these odd leaps of architecture might be that the monasteries and cathedrals along the Spanish pilgrim routes were already going strong in the time when Romanesque was still the architecture of repute; and no one saw the need to fiddle with the magnificent buildings until the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when South America brought Spain both fabulous wealth and the leading public relations job in holding back protestantism.

So in the Iglésia de Santiago in Puenta la Reina the Romanesque imagination in the portal has beasts and apostles, trees and demons in beautiful flat carving, and a looping fringe that hangs down in an almost Moorish fashion. Inside, the Romanesque severity of the walls, whose trancept was the merest nod towards a widening, carried flowing vaults of the extended ceiling of the late Gothic period effortlessly. The monastery of Santa María del Real in Iranche has a small cloister and church that are simple, peaceful and plain in the face of the Renaisance and Baroque additions elsewhere in the complex. Of the Cathedral in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, it is the chancel and apse that stay in the mind, with their unique patterned columns surrounding the high altar. Almost contemporay to our eyes, in their rhythmic patterning of the white stone lit from below. The small monastery church in San Juan de Ortega is filled with peace and an identifiable joy against the hubbub of pilgrims greeting each other outside. It reached the heights of Romanesque ingenuity and carving, where multiple receding window columns in the deep walls are a game with hidden light, as is the capital in a dark corner, where the carving of the Anunciation receives it´s ray of sunlight only twice a year, at the equinoxes.

In Torres del Rio there are traces of Moorish influence which reach even further back. The tiny Iglésia del San Sepulcro is a single-domed, octagonal graveside church that mingles elaborate, wide vaulting, chequerboard patterns and delicately carved stone lacework over the slit windows with the traditional curved arches of the Romanesque.

Some rare examples of 'real' Gothic surprise and delight us, but serve to confuse us further with how they got there. In Los Arcos the carved bays of the Gothic cloister are like fresh water after the Iglésia de Santa María's interior, where not an inch of the surface has been left unpainted or ungilded. The Iglésia de Santa María de Palacio in Logroño has a spikey steeple that is straight from Senlis in northern France. The wonderful Monastery of Santa María la Real in Nájera is rooted deeply in late Gothic and given its royal inheritance is a showpiece of humourous and naturalistic wood carving, in the darkly patina'd miserichords of the raised choir under roof vaults that are from the peak of Gothic conception.

Suddenly, in Burgos, there is a whole Cathedral whose external appearence, at least, is the direct cousin of northern French Gothic, from spiked steeple to arcade of kings.

But too often the bling of Baroque swept into these buildings and landed, gilded custard pie-like onto the Romanesque or Gothic structures. We had to peer hard to detect the good bones of the original under the cellulite ripplings of the seventeenth century in such places as the Iglésia de Santa María in Los Arcos, the Cathedral in Logroño or the many churches in Pamplona. Yet familiarity can sometimes confuse the senses and kill taste. With constant exposure we start to compare and make judgements. There are even moments when we think "it works", like in Puenta la Reina where somehow the austerity of the original church allowed it to carry the Baroque altar as an addition not an imposition.

Walking in half way through Mass in Navarette, I realised the service was in French and found myself giving the responses with everyone else, so stayed. As a fellow pilgrim, it appears the priest says Mass in the local church wherever he stops each night. There he stood in his white triangular robes with strips of gold in front of that soaring gold cacophony of an altar that is punctuated by vividly-painted statues of saints and apostles rising ever upwards. And for the first time I saw how it fitted. The priest with the outdated clothes and the over-the-top altar complimented each other in the same sense of mystic ceremony.

But in the face of the very ostentation of these churches the protestant roots of me rebelled. Bowing every time the priest mentioned Mary, Jesus or God reminded me of the rocking of Muslim or Jewish responses to words spoken; although in those religions I find nothing wrong with the idea. But saluting Mary first? No.

And the socialist roots in me couldn't accept that only the priest could taste the wine, quaffing deeply and rubbing the chalice with linen so every speck of red was removed from the danger of being touched by the populace. The rest had to be content with dry wafers. Jan Huss, where art thou? What happened to the right for everyone to commune "in both parts"? The self-satisfied trumpet blowing of Baroque gold must surely have lit the fires of both protestantism and revolution.

5th September 2008

Squalor

2008-09-05T10:24:00.015+01:00

Sadly, you get used to it. And quickly too. The flowering of crumpled tissue, white mostly, or pink, that gathers at the foot of trees and to the side of bushes just inches from the path. Anywhere that is half an hour's walk from picnic tables or a water tap: the moment nature comes a-calling you realise that hundreds were there before you. But nobody thinks to bury their leavings. It can't be pleasant for any local person who dares to go for a walk.

Then there's the trail of drinks cans and bottles, wrappings from cereal bars or chocolate, the thin twists of paper from bocadillos and tortillas bought in a bar and eaten along the way. It's as if all these pilgrims really are planning to walk back again, leaving a little waste-paper trail to find their way home.

The squalor sinks in deep and stays. We drop our rucksacks onto the dust at a lunch stop rather than look for a clean bit of ground or a grassy bank to put them on. There aren't any. And somehow dry dirt doesn't seem as dirty as wet mud. Our clothes, eight months on, are stained with sweat, rust and random blotches. We scarcely bother to brush the dust off our hats any more, much less wash then. In hostels, it's hard to hog the water long enough for a thorough wash so a faint overlay of soap has to thrash it out with the stale sweat. In such conditions tired feet don't really get clean, and start to smell.

There's a kind of moral squalor too. Once one person has dropped a wrapper or pushed their way through a fence, the others think it's alright to do the same. The plaques fixed to pillars to point pilgrims in the right direction are routinely stolen as souvenirs - by the pilgrims themselves.

It's wearying, this squalor, the more deeply we sink into it. But as I again decry the failure of Spanish villages to set up public toilets to prevent the desecration of their countryside, I'm reminded that no one should suffer squalor, a lack of hygiene, a lack of clean water. If we can't put up with it for a few weeks, how can it be enough to say of others "They've never known any different, it's what they're used to," or "They wouldn't know how to use a toilet"? Everyone has the right to and should be found the resources for clean water and proper sanitation, and everyone knows it.

Meanwhile, pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago could take a long hard look at their behaviour and give a thought to those following behind and all the people who have to live along the path of their rubbish.

3rd September 2008

The jaded season

2008-09-05T10:05:00.013+01:00

The leaves of sunflowers are withered yellow and their faces buckle and droop. Someone has skirted the field whittling eyes and smiles out of the unripe seeds, but it only makes the faces more sad.

Things feel tired at this season and in this place. An eye cast across the hillsides sees only bare ground, rocks and dust, burnt weeds. The soil dominates, even where vines and olive trees stand in rows, a brave facsimile of green.

The land has run dry of the growth of spring and summer but has not yet arrived at the fattening harvest of full autumn and the freshening of days. Has not yet found the final spurt to make it through to the end of the year.

Or is it just us who are jaded? We are too close to the end and not close enough. The transition into Spain still bewilders and drains us.

Yet all the pilgrims seem weary, even though most only set out in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. That first day over the Roncesvalles pass did for them. They have lost that France-hosted knack of forming noisy, happy groups ad hoc in cafes. Here, there are too many languages and no one knows how to address each other. So we huddle in our twos and threes, perplexed and wearied by the road. And we eye the shrines to recent pilgrims who have died along the way, which are more common now than the rare ancient crosses.

Because the road, too, feels weary; a relentless stride towards the end. It has given up on the effort needed to charm us and paces briskly and efficiently on, concreted or paved as often as not; following the straight line of the motorway if need be. It delivers pilgrims in pellets to the staging posts of morning bars and evening hostels. We are enough to make a jaded living for the people along the way, but too many for a lasting memory. We are a business, a commodity. There is no spontaneity in the way we are greeted when we arrive, and no curiosity. Avoiding eye contact with us is safer.

Or is it just that it is the back end of the year? What would it be like here in spring, I wonder. What would the colours of Navarre be then?

So we focus on what tiny pleasures this dry, tired season can spare. An old man pulls down branches with the crook of his stick to gather the first few almonds that have shed their green coats. A single grape plucked from an abandoned vineyard is sharp and full in my mouth, promising the sugar to come. A swallowtail butterfly settles on the dust at our feet. A tiny, red and blue humming bird has got lost in the field of golden stubble. The smell of sage, fig leaves and unripe blackberries. A husky dog barking endlessly into the blue abyss of the Rioja plain from the Alto del Perdón - what had he imagined he saw that made him so tenacious?

27th August 2008

Walking Spanish down the hall

2008-08-23T10:28:00.012+01:00

These things are different in Spain:

People don´t say "hello" as a new arrival enters a shop or bar.

We walk in an almost constant chain of people and have to modulate our pace, so we don´t trip over them.

Bits of lost clothing are snagged on branches at regular intervals. You could dress yourself from these items of drying laundry.

The hostels sleep ninety to a room. Or more.

Village streets are of concrete, rapid to lay and cheap.
We can´t communicate.

There is a mania for covering countryside paths with nice, tidy, easy ribbons of concrete. Ouch.

In villages and old town centres you can´t see a shop or bar until you are upon it: no new plate glass and neon here. If it´s in the long, closed hours of the afternoon, all you´ll see (or walk right past) are the closed shutters of what might be a barn door.

In Pamplona the pedestrian crossings count down the seconds till you can cross and again the seconds you have left to cross. It doesn´t change people´s behaviour, but the little green man speeding up towards the end makes people laugh.

Spanish people are fatter than French people: No, that´s not right. There are thin Spanish people. But a lot of Spanish people are a lot fatter.
Breakfast can contain a tower of freshly friend donuts dipped into melted chocolate. Or toasted bread spread with olive oil and salt. See above.

In laundrettes, women in white take your clothes and wave you away for two hours, to go look around.

There are thousands of adverts on TV, most of them while you´re waiting for the weather forecast.

There are always too many walkers for the café´s chairs.

Fresh-pressed orange juice is everywhere.

Drinks are cheaper.
Set menus, especially if aimed at pilgrims, are pretty industrial-tasting.
Double beds are rare.
Everything happens late.

Yellow arrows are much harder to spot than red and white flashes.

The idea of savoury things for breakfast is not strange.

Dogs are much quieter.

They´ve heard of fruit smoothies and Oil of Olay. But not Orangina.
Even bars shut for vast hours of the afternoon.
Children stay up late. Very late. Usually playing and screaming outside our room.
Church clocks don´t stop chiming till midnight.
There´s yet another computer keyboard layout to learn.

20th August 2008

Jeux sans frontiers

2008-08-23T09:34:00.046+01:00

At around three on Sunday afternoon we entered Spain. After seven months and seventeen days, the crossing wasn´t entirely as planned, but I think we made it within half an hour of each other.

Leaving behind the festival of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, which had cheerfully gathered us in to two nights of drinking, eating, parading and concerts (plus an amusing cod version of the Pamplona bull running), we rose swiftly through the scarves of morning cloud that lay rumpled on the hills´shoulders like the Basque neckerchieves of last night´s revelllers. The air was moist but not too cold: 17 ºC or so, and although overcast there were shafts of sun to select this field of sheep or that white-washed village for special display. The lower foothills to the Pyrénées were sharp green pyramids piped with the darker green of low trees and hedges.

Higher up, trees closed around us then opened onto the short-grazed wild pastureland where the long-haired Basque sheep and herds of horses have right of way over cars and pilgrims. Then bracken, turning to autumn at its base, and heather turning to purple lined our grassy shortcut across the shoulder of a hill. Above the first pass, twelve Red Kites had found something to gather about, ominously.

I hadn´t expected this. I had buried my fear of the high places and set out with confident visions of the moment of arriving at the Spanish border, so it was was disturbing that the approach to the Pyrénées was quite this suburban. There were walkers all around us, some stopping to stretch and loosen up on their first day´s walk of the Camino. For the first time Italian and Spanish was added to the French, Dutch and German we heard spoken. And the road was a constant slalom of sightseeing tourists and locals descending for bread and Mass. Large roadside panels instructed pilgrims to walk in Indian file and warned drivers to look out for sheep and walkers. So it was both an easier and harder walk than I had imagined.

The first fifteen kilometers or so out of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port are on road, starting out between the neat gardens of detached family homes and then winding away to hamlets and finally scattered farms till eventually the bare mountaintop is reached. And it was steep: something I had expected. I climbed 3000 feet in 10 miles. Coming out of Conques a few days before we had climbed nearly 2000 feet in a mile or so, an even steeper gradient, at the end of which every stitch of clothing down to my knees was dripping with sweat and my lungs were exploding. But once it was done, it was done, and there was a café for a warming drink and, after a while, sun to heat me through.

But the Route Napoleon, as it is known, just went on and on till the sweat was way past my knees; and the higher we climbed the cooler it grew. My lungs were done exploding: my heart was about to join them. And people around me were still talking! Then the whole anti-immune, hey-let´s-attack-my-own-body thing kicked in and I had three options: keep going uphill faster and faster to keep my temperature above zero; stop for something to eat to get energy and die of hypothermia in five seconds; or fling myself at that lone 4x4 just appearing over the horizon. I chose the latter. Hitchhiking is not something I´d do at home, but on the Camino it´s different.

The confused but unltimately wonderful Spanish couple I thrust myself upon, Esther and Mikel, had soon swept my body and my bag into their car, tried and failed to persuade David to join us, and then taken me on a jolly roller-coaster of a ride on the mountain roads into Spain. They didn´t even seem to mind when, after dramatically altering the course of their Sunday drive out for a picnic from their home near San Sebastian, I then shouted to pull over quick, as I had to vomit; after which I was installed in the front seat. Esther and Mikel took me right to the door of the hotel, waving away my suggestion that I could get a taxi from Val Carlos. They pressed their picnic upon me and were generally such cheerful and generous saviour-angels that I hope very much they´ll visit us in London one day so I can thank them properly. Will the rest of us do the same when a wild-looking stranger flings themselves at our car? Even more fittingly for me, perhaps, was that my crossing of the frontier was in the midst of an unavoidable crash course in remembering the Spanish I had once learned. By evening, while my heart, lungs and innards were still recovering from their pummelling, I had the consolation of already thinking in Spanish with the French tucked back into the storage part of my brain.

David, meanwhile, strode on and on, overtaking all other walkers and enjoying the freedom to push his body hard for a change. Occasionally we have seen sculptures on the gothic portals of cathedrals, of the Devil tempting a pilgrim with water to drink or a soft bed. The good pilgrim always refuses; and in this we can see that David passes the good pilgrim test.

There were two more steep climbs to come of nearly a thousand feet in just over a mile to the Col de Benarte and the last great rise to the Spanish border at the Col de Lepolder. The landscape there is a reversal of the high bare mountain or pine trees of expectation. It is a broadleaf forest and a small monument is now all that marks the crossing into Spain.

That was David´s job nearly done for the day. A rapid descent of nine and a half miles, dropping some 1800 feet, lay ahead into the Roncesvalles of legend - too rapid, according to his toes and shins - and the massive monastery/hostel where already anxious pilgrims were stacking their rucksacks in order of arrival, hoping there would be enough beds and hot water for them when the hostel eventually opened its doors. But now even David let the Devil in, downing an icecream and heading off to the hotel in Burguète instead, to find me, the bath, and a cold beer.

17th August 2008

Flashes

2008-08-13T17:51:00.002+01:00

Deep in the gloaming of a wood; distant on a metal bridgehead in the mist; or glowing with borrowed radiance on a rock at our feet, the red and white stripes that mark the Grandes Randonées of France have been our friends and guides for eight months. In a day or two we will leave them to be faithless with the yellow arrows of the Spanish camino.

In French they are called balises but to us they are flashes, and a part of our everyday conversation. Simply and consistently the horizontal paint on any convenient structure has said yes, we were on the right path. Tilted into a cross, the red and white dissuaded us from any wrong turn and where a white elbow was added, left or right, we knew that a turn was coming. Simple, cheap, trusted.

13th August 2008

A cross marks the spot

2008-08-13T17:44:00.004+01:00

France is thickly sown with the crosses of centuries that mark turnings and crossroads, places of death or pilgrimage; that mark thanks for successful overseas missions or for deliverance from difficulty. It doesn’t matter what the crosses are made of. It is the surge of emotion they represent that moves us.

There are ancient Celtic carvings in grey stone in the Basque country; while on the road to Espalion by the Lot river, a romanesque cross in pink granite shows Saint Hilarian carrying his head home to his mother after it was chopped off by the Saracens.

Many are the tall iron crosses with intricate garlands, hearts or cherubs that are the work of some local blacksmith. I remember suffering Christs in eerie flesh tones against the steel skies of Picardy. And the red-painted four-by-four posts nailed together under a tree at the turning for Vézeley. Was it the glowing red paint or the yellow rape in the field behind that made this simple cross such a landmark?

In spring we read the “Song of Roland”, the early Medieval poem of the legend of Charlemagne and his nephew Roland, who beat the Moors at the Roncevaux pass from France into Spain. Roland died valiantly in the battle and on the rock where his body fell a cross was erected, still known as the Cross of Roland. It is a montjoie, named after Charlemagne’s battle cry and a word still used for so many of the crosses of the St Jacques’ route – cries of triumph and thanks in high places.

I don’t know if the people of the Auvergne are naturally more pious than their compatriots or whether in the splendidly austere Aubrac plateau with its summer cattle drives and frozen winters, the need for guidance and reassurance is that much greater. A fifteen-mile walk here is punctuated by fifteen or more crosses. Before 1182, when a Benedictine hospice was built at Nasbinals, pilgrims had to traverse all 120 kilometres of the Aubrac plateau without shelter. The sight of a cross against the horizon must have been especially welcome then. But not all these crosses are of such long standing. In 2004 a new cross was placed on the path above Aumont-Aubrac in recognition that we each have a cross to bear. That one was splendidly carved and polished, but more often two branches are laced together with twine and propped upright in a cairn of stones to which every passing pilgrim adds their pebble. These latter-day pilgrims’ crosses are, I feel instinctively, both a guide for fellow walkers and joyful shouts of thanks for the view, for the peace, for the freedom simply to walk.

10th August 2008

The way of the stars

2008-08-13T17:09:00.002+01:00

Once upon a very long time ago, back before electricity, people knew which way to go for the shrine at Santiago de Compostela because they could follow the Milky Way. Campus Stellae, the field of stars. Or was Compostela so named for the field where the shepherd Pelago discovered the body of St James under a guiding star? It's a point hotly debated.

Of equal debate is what we shall eat tonight. Shall it be the boiled eggs with clams and chive butter on soldiers? Or the veal kidneys and lobster with figs? For dessert, the soup of red fruits, perhaps? Because the Grand Hôtel Prouhèze in Aumont-Aubrac has a Michelin-starred restaurant and is the reason we are staying here. It also has the fattest cat (at 10 kilos) and dog I have ever encountered. Michelin-reared, and for that the chef and owner Pierre Roudgé makes no apology the next morning as he pours melted chocolate into my cup.

The Hostellerie du Clos in Chablis was our first Michelin star of the trip, although Au Pied des Marais in Normandy was well on its way. Sadly the three stars of Michel Bras in Laguiole were denied us this August, but the glittering star of the Hôtel des Pyrénées in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port will fortify us for the ascent into Spain. A way of the stars, indeed.

It’s said that whether your pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is religiously-inspired or not, everyone comes to know themselves more honestly than when they started. And so, I guess, we do.

5th August 2008

Praying for world peace

2008-08-13T17:03:00.004+01:00

In Le-Puy-en-Velay in the Cathedral at the top of seemingly endless stone steps, a service is held at seven o’clock each morning for the pilgrims about to set out on their walk. This is the most popular departure point in France, so for most people at the service the steps back down from the Cathedral do indeed signal their first footsteps along the road to Santiago.

The priest was a young man who devoted much thought and care to making what might have been a ritual performance into something personal for each of us. Then he invited us to take from a basket a slip of paper on which visitors had written their prayers. Each pilgrim would take one and pray for the writer every day along the road. Carried away by the occasion, I took one. Then worried what I would be asked to do.

Phew! “World peace and harmony among all religions.” Tick: I can ask for that. And for the monks struggling for freedom for their country in Tibet. Yep, I’ll go along with that too. Then a prayer for the health in old age of the writer’s aunt and uncle. A thing that, thinking of my own relatives and friends, I can certainly sympathise with. Next, touchingly, the writer asked for comfort after his “first heartbreak” at age sixteen. Ah yes, that way lies wisdom. And a PS: please could I pray for his parents, because he loves them a lot despite annoying them endlessly.

So most conscientiously each day, at a turn in the track or in the cool of a village chapel, I pray for world peace. And all the rest.

2nd August 2008

Messing about in boats

2008-07-31T11:05:00.008+01:00

Our paddles snagged in clinging brambles and we forced ourselves free of the bank. I wondered if this had been a mistake: just as I'd come to terms with the mountains of the Auvergne, I found myself a whole new comfort zone to fall outside.

The cloudy water with its orange tints of iron hid the small rocks on which the canoe immediately beached. A technique somewhere between pole-vaulting and pogo-ing propelled the boat further into the stream, so with burning muscles – those arm muscles which are rarely used during a year of walking - we began our next section of St Jack's route: boating on the Loire between Retournac and Bas-en-Basset. Just a couple of days' walk from Le Puy-en-Velay, we had reasoned that going by canoe still classed as going under our own steam; and with advice from the giggling tourist office staff in St-Bonnet-le-Chateau, we turned the idea’s germ into reality.

Less than a minute later, flowing freely now with the current, the first boulders appeared from nowhere and hurtled against the pink plastic prow in front of me. We were pitched sideways, but a memory of canoeing was lodged in our hips and we instinctively leaned upstream till the canoe steadied and we could push and heave at solid water till we once again pointed downstream. Time for a quick assessment: rather too much water sloshing around our feet but otherwise no damage.

But already we were rushing into the next rapids and my arms were acting like slinky coils - great at stretching out but wobbly on the return. It crossed my mind to phone the canoe company to say we'd changed our minds and could they please pick us up next time they were passing?

Then deeper, slower water came just in time and we let the boat drift while we rested. To our right the high russet cliffs of the Gorges de la Loire rose free of their skirts of pine forests. To our left, on the concave bend, silt had formed meadows where, on this steamy Saturday, weekend fishermen stood silently.

The sun broke through the early river-birthed fog and flashes of blue revealed, at long last, a French kingfisher at work. There were herons too, adults and juveniles, who stood chiseled against the water until at the last minute they dragged away like reluctant teenagers. Later, where the Gorges closed around us and all was forest, a bird of prey - perhaps a Milan Royal or Red Kite - remained petrified on its lookout as we passed underneath, gazing up at his pale throat and cocked eye.

The river didn't stay calm for long, of course. Every silent interlude pierced only by the mewling of the buzzards was followed by the rising chatter that turned to thunder as we came upon the next rapids. We remembered to paddle slowly as we approached, raking the view for hints of the line to take. Where did the reflected light seem to create the 'V' that would point the way? While looking for the farther boulders that just broke the surface we too often missed those lying under the near water, which threw us off our best-planned approaches. After choosing our line and steering - wonkily - towards it, we mostly ended up scraping the side of the biggest rocks and bucking violently in their lee. Which was how we learned to just go with it. Once you've lost control, the next best tactic is to let the canoe decide the line to take. Soon we were running the rapids like pros; my yelped swear words when I saw the size of the drop ahead seemed to help. Waves broke high over the front and into the boat; and twice we had to pull over to empty it. But the exhilaration was reward enough.

By the end of the day we had covered the twenty-one kilometers slightly faster than we would have walked them - but only slightly. So it was a relief we had decided on only one day of canoeing - our shoulders, lower backs and our bottoms are honed for just the one form of exertion this year.

28th July 2008

Blessings

2008-07-29T08:58:00.010+01:00

We couldn’t help a sense of triumph approaching Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. The final few days were in the roundly green rounded hills of the French Basque country, where we lodged in gîtes d'étape like "real" pilgrims and ate our evening meals at long tables of people all heading in the same direction. Although those Pyrénées that we would have to cross were now in close focus, with a clear blue sky I felt that the enthusiasm and companionship of those whom we had come to know over the previous fortnight would surely float me up over the mountains without a care. But we had decided to bring forward our next visit home in order to have a clear run, later, at finishing the missing French section in the Massif Central. So rather than check into the hostel with the others we slept in crisp white sheets with a crisp white bathroom attached at the Hôtel des Pyrénées. And the next day we went home.

After deciding to go, the thought of home came in strongly and with it the urgent desire to see my parents. Traditionally, when a pilgrim set out for Santiago de Compostela or one of the other far-flung destinations, he or she would receive a blessing from their parish priest and be accompanied to the edge of the village by friend, relatives and neighbours. The pilgrim should also first have asked permission from their spouse or close family. Permission to be away for so long and to abandon their affairs to the care of others.

Before we set out I never got round to going to the local church, St George's in Queen's Square, to ask for a blessing. Too embarrassed, since I’ve only set foot there twice, although we're friendly with the staff. Nor did we ask permission of our families. We simply announced our intentions and basked in the interest it aroused. Once or twice during the year I have been to church services, some specifically for pilgrims where those continuing on their way are blessed and sent with prayers. I remember the glorious singing at the midday service in Vézelay. The hesitant manner of the village priest in the tiny hamlet of Las Cabanas as he washed the feet of all present and read out the names of those who had passed through in the previous week, so we could join him in praying for their success. I remember the happy timing of reaching the remarkable Romanesque church of Chamalières-sur-Loire just as one parishioner was clearing up after Mass. She welcomed us and wished us "bon chemin", then added a simple "the prayers of Chamalières will go with you."

Although by St Jean I had been enjoying myself, I have over the year grown wary of failing again. Being home had removed me from the place where I had to face that truth about myself. Then just before we left - bless those pilgrim gîtes d'étape - David was besieged by bed bugs and by the time we arrived in London he needed antibiotics, antihistamine and cortisone in multiple doses to offset his allergic reactions. So now it was David's morale that wavered and for a while he questioned whether to carry on. It wouldn't be me pulling out this time.

The latest newsletter from the Confraternity of St James was waiting for us in London with a book of reflections by twenty five pilgrims about the journey and what it meant to them. Given my thoughts, three articles struck me strongly. A pagan wrote of the pilgrimages undertaken by all faiths and of his own Camino as a way of keeping a connection with the earth. A Methodist minister said that he had been called to be a minister - which he found immensely difficult - but had by accident discovered his vocation as a pilgrim. The testing and times of reflection on the walk helped him deal with his ministry more clearly as a journey. In a third article a woman questioned what was a "real" pilgrim? She worried that she was distinctly unreal, staying in hotels and having her bags carried while walking only short stages each year. But her words revealed she clearly is a pilgrim, as real as any other, facing her own challenges and problems and learning how to deal with them; and growing in herself as a result.

But still there was a hole inside myself and I knew that I needed to see my parents and to receive in some sense a blessing from them. It was a very flying visit, and beautifully exclusive. Talking about the year, I realised how much I would let other people down, not just myself, if I didn’t finish what we had started. I also realised that I can do it. Probably. When it came time to leave I asked Mum and Dad to pray for me to help me over the mountains still to come. The request took them by surprise but they responded instantly and, I think, with pleasure, in a group hug that left us each wiping away an embarrassed tear and laughing sheepishly.

18th July 2008

Another update

2008-07-13T19:34:00.002+01:00

Just to let you know that after a long absence from technology I've just been able to upload about five little missives and photos - enjoy! And take a look at David's latest selection too ...

Designed to be friends

2008-07-13T19:06:00.014+01:00

There are moments that glow. An astral alignment of place and time and people that come to represent the things we dreamed of from this journey.

Like the movement of the stars there’s perhaps less random chance in these moments than we might like to believe. The hand of design is at play – an intelligent designer, you might say, setting the scene with care and understanding, laying out the props for their own corners of paradise.

At Lasserre de Haut in Gascony Joelle Pfeiffer bought a big house with a few old barns on top of a hill. She imagined a beautiful family home for herself and her new husband. But people kept knocking on the door on hot days asking for water, or on rainy days asking to shelter in the barns. That was how she discovered her home was right on the route to Compostela. She invited these people in and talked to them, and so learned what it is that walkers need. Then she opened up her dream home into a dream resting-place for them.

We arrived on her hilltop in a baking mid-afternoon. All day the group of eight who had met the evening before had passed and re-passed each other as is the rhythm of the road, alternating rests and surges and with each passing learning a few more things about each other. We arrived with Adrian, the sixteen-year-old Swiss lad on holiday with his aunt and uncle. Adrian was hot and even more tired than us, but he had struck out ahead with the gleam of a promised swimming pool in his eye. As we got close, we thought the same thought: “It can’t be here; this is way too sophisticated for pilgrims!”

But for pilgrims it was, plus a few stylish bedrooms for holiday guests or self-indulgent walkers. The big, grey-stone farmhouse dominates the bamboo-shaded terrace, the wide gardens and the low smooth valley of vines and pastureland where we first heard sheep bells. The solid barns have been converted, on one side to dormitories and boot- and clothes-drying hangars; and on the other to secluded private bedrooms with their own terraces for lounging, hot showers and cool shutters and a soft bed with oil paintings to gaze on. Sweaty clothes were taken off to a washing machine and returned dried and folded, and those unlucky enough not to be staying there could buy drinks and sandwiches and sit slowly before the view like the rest of us.

For it was the garden and the valley that made this most closely resemble a paradise. The shaded swimming pool – where Adrian was already floating in his own world when we went to explore – wandered down to a terrace of wicker sofas and sun loungers with deep-coloured linen cushions under the bougainvillea. Beyond the flowers and young trees the wide lawn offered the temptation of hammocks or strolls to look over the vines. There were family pictures and books to borrow. But it was at dinner that the spell took hold. An afternoon of swimming, snoozing and gossip had made us into a group and round the long table under the reed canopy the simple meal with fresh southern-tasting flavours was laced with hilarity over absurd European outlooks. French, English, German or Swiss, none of us had before seen flat peaches when the world was quite happy with round ones. It was a puzzle that the two kittens, carefully placed to charm, distracted us from. Every few minutes someone would break off, gaze out into the valley that was hazy with an apricot sunset and marvel that we had been allowed to live such a Vogue life, even for just one night. And we would all fall silent in agreement.

At the end of the meal we drifted away, 1930s house party-style, to table football in the outdoor sitting room, to a stroll round the wild flower meadow, to a hectic ride on borrowed bikes the four kilometres to Montréal and the nearest TV set for the Euro 2008 final.

Six days later the tone was very different but the touch of a considerate stylist was again evident. The Gîte du Cambarrat in the Béarn from where Isabelle and Nicolas Champetier de Ribes farm and work as a fabric designer and landscape gardener respectively, is the farmhouse dependent on their old family domain of Cambarrat, which means “enclosed field”, for the clearing surrounded by forests where the chateau and farm stand, close to Maslacq. This is a pilgrim hostel in a more basic style. For self-propelled pilgrims only, staying in small dormitories where the deep wood walls make a nest and the bunks are like berths in an old ship, in the glow of their individual lamps. Here the toilet is out in the garden, near the washing lines. No machine, but as you arrive Isabelle contentedly points out where to do hand washing and has left a full bottle of detergent to help. You can cook your own supper in the long kitchen built into the end of the barn – or you can, as we did, accept the offer of demi-pension and a relaxed four-course meal prepared and left for us to heat up and eat in our own good time.

From the moment we stepped into the cosy bedroom, a deep restfulness came over us. Nothing seemed too precious or demanded unnatural behaviour. There were three of us that afternoon: a German man called Klaus, whom we had met the night before, had arrived early and was already rousing drowsily from one snooze as we arrived. It wasn’t long before we followed his example, and in the extended, overcast but warm afternoon three oddly tired pilgrims cuddled into their bunks and slept or read the hours away, rising renewed and freshly optimistic into the evening.

It was then that we started to notice the care behind the style of this gîte d’étap. Its atmosphere of old, unimportant family bric-à-brac, easy to live with and unassuming, has been created with items selected for their beauty. Duvets and pillows made from the rich linen fabrics Isabelle designs; an old, rough-stone sink with a charming curve is just the right shape for the zinc bucket to stand in. Earthenware jugs catch the low light by the window, Vermeer-like. A hat stand welcomes our hats and a stove-top kettle invites us to brew tisanes or coffee as we want.

It is small and personal. When Isabelle came to take payment and to stamp our pilgrim record books, the ‘stamp’ was carefully hand drawn for each of us, as she explained the symbolism of the banjo for her husband’s passion, the stripes of the Basque country for the linens she designs, the enclosed field. As we finished our meal, Nicolas appeared to clear away and we got talking about his banjo playing – then he returned to profit from our interest and grab some extra playing time from his busy day. Not banjo like I have ever heard before. Five-stringed bluegrass music and arrangements of Vivaldi’s harpsichord music, and Nicolas’ own classical compositions that sounded like running streams.

Perhaps little of the setting or the behaviour that night was left to chance; the “design eye” of this cultured pair was evident once you had woken up to it. But because of it, we and Klaus became friends during one of the most memorable evenings of the trip and each of us received the deep rest we needed, in our different ways, at that particular moment of that particular week.

10th July 2008

Life

2008-07-13T19:05:00.012+01:00

The stone rose above the water line like the crest of a mountain, the peak of an iceberg. It would be a good resting place, on which a white layer of quartz described a crisp cross in the grey granite. A good omen.

The nymph swam towards the rock and grappled with the smooth slopes, leg after leg hauling its muddy carcass into the blue air. Its mother would not have recognised it in its low-lying state, its armour spiky and defensive, sludge-brown with ages. It stepped awkwardly and uncertainly into the sun.

There it rested and was vulnerable. The heat shuddered through it like anguish, rending the armour. A beauty stepped forth, shivering with the excitement of pale green wings and a needle body that felt the breeze and knew its meaning.

Knew it too soon, for the fresh-born dragonfly embraced the breeze while it was still a tender innocent. The breeze took its fledgling wings and lifted it, up to the bulrushes and down to lie gently on the water. And a trout, in a midday doze, saw the flash of green and snapped it, and the dragonfly could never know the beauty of its iridescence.

4th July 2008

The devil came too

2008-07-13T19:05:00.011+01:00

I’ve never before considered myself badly menstrual. A few hours of stomach ache that a couple of pain killers and a snooze will deal with; a morning of taciturnity and bumping my head on cupboards, and that’s it. But this year has revealed the devil that lurks inside. I suppose it’s the sheer physicality of the undertaking that brings bodily drama to the fore. I’ve said before that this long walk is much more a study in the physical than the spiritual. And I’ve come to see that for a walking woman, her body is in a much more direct relationship than for a man. Forget all that stuff about women being naturally more of the mind, more spiritual or intellectual. Ok, so that comes too, but our bodies have a way of bringing our minds right back into the realm of the physical – and with a bump. It’s no wonder ancient superstitions link the monthly cycle and labour pains with the devil.

A body stripped down and balancing daily muscle fatigue, heat, thirst, hunger, beating sun or shivering rain does not conserve energy to plump the buffers of civilised constraint. We walk gently and steadily, enjoying the views and laughing with new-made friends and then – POW! – the cycle turns. The world and I turn black. I curse the bed I sleep on and the floorboards under my feet. I curse the green grass and the stony track, the mud of the forests. I spit hatred on David and his guilt for the walk and I remain silent to the comments of our companions. I glare at the road as if glaring would flatten the descents and the rises and suck the moisture from the sky. For in the devil-drawn blackness of my mood I alone have called down the night-long rage of thunder and torrents from a previously clear sky. It swirls around us in our wood-cabin bedroom and sends the farm dogs howling to the safety of their master.

Nothing will appease me or my devil. The walk must end now; never will I tolerate such an undertaking again. I avert my eyes from the black-shadowed mountains in the distance, knowing that to acknowledge them will spread depression and suicide across the land. David has learned not to speak to me, to let me stalk into the distance without a thought for him. I walk until I get there, wherever there is, ignoring the scene.

And then it is over. The devil bleeds away and the morning sun rises cloudless. I smile and David smiles back. Flowers again dare to blossom in the verges and birds to try out a song or two in my presence. The Pyrenees shassey their silver shoulders and coyly smooth their pale green skirts around us. It may only be the seductive, treacherous face of the serpent – but it is a lot easier to live with.

7th July 2008

The hare and the tortoise

2008-07-13T19:04:00.003+01:00

“Ach, you came from London! When did you leave?”
“1st January.”
“And when will you arrive?”
“End of September.”
“Ach, so long….” But you can tell from the face opposite that they’re thinking, “How can it possibly take six and a half months to get from London to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port? Martin and Cathérine and Klaus and all those others set out from Geneva or Munich, and they only left in May…”

So we hasten to explain our tortuous route and the self-indulgence of days off to visit towns. Sometimes, under cross-examination, we’ll attempt to explain the stops and starts, the jumping-over and going back to recoup the Auvergne, the visits with friends. In the sunshine it makes less sense, when all the long-distance ones faced and overcame the same rains.

Tortuous. Tortoise-uous. David says I’m a reptile: I cease to function in the cold and come alive when a patch of sunlight falls on me. That’s fair: the tortoise has long been my totem. I thought it was because tortoises seem wise; they watch the world carefully and quietly, seeing all sides and weighing things up slowly before arriving at fair-minded decisions during a long life. But now I realise otherwise. Reptilian and sun-loving, the tortoise wants to sleep in the warm all winter. Yet, as Aesop taught all children, the tortoise starts slow but gets there in the end.

“I aim to do thirty-five kilometres in a day,” say the hares, “sometimes maybe forty. If I get up at 5.30 in the morning I can do that. I must be in Santiago by ….”

We gasp and marvel, appropriately. We admire their strength and determination, especially as hares are solitary creatures and can be seen running on the horizon alone, shunning moral support. So it’s odd, then, three or four days later when we thought them far out of range, to recognise a sack or a stick in a village café and to greet with pleasure these hares whom we admired. The reasons vary. Blisters or tendonitis; sometimes an overwhelming weariness holds them back, or those moments of congestion in the hostels that pushed them beyond even their stamina. Or maybe even a moment of curiosity to stop and look around.

30th June 2008

There must be a reason

2008-07-13T19:03:00.002+01:00

“So why are you here?” The question draws looks of rapidly concealed panic followed by a sly narrowing of the eyes and a glance off to the distant horizon. Or else by a blank stare then a frown while the person thus confronted struggles to remember.

“Euuh … I heard there were some pretty places to see,” we might eventually hear, or “I lost my job.” Sometimes it’s “I saw an exhibition in the Cathedral.”

What we don’t hear, ever, is that the pilgrim is making for Santiago because he or she believes that proximity to the relics of St James will provide a miracle cure for some illness or will speed their souls through purgatory towards heaven. Or at least, not in so many words.

One of our more naïve preconceptions about walking the Camino de Santiago (right up there in naivety with thinking it would be easy) was that each of our fellow travellers would have strong and specific reasons for undertaking the challenge. It hadn’t occurred to us that most would have the same woolly rationale that we had for setting out. Now that we are many days into the easy if short-lived intimacies among people undergoing the same privations we have the chance to pose the question. But the answers are far from compelling.

First, to be equitable, I should state our own excuses – or at least as we present them in exchange for other people’s revelations:

We have wanted to take a year off for some adventure for a while now; it had always been part of our long-term plans. The intention had been to travel in the Americas, north and south. But with David’s grandmother being of a great age and unsteady health, we didn’t want to be so far away in an emergency. Then three years ago, on a holiday in the Auvergne, we went for a walk and kept criss-crossing some strange scallop shell signs and got curious … The next day, visiting Conques, we saw hikers enter the monastery buildings behind the church as if it were a youth hostel. It was so mysterious and beautiful, and we wondered what we would have to do to, to be allowed to sleep there too. And so we discovered the St Jacques route, which fitted with our liking for those slow travels through a country that gradually reveal the evolution of its topography, climate, agriculture and architecture.

And so for more of other people’s reasons:
“I’ve been bringing up my children on my own and now they have both left home. It’s destabilising. I need to time to find myself again.”
“Because it’s cheap.”
“To see if my body can be relied on that much.”
“To have time to think.”
“I wanted a long walk to challenge myself but on this route I knew I would often have company. My parents were relieved about that.”
“It’s a holiday with exercise.”
“Thirty years ago I met a man walking home again from Santiago. I thought that was wonderful and promised myself I would go there. And an old friend agreed to come with me. We leave our families behind – it feels a little guilty.”
“To visit other parts if France I don’t know.”
“Because so many of my friends have already been.”
“Because I read a book.”
“I had a few weeks to spare before harvest,”
“Because when he walks with his friends it is too steep and I can’t keep up. This walk we can do together.”

Given that these days the “get out of purgatory free” card is rarely played, it’s wondrous how many human beings put themselves – voluntarily – through rituals and rigour. Not just the hundred thousand and more who travel to Santiago de Compostela each year but all those other thousands who go to the Ganges, to Mecca, to the Barabar Hills, to Jerusalem or Rome. And all those secular tests of marathon runs, pentathlons, mountain hikes or cycle rides for charity. Given the costs, the perils, the discomfort and often the boredom of it, why do we do it? What in our psyche seeks such ritualistic pain?

It seems the need for ritual testing must be part of our makeup. Tribes both ancient and far-flung have or used to have rites of passage marking the transition to adulthood, and they mostly involved fear or pain. The games of “chicken”, the drinking contests at University all fit the same mould. Just because more modern religions have transmuted their rites into mere symbolic or intellectual tests doesn’t take away the need for a ritual. Nor does it seem to take away the need for pain and difficulty. When baptism by total immersion was replaced by a token wetting of the forehead, it wasn’t long before a pilgrimage or a stretch living as a hermit came to be the ambition of all Christians. And I bet there’s a similar progression in other religions too. Medieval Christian pilgrimages may have been elective (or may not: many were prescribed by church or criminal courts to atone for some sin) but they were clearly answering to a deep-felt need. There’s some kind of validation that we’re all after – of ourselves and our bodies, perhaps, but mostly it’s a spiritual urge to be tested and to pass the test that is within us, whether we recognise it as such, or not.

Of equal interest to the reasons for starting the pilgrim route, if not more, are the reasons why people stop. These are harder to track down. If people give up they are likely to flee, so we have to rely on the hearsay of the accommodation owners or “hospitaleros” for information. We hear of broken ankles from slipping in muddy tracks in the rain. Broken arms after falling off a bike in a steep lane. There have been foot-engulfing and infected blisters with which some pilgrims manage to stagger on for days before conceding defeat. There is the occasional heart attack or hip operation tested too soon. Bed bugs. And then there were those who simply couldn’t stand the rain a day longer. A Japanese man who has three times walked from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago decided to give up on the French path because it wiggled too much. One woman admitted she had walked successive sections for a few years, but life was too short, she wants to do something different next year. A German man was leaving the road to enter a retreat in a Buddhist monastery.

But my favourite reason came from the woman who left us at Nogaro to go and pick cherries on a friend’s farm in Switzerland. Now that seems perfectly reasonable to me.

23rd June 2008

Automated living

2008-06-27T19:29:00.004+01:00

In the absense of anything much that's open in small towns and villages, the French have found a way for some of life's essentials to carry on. Sadly light on job creation opportunities, the vending machine is nonetheless building a role for itself where real service has died out.

If you are stuck for entertainment with only cringe-inducing cabaret on TV or the cinema that has closed, you can always go to the hole-in-the-wall, insert your credit card and dial up a video or two, then post them back through the same hole when you're done. For more energetic entertainment it is nothing to see a condom-vending machine on the street - outside a school, a pharmacy, a post office, it doesn't matter.

You can weigh your letters and parcels, select your destination and class of post, print your stamp and pop your post in another slot, all without speaking to a postal employee; while as one of the ubiquitous motor caravan drivers you're able to park overnight in numerous laybys or picnic areas and, again with a flash of your credit card, access a modern tardis for water, waste disposal and electricity.

As well as the increasingly common - though only in cities - bicycles that you can borrow via a smart-card, in Troyes I saw my favourite vending service so far: at the car park outside the centre you can liberate an umberella or even a baby buggy for the duration of your visit. And there, the vended goods were free.

24th June 2008

Here comes the sun (and I say ...)

2008-06-22T14:38:00.010+01:00

A few rays of sun change everything. All life is governed by the climate and although humankind has learned to make adjustments and created technologies to bend the weather to our wishes, it's still only bending and not a volte face.

While the weather has been an ever-present factor for us its impact on the communities through which we pass is equally inescapable. As I write, I'm watching through a white haze the swarms gathering at the Sunday morning market in Moissac. The temperatures reach the high 30s of late and everyone is happy. People stroll slowly in sundresses and shorts and even the Moissagais admit they have a holiday allure as long as the sun shines. Groups of friends are generous with the apéritives in the shaded cafés; and last night the biggest crowds ever assembled for the annual solstice Fete de la Musique in the square under the protective gaze of the famous Romanesque tympanum of the abbey church.

Warm weather opens purses, which gladdens the hearts of restaurateurs and farmers. Just eight days ago our host in the Auvergne fretted at the effect two wet summers would hane on his ability to stay open. And the bent-over farmer instructing his grandson in the ways of cattle moaned that for the second year he couldn't make hay so would have to buy feed during the winter for his unhappy cows.

People in the Lot and the Tarn et Garonne departments - a region called the Quercy - through which we are now passing stitch together a livelihood based on polyculture. Small plots of sweetcorn alternate with tobacco and sunflowers, but it is for fruit that the area is famous. Cherries, figs, plums, strawberries, Chasselas grapes and apricots - they are here in aromatic piles on the market stalls, but the prices are high. The late frosts killed off the blossoms and on many trees no fruit has set. The growers are left scrabbling for an income.

The sun was therefore heralded with glee three days ahead by shopkeepers, bed and breakfast owners and farmers. It was not just the English and walkers who were obsessed by the weather. "Summer will start tomorrow!" we were told by the butcher as he rubbed his hands and looked at the sky. We heard it again and again, till the statement took on the joyous certainty of an end-of-days prophecy. And start it did, with glinting dew and a shiver of bare arms that were breathing for the first time. The sky was silver above the crest of a hill in the instants before the sun blessed it. Such mornings draw us out early, peering at each flower as if it was the first. It's a coincidence, though it feels inevitable, that the sun arrived for the Solstice and our baptism on the "true" St Jacques route. Everything is different. The villages are big and lively, with busy cafés and resplendent butchers' and bakers' shops presided over by talkative shopkeepers. Homes feel richer than almost any area we have been through; the communities are viable and living at peace with themselves. And we are no longer alone. Twenty or more people follow the same path as us at roughly the same pace, making for the key villages and accommodation each evening. So although we don't always walk with other people, it does happen; or different combinations of familiar faces will share a table at a café or collect around a valued water tap. Our thoughts and conversation are thus levened by those of our temporary companions, and their ideas and perspectives on what we're all doing here. Outside the gites the festoons of washed clothes are almost festive each evening and rather than skulk in our room we sit in the late sun as it tickles us out from under the shade of a walnut tree.

As the temperatures mount it becomes imperative to walk early in the day and to spend the two or three lunchtime hours in shade. A hillside orchard could have been invented by Enid Blyton for its views over poppy-filled cornfields to a small green lake and the vineyards beyond. Afterwards, just up the lane, the farmer's wife sat under another tree offering cold, homemade lemon and honey drinks to enraptured walkers, along with her cakes, walnuts and prunes. There was an honesty box, but she did it as much for the pleasure of sharing her view with people from all countries. We were Canadians, French, Swiss, Germans and English to collect there in the breezy eddy of her farmyard. Where once we have been grateful for the offer of hot drinks and shelter from the rain, now a sign pointing us to someone's garden tap overwhelms us with the locals' generosity.

The baking sun is blinding against the white stone and it draws attention to the buildings. And now we come back full circle. In Normandy and Picardy the long, low houses were built of wood for warmth and their thick thatches tucked in tight the heat from the fire - even at the risk of catching fire themselves. The overhanging eaves were sloped to protect the outside stairs from snow and rain and to provide a place close at hand to build the barricades of logs needed to give heat all through the long winters.

Quercy houses traditionally have wide overhangs too, tiled in red and yellow terracotta for the heat to evaporate. It's when you see more modern houses, without the deep eaves, that you realize the wisdom of vernacular architechture. The rooms of the modern houses bake through the length of the day while those in the traditional style are in constant shade. And yet this district, with its recurring chalk and limestone ridges and valleys has moments of rain that can spring up unexpectedly and from any direction as the wind, confused, is buffeted by the rock. So we see that the verandas at ground and first floor levels stretch around three or even four sides, so there'll always be a place to sit or to stretch out laundry in the lee of the rain. The gentle contours of the hills lend themselves to building part of the house into the rock: cool constant temperatures for storage. Our table companions in the Fete de la Musique last night were a carpenter and his wife. He works in all the nearby villages and towns, in traditional styles and modern. We told him of a modern eco-house we'd seen built entirely of thick wooden blocks. Useless to do such a thing round here, he advised. The succession of rain and dry winds would twist and crack such a structure ina couple of years.

I'm fascinated at how the vernacular building styles change and adapt as much to the climate as to the landscape and local materials. As if the earth is given the natural materials people need for homes that will let them live comfortably and economically. In modern cities, in modern homes everywhere, such wisdom has been lost. We build for immediate economy and savings, but pay out in more than money alone to heat and cool our buildings with fossil fuels. Certainly, some architects research and promote other ways of building but cost for cost up front, we're nearly always frightened away from even this new-found wisdom.

Moreover, I'm confounded always by the folly of colonialisation. In our haste for resources and riches and in the pressure of populations humankind has driven itself further and further into parts of the earth where we have no right to be. We sat out a rain storm with a student from sub-tropical La Réunion, a French départment in the Indian Ocean. A nice life, tending towards laziness with only the periodic cyclones to keep an eye on. But in search of employment he had spent four years in Québec and was traumatised by the inhumanity of -40°C winters. And I'm left to puzzle over why people should have wanted to settle there in the first place.

Now, once again, there is talk of colonisation on Mars or some other such distant place, to escape the disasters we have brought to the earth. Does anyone know what the vernacular architecture for Mars would be - the one that would allow us to live in balance between our bodies and the environment there?

22nd June 2008

Yum-yum bye-byes

2008-06-22T13:49:00.008+01:00

No, I'm not (yet) insane. It's a rough translation of "Miam-Miam-Dodo", the title of an intensely practical set of books covering the whole Composetlla route from Le-Puy-en-Velay to Santiago. Within two days of discovering them, "Dodo" has become our bible - as David just managed not to say to a priest who was cross-examining us. If only Lauriane and Jacques Clouteau had done similar books for all of the GRs in France, for all of the routes we have walked!

"Dodo" lists all accommodation, all food shops, post offices, banks, chemists, cafés and restaurants within five kilometers of the route. Even any stabling for donkeys. And to provoke grovelling, snivelling gratitude in us, it gives opening hours and closing days, and the information is checked every year. No more detouring to a village where the café shut up shop three years ago and the boulangerie only opens every third Wednesday. But this is tough love too. Before you get to their mouth-watering gobbets of information, the authors knock you into shape for the challenge. I translate:

"The Way of St James isn't the Club Med. If you expect a cheap holiday with delusions of luxury but a little frisson of the Middle Ages, don't start out. ... If after the first few days you are still moaning about the accommodation which doesn't quite live up to your standards, go home immediately!"

You have to be up to earning your food and your night's rest. My heartfelt apologies for all the whinging over the past few months. I am not worthy ...

After my previous outpourings of angst about the mountains, we really did try to keep going for a few more days, but the peaks facing us were over 5250 feet, at which heights the temperature was below zero. There was fresh snow on some of the tops, mid-June or no mid-June. The depressed farmers (prevented from making their hay) and restaurant owners (whose clientèle were too miserable to spend money) all agreed we were right to be wary of the peaks in such weather. They were equally adamant that by August the sun would shine and summer would come to the Auvergne. So we bid them à bientot and skipped on a little, local, lazy train via Clermont Ferrand and Aurillac to Figeac, to pick up the St Jacques route as it comes out of the foothills of the Massif Central and heads into the beauties of south west France. Still raining, but at least it was warm rain.

Then, at Figeac, I was able to pick up emails and read such a supportive and bracing reaction to "Fear" that I'm humbled. The description of the panic that assailed me in the mountains struck chords, it seems, and several sent caring messages sharing your own moments of fear and weakness, making me feel already not so alone in the darkness. And you described the ways you deal with those times - a variety of ways that stop me and give me hope to put them into practice if I need to. Perhaps the common thread is digging as deep into oneself as the fear is, to find the corresponding self-belief to balance it out. With a side order of self-hypnosis.

Some of the advice was bracing. You're with "Dodo" on this one.

"It's strange what sparks off the extreme reactions in each of us... It's better to face up to these things, focus on each instance at a time and not give in to it!" This from my sister Sarah, who we all turn to as the strong one. And from Sal:

"We did zip-trekking in Whistler, Canada last month and the fear of stepping off a cliff at twice the height of the Eiffel Tower attached to a wire by just a hook and a canvas harness almost bowled me over - literally. I thought my legs would give in and I was going to pass out. I felt tears behind my eyes with pure fear, but it was exhilarating to have conquered it and do it! ... So go girl, you can do it!!"

I'm afraid that one had me dreaming the next night of clinging to a rock face on top of which stood Santiago's cathedral.

So although life is all smiles since arriving in Figeac and I'm behaving like a regular person, part of me wonders if, had I been able to pick up emails in Noirétable, the concert of your support, encouragment and gentle telling off would have got me over those foggy mountain tops.

21st June 2008

Pardon my French

2008-06-15T19:36:00.009+01:00

We're getting close to where the St Jacques' pilgrims will be legion and we have begun to wonder whether the tracks will be worn bare and whether every bed and café table will be filled long before we arrive. But our main cause of sadness that our (mostly) solitary peregrinations are about to end comes from the thrall in which the world holds the English language.

Until now we have resolutely conducted our life - outside of ourselves - in French. Not just me: David has thrown himself into conversations with our hosts or the people we've encountered in the language of the country we're visiting. When waiters, shop assistants or tourist officials reply in English we smile, continue for a few words likewise to show their effort is appreciated then politely return the conversation to French. And by now, indeed, it is easier for us to think and speak in French for such transactions: there is less risk of confusion. Regional variations of accent now throw us only temporarily.

Occasionally David experiences that fatigue from the fierce concentration of keeping up in a foreign language and he'll zone out for a while - keeping just enough of a sixth sense to smile or nod on cue. But then he might do that in English too, when the conversation rattles on to grandchildren or health or hairstyles; and once or twice - but very rarely - walk-weariness makes him impatient with my eagerness to gossip with anyone and everyone, just because I can. Although even I tried desperately to disengage from the discussion of the Queen's fashion sense in one village alimentation.

While my writing keeps me firmly in the anglophone world I increasingly relate our experiences to myself in French. So does David. He'll often break a walking silence to confirm some point of vocabulary or grammar. Back in January I still had to concentrate hard on other people's conversations or on the TV news to grasp everything that was said. Now, I'm in danger of chuckling over the joke at the next table before they do.

I wonder how I got this easy knowledge of contemporary expressions and slang? I remember when I arrived as an au pair fresh from passing A Level French it took me weeks to convert the static, written language of school into something to use in human relationships. And then it turned out most of my conversation was baby talk picked up from the kids. Homesick, I drifted into an English-based social life and at first my language was so bad that I and a fellow student at college struggled on for ages in French, believing each other to be French, before realising that we'd grown up not twenty miles apart in Derbyshire.

Later, teaching outside Paris, my lessons were (in theory at least) conducted in English, as were my off-hours due to the international nature of the teachers there. Only for a couple of months one summer in the Dordogne did most of my life get played out amongst adult-speaking French people.

So it can only be by osmosis - the method of lanuage-learning called "immersion" - plus constant brave attempts, that has brought us both to the ease in French we can claim today.

So why the sadness?

It's sad and seemingly inescapable that if you put more than two nationalities together their only common language will be English. In Prague during my rather more forlorn attempts to learn Czech, my friend Karla commented that she pitied English people and couldn't understand that I felt humble when all the rest of the world speaks English while native English speakers are such bad linguists. "But that means everyday your language is invaded by others," she said, "and therefore weakened, destroyed, made less than it really is." It was a wise comment, coming from someone who loves the beauty of words passionately.

So far the few other pilgrims we have met have been Dutch or Belgian and although we obstinated in French, their blank faces brought us quickly back to English. Even the Belgians. Despite the fact that these people are similarly spending several weeks or months in France and seem to expect to negotiate cheap or free lodgings and food at every turn.

No doubt when we ourselves reach Spain our smug attitude will disappear and we'll fall with relief on any English-speaking Spanish person to get us out of difficulties. But we hope not. We had planned to set aside a couple of weeks between countries to refresh our previous attempts to learn Spanish. That might no longer be possible, but if we can find MP3 versions of Spanish lessons for our phones we will at least try the immersion tactic in Spain too. It's yet another reason to continue to prefer chambres d'hote over the more international (and therefore English-speaking) walkers' hostels.

15th June 2008

Fear

2008-06-07T10:31:00.014+01:00

How long have I felt this way about mountains? The foreboding; threats seeming to lie heavy on my mind. I know some people – Julie Andrews, for example – in whom the heart sings when they’re on a mountain top. But when we were sixteen and went youth hostelling in Hampshire, it was the wide horizons of open moorland in the New Forest that gave me that singing feeling, stretching away under their enormous ellipsis of sky.

For more than two weeks now we have been rained upon. Sorry, Europe has been rained upon; ceaseless waves of rain and lightening storms pushed up from Africa way to deposit their load on the Mediterranean and up as far as Britain. Those same storms in one evening stripped forty percent of the grape flowers from the vines in the Midi-Pyrenees; they caused landslides in the Cantal and flooding in Italy and Germany. And they have turned some of our tracks into tumbling mountain streams.

Because for the last ten days, and much sooner than we had expected from our cursory survey of the road atlas, we’ve been above 2000 feet and most often around 3000 feet. That’s a Munroe, back in Britain. These are not jagged peaks of mountains. Thank goodness. They are smooth rolls and long ridges, densely wooded with dark pine. Occasional roads thread through the valleys and a village of two thousand inhabitants is reckoned a buzzing town. ‘Reckoned’ so only, since being in another valley, the people we ask don’t quite know for sure.

In my outdoors-y, walking-y youth I was brought up to respect nature. You know: not walking alone, leaving notes in the car or at the post office to say where you’re going and when you expect to be back. Taking spare clothes and food, a compass and whistle even if it’s cloudless when you set out. Knowing how to read a map, that sort of thing. So some of my nerves at these mountains can be traced there: are we respecting these foreign hills as we should? Are we respecting the foreign weather? Although we always reserve our beds in advance, sadly too many previous walkers have changed their plans without letting the accommodation. Now a no-show is seen only as bad manners, certainly not a reason to call in the search-and-rescue. But of course I’m exaggerating: that’s the thing about fear. We’re following the GR3 which is very well signposted even if it is deserted. And while waiting out a thunderstorm under a single tree is an acknowledged bad idea, there’s no reason to suppose a lightening bolt will seek us out in a whole forest of trees.

As we entered the mountains with their heavier rain and closer clouds, we also entered a phase where to stay in a gite d’étap – a walkers’ hostel – is not a lifestyle or budget choice but a necessity. Excellent though many of these places are (and they are, especially the year-round ones in the mountains that double as skiing chalets), you’re never quite sure what you’ll get till you arrive. Cooking facilities, hot showers, blankets and sheets, ok. Sometimes a room to ourselves, sometimes a heater. Even meals provided, sometimes. But always lino or stone floors, no towels to wring our wet clothes in and an atmosphere that defies the drying abilities of even our technical clothing. Just two days of hostels and rain means everything we have is wet. Wet socks rub the wet feet raw; wet overtrousers summon up red welts on each hip. Overnight, moisture leaches from the wet to the once-dry, dragging that clamminess familiar to all campers and caravanners as they wake.

So far, so grim. But not worthy of terror, surely? And yet it is terror I have been feeling, the same closed-in panic I suddenly felt one day inside a plane and that spread out of the pressurised container to infect many more corners of my life. It’s shameful for a daughter of Derbyshire to admit it, but the depression goes beyond physical wariness. This is something more elemental, an animal presence lurking. I prefer to close my eyes, not to look out.

So what’s to be done? There are weeks still at this altitude in the Massif Central, till we descend to the lower lands near Figeac. And more mountain ranges to come in Spain. Perhaps lifting the lid of these clouds would help? We agree that it’s not a physical inability to walk in the mountains. Although I plod slowly up the steep stretches and although my lungs and heart pound long after the exertion has stopped, in truth it’s not too hard and even the sack no longer feels so heavy, provided the straps are all pulled tight just so … But anyone who has had panic attacks themselves won’t need me to describe the waves rising up the body, the heat, sweat and paralysis. Yes, it’s irrational. Knowing that doesn’t help, since it’s the reason that is sick. And for me, with my sensitive metabolism (“Finely-tuned,” I tell David, “like a Ferrari”), the mind is hot-wired to the body. I lose all appetite but not my churning stomach. It ceases to be traceable to any specific factor of rain or cold. It’s all-pervasive, yet amorphous. Something to run from.

We hold a summit meeting, in a valley. The sensible thing is sensible to be flexible and to sit out the weather when we need to. David can’t understand my fear, my panic. But he accepts it’s me. Does he too feel some sort of panic, at the idea of spending even a day, let alone two or three, in a mountain hostel or cheap hotel room in some one-sheep village? Nothing to do. Nothing to look at. A panic in the face of boredom? Or simply of emptiness. I, in my turn, cannot conceive of that feeling.

After coming through the winter and its difficulties; after adapting to the snows and floods of spring and yet still keeping on track, it has been salutary to experience these past two weeks and to be reminded that the Camino is not simply going for a walk on a nice day, as I put it. It is hard, a challenge – and there are many possibilities of failure still ahead of us. Yet now the challenge for us both is from the inside, and perhaps that makes it all more valuable. Will this experience teach me to conquer my panics once and for all, freeing David from the shackles they place on our lives? But softly, softly. A doctor once explained I needed to feel in charge of situations that might provoke the panic and that I should look back on previous times and remind myself that nothing bad happened then, so why should it now? The second instruction I can do; but as for the first, those tumbling streams of inevitability drag me on, like just another storm-dislodged rock, not hearing my cries of “Stop! Just stop and let my mind catch up!”

6th June 2008

Song

2008-06-05T17:56:00.047+01:00

The sun is hot in the courtyard and the bird boxes sway in the tree branches. The uneven flagstones wash against flower troughs full of colour, and I settle under a parasol for lunch. Our hotel in Auxerre. Basic, but the courtyard is a charm. And just then the chef starts singing.

I’m shocked, like a cold cloth on a sleeping face. Song is something we don’t hear. I don’t know what he is singing, but it sounds like an old song, a folk song, and pretty. Just a short snatch, for the joy of it, and then back to work.

Back in St-Rémy-en-Bouzemont in icy March, one of the Dutch pilgrims staying at the same bed and breakfast said that the thing she most missed on the walk was music. We hadn’t quite empathised. Music was not something we had felt a lack of, even though at home we have music playing nearly all the time, mostly classical or choral these days, going back to favourite symphonies, still learning them. But here we haven’t seemed need music. Neither of us plays music, neither of us can sing, so music is something we have accepted as being absent from the year.

Until the chef’s trilling woke me up. I remembered an article in the last Confraternity newsletter telling of two women pilgrims, university friends who came together through music, and whose Camino was counted out in daily sung services of Evensong in honour of the place music had in their spirituality and in their pilgrimage. If only David and I could sing, could play!
Instead, we have birdsong without stinting. In the forests it greets us in volume in the mornings, varied and melodious. The chorus teases us to look up and try to find the singers, to spot one species form the other and to name them.

At Easter I read a book called Animal’s People. A vigorous tale set in India, with sharp overtones of the Bhopal chemical disaster, but not in the least as dreary and worthy a book as might be feared. One image stuck with me as I was reading it and returned to me, appropriately, now. An older man, a musician whose happiness was destroyed by the disaster, has been unable to sing since. But he discourses with Animal, who is the only one not to consider him mad when he says (something like) “there is music even in the croak of a frog. They use the same scale….. If it were rearranged it would be music.”

On the road from St Léon to the Chateau de Montpeyroux there is a large pond in a field. And there we are given back our music. The late afternoon song of frogs celebrates the rains, a whole pondful of them. Two days later it is a Charolais bull, jealous that his cows flock to witness our passing, and who chimes his anger in a resonant baritone.

Maybe we will catch up with pilgrims who speed their days in songs of the road and in hymns, and we will listen with pleasure, envy and fear that we might be invited to join in. Until then, we might learn to re-calibrate the animals and hear songs all around us.

(PS: However hard it has been, I have not yet resorted to dirging “Onward Christian Soldiers!” as I walk!)

30th May 2008

Memorable hosts #2

2008-06-05T17:55:00.012+01:00

The three short weeks since we came back to France have been varied like they were two months. And once again it is the people we’ve spent time with and the places we’ve stayed that make up the kaleidoscope. Shake the tube and here’s what we see:

- Madame Marie-Marthe Maitre’s garden is the love of her life, or has been since her husband died. She warned us she might not answer the door when we arrived. “But don’t worry; just go through the gate at the side. I’ll be in the garden.” After an evening meal and a breakfast where like a grandmother she sat at the side of the shadowy room making sure we ate, she led us outside. We had made the grade. The garden was dripping, as much with climbing roses and clematis as with exhausted raindrops. There were fuchsias and lilies, hydrangeas and peonies. A few years ago Mme Maitre bought the garden of her elderly neighbour, doubling her own plot. But already it was full and she ought to stop buying new plants. “But there are just so many I fall in love with!” It is good she has the garden, as she’s thinking of retiring. Not so much from offering bed and breakfast (to the relief of walkers in this sparse area) but from the restaurant and bar she also runs in her old, stone-built Burgundy house. The house too felt like we were visiting our grandmother – full of the collected fancies of a lifetime. Glass bottles, china cups on a china cup stand old farm implements, embroidered pictures that she did herself, back when she had time. The food was robust and her assessment of the way village life was going, candid. “The factories have closed and when the only customers in the bar are two old grandpappies nursing a glass of wine all day, forget it. I could be working in my garden!”

- Monsieur and Madame Prevot of La Renouillère are relaxed but their rooms are new and comfortable, and their long dining table is at the heart of matters. Monsieur’s deadpan delivery is underpinned by an inherent consideration for his guests. When he said we should telephone if we couldn’t get back from Bar-sur-Seine under our own steam we believed him, though thankfully didn’t need to exploit his kindness. Mme Prevot, who has the delightful name of Edwige, speaks decent English and like her husband is alert to people’s needs: the elderly and hesitant couple forced home early through illness had no sooner considered calling a hotel in Arras than Edwige had, unasked, sought and printed off details from the internet ready. The thoughtfulness was not oppressive because it came with humour and self-mocking. M Prevot claimed they cast spells on their guests to make them return – and a young French couple, there for the second or third time, confirmed it was true. If comfort, good food with local and home-made ingredients, interesting conversation and the offer of bike hire or escorted mushroom forages in the Forêt d’Orient are a spell, then bring on the magic.

- Gilles and Catherine Fonteniaud bought Le Cloître three years ago in the little village of Diou on the banks of the Loire, south of the medieval-cum-spa town of Bourbon-Lancy. Diou is strung-out and ambivalent, a place which the busy road batters and whose large but boarded-up hotel speaks, for once, of marital breakdown and a descent into gambling more than a loss of local industry – which in fact seems to be thriving in the form of a concrete staircase maker. But enough of the barman’s gossip. There’s also a craft pottery, a pretty church and walks and fishing by the river. And a marina over on the canal beside the town.

The Fonteniauds call it the Cloisters but it isn’t really. It’s an eighteenth-century landowner’s house with an inner courtyard and wide verandas outside. You step through the grinding iron portal from the street and find you’re surrounded by as much peace and greenery as any traditional cloister could offer. A shaggy garden full of colour and running out into the trees of ‘le parc’. It’s Alhambra-like in the warm rain, dripping and scented.

The rooms of the house are mainly accessed from outside, from the wide, tile-floored veranda with its old metal tables and chairs, its box of galoshes for the guests to borrow, its pile of tennis racquets and glimpse of the swimming pool. The young Labrador sits and whines a few doors down but is happy to investigate us and David’s stick-wrestling skills. Outside our window is a rich kitchen garden fringed with wild strawberries. Less wild but nearly as scented garden strawberries appear for dessert on the table later. It’s around the table under the wood-beamed ceiling that we and our hosts pass a long, chatty meal while the dog brings each of us a tea towel from the kitchen to play with.

Although Gilles and Catherine bought their dream house only recently, they are local people from Dompierre-sur-Besbre with a love for the history and traditions of the region, traditions that include good gardening and good eating. Peasants here used to eat their fromage frais with salt and pepper not with sugar. That’s how Gilles eats it, and now so do I. This area gave the French it’s Bourbon royal dynasty and received in return a wealth of small chateaux, courts and fortified farms in the hills all round.

When they acquired the house it was run down and Catherine wouldn’t move in until their own living space was done. Since then, it has been a continual job of converting and renovating room by room, learning how as they go. Gilles was still up a ladder painting in the hall when we arrived for dinner, but hid his physical weariness well. Our bedroom was peacefully spacious and the bathroom palatial. Palatial too the two dining rooms that open into each other and that can seat twenty-one for meals, if they have that many staying. But it felt just as natural with four. Meanwhile, in the spirit of their parents, perhaps, the Fonteniaud’s two sons take time out from more serious jobs to put on juggling and acrobatic festivals.

- The Chateau de Montpeyroux near St Léon is one of the small chateaux built in the region by the followers of the Bourbon court that Gilles had spoken about. Dating to the eighteenth century times its farmhouse, land, school house and ancient chapel and presbytery were the heart of the little Montpeyroux village long before St Léon was thought of. It remained in one family long into the twentieth century, eventually passing to a niece who had an excess of castles already. Now the Fizzarottis own it, calm and laid-back chatelains thoroughly enjoying their retirement from international business. And they’re bringing the castle back to what it was: a mostly self-sufficient unit embedded in the local community. As we arrived, wild laughter leaked out of a barn. We peered inside to see a group of middle-aged women busily restoring and reupholstering furniture amid avid gossip and giggles. A cottage industry, we assumed. A ladies’ club we later found out – for fun, but useful too.

We had asked about a meal when we booked the room but were told they would be too busy, so we asked if sandwiches were possible. Sustenance rather than entertainment was what we needed, which was how we came to be eating around the Fizzarottis' kitchen table, sharing potluck and leftovers while our clothes dried in the machine. The tasty food was almost wholly home grown – even the duck terrine that they had taught themselves to make and the bread that was came from their wheat, milled at a neighbour’s watermill. It was the most relaxed, homely meal yet, maybe because our frames of reference, underneath, were similar and Emmanuel and his wife were such good company. They laughed over their mishaps in learning to be farmers and refused to get worried by anything. A grand hobby I suppose, rather than a living.

Then we had a tour around the chateau, which was like the set for Gosford Park, all hidden doors for the servants and ballrooms, a boudoir in a tower and walls half-a-metre thick. The kitchen table where we ate was in the butler’s pantry, but there was a grand room for more formal tables d’hôte. Upstairs, the rooms have been lovingly decorated by Mme Fizzarotti in period style with furniture hunted down in sales. All except the ‘historic room’ whose four-poster bed, heavily-carved furniture, silk walls and velvet drapes were all original, made to measure for the Lord’s bedchamber. You can book to stay there too. But we thought it might have ghosts and anyway, David was so in love with a beautifully-carved medieval blanket chest in the hall that I think he would have slept there if he could, vampire-style.

- Le Relais du Lac might not be an obvious place to recommend, but the owners made it memorable. A sizable hotel by the lake just south of Le Mayet de Montagne, we were nevertheless the only people staying there. We had an idea we had been the only guests for a good while. I suppose we chose it for the Logis de France label, a symbol of reassurance. And yet the Cazals seemed so dazzled by idea of having guests that they couldn’t have put themselves out more. Did we want a shower or a bath? We had booked a shower, but it had been a hard day and we fell on the suggestion of a bath. Could we ask him to put the heating on to get our clothes dry? Of course! And Mme Cazals took all our clothes to hang up in the huge basement boiler room where she dried all of her laundry, kicking the almost as huge guard dog out as a precaution. Later, as the only diners in the long rustic-style restaurant, we heartily welcomed the full plate of mixed salad and the steak with onions and potatoes – fortifying food, and tasty. And we appreciated, almost despite ourselves, the USP of the place: Mr Cazals playing his accordion through a synthesiser at the far end of the restaurant, just for us. He was a surprisingly good musician, and the sounds coming out felt like a whole band not just one player. It was our wedding anniversary and the only thing missing was The Girl from Ipanema. Afterwards, Mr Cazals leaned by the table and talked music with us as one disciple to another and his references ranged far beyond the horizons of a little town in the Auvergne. It was easy to giggle, but there was something majestic about his belief in music. Even if the only civilised countries in the world, according to him, were France, Britain, America and Germany.

- Half an hour from Chabreloche the day’s rain finally caught up with us. We pulled into a tree-shadow to shroud our rucksacks in orange and to pull on jackets and hoods. And there we stood, oddly contented as the tree was providing more thorough protection than usual. Still, when a white shape in the doorway further down beckoned, I grabbed the poles and ran. It would have been rude not to. We hoped only for the deeper shade of their open garage, but “Voulez-vous du café, un boisson chaud?” A hot drink – that would have alerted me, even if the whiff of Merseyside didn’t. We were in an English household, unsure of their French but determined to rescue the drowned rats. So for the length of the downpour we settled to mugs of coffee and biscuits around their kitchen table. We’d been speaking English with Dutch and Belgian fellow walkers, but this was English with English people, and we all knew what we meant, down to the hinterland of TV programmes and village fêtes. Nigel and his wife buck all those horror programmes of moving abroad, I’m delighted to report. Their purchase went well, as have the renovations and repairs. They are surrounded by friendly and chatty neighbours and a welcoming local church, and they are loving every minute. So no documentary-makers needed there, thank you.

2nd June 2008

Theory of relativity

2008-05-22T16:39:00.019+01:00

We're back on the real walk, progressing through the Aube and the Yonne departments a day's distance at a time, as fast as our packs and our legs will allow.

By our second morning out, we realized how much our frame of reference had already shifted. No more racing around in cars, thinking nothing of a twenty-kilometre trek to the nearest food shop or a half-hour drive for a five-kilometre walk by a lake. We listen, bemused, at breakfast in the Domaine des Lacs in Lesmont and later at La Renouillère in Villeneuve-au-Chêne as fellow guests (yes, that has changed too) explain they plan to spend the day in Troyes.

"But that's nowhere near here!" we think, "it must be at least three days away."

Ah, but three days at walking pace. Just around the corner for everyone else.

A week later and the relativity of our life swings again. From €30 each for a room, a four-course meal with wine, breakfast and enough over for a picnic, in the beaming hostel in a chateau donated to the village of Étouvy by its English doctor, to a bubble bath and fine dining in the Michelin-rated restaurant of the Hostellerie du Clos in Chablis. Well, we've just passed our one-thousandth mile. And we'll soon pass our tenth wedding anniversary. So we follow the hotel receptionist down the corridor as if in a L'Oreal advert: "We're worth it."

There's no "better" between the two experiences. Just the richness that comes with the unexpected.

18 May 2008

A duty of care

2008-05-22T16:39:00.017+01:00

In Tonnerre stands a big hall, 90 metres by 18 metres on the ground and reaching to a height of 20 metres into the huge upturned ship of a ceiling. The long, tiled roof is easily seen from across the valley as you walk down from the hills into the town. Even now it is perhaps the largest solid slab of colour in the view; and back in 1295 when it was built at the request of Marguérite de Bougogne, it must have dominated the thoughts and vision of travellers approaching Tonnere even more than the churches of Notre Dame and St Pierre.

This is the Hotel-Dieu, and Marguérite ordered it to be built because the influx of pilgrims heading to Vézelay and Compostela who stopped at Tonnerre were sqeezing out the local sick and homeless from the existing places of refuge. The new hall doubled up as a chapel and a ward for the needy, so the forty or so people who could fit into the wooden alcoves down each wall could attend Holy Mass without leaving their beds. For some, I suppose, this was handy: their Last Rites on the spot.

Despite being a queen of Scicily, Jerusalem and Naples and sister-in-law to one of the most revered French kings, Saint-Louis, Marguérite seems to have been genuinely concerned about the needy, getting down and dirty with the sick and dying, St Jaques pilgrims among them. She even had her own accommodation built in a connecting wing so as to be on hand with the nursing.

Up the hill by the Notre Dame church, the tiny St-Antoine hospice carried on letting the fitter travellers stay for one night only and the nuns there issued pilgrims with food, drink and a stipend of five pennies to see them on their way.

Until 1650 the Hotel-Dieu was the only place in town for the ill; and right up until the twentieth century the complex remained a hospital and a place for caring for abandoned babies. Upstairs from the large hall the small rooms of the museum offer a disturbing mingling of medieval copes and altar cloths, saints' relics, kitchen furniture, Royal wills, wheelchairs and traction aparatus from before the First World War. The photographs of empty white beds are eerie enough, but that of an unconscious (one hopes) man about to have his lower leg sawn off by smiling, wax-moustachioed orderlies freaked me, and I had to leave.

It was't my constant conviction that my toes will freeze and break off that drove me out. Not this time. It was the fact that we were about to visit a Dr Letellier, an appointment kindly and without fuss arranged by our hosts at the Ferme de la Fosse Dionne on hearing that David had been walking for several days with a grotesquely swollen leg and a feeling "like knives slicing into me with every step".

David has a sweet nature. That's why mosquitos love him so much. All the other bite-induced balloonings had been conquored by the cream and tablets of the chemist in Bar-sur-Seine, but one on his ankle just kept on growing, trapped between the top of his boot and the clamp of his sock welt.

Dr Letellier prodded at lymph glands then gently laughed and promised me my husband wasn't going to die. It was most likely a spider bite, he thought, and if not walked on or constricted would probably sort itself out in a few days. But since we were pilgrims and on our way, he upheld the long traditions of Marguérite and ordered up an alcohol compress, cream and pills that were already taking effect by the next morning. But no five pennies.

22 May 2008

Bi-poles

2008-05-22T16:38:00.014+01:00

On a brief trip back to London, inevitably, our world of green and streams continues to drift us above the concerns of home for a while or two. Indeed, walking out of the new(ish) Eurostar terminal in St Pancras for the stroll home, the May afternoon that greets us is dizzy with the temperatures of high summer, and we forget that the whole world is not also on holiday. What else could explain the missing cars around the mansion on around Tonbridge Street? Or the bubbles of people at outdoor cafés and in the doorways of pubs? We decide to join them immediately, in celebration.

For a day or so more our slow scrutiny of the countryside remains more real than the dust and culture of the capital. I spend a day from early breakfast to late afternoon tea, never leaving Lambs Conduit Street in a succession of dates and chance encounters with friends. We talk, we explain, we share woes and indecisions, we celebrate. Jennifer, Paul, Marc, Sara, Cigala and Ciao Bella, Tutti's. Sara's baby is almost due and we drink tea for hours in the café at the back of Kennards, laughing and sighing over the neighbourhood news.

Walking over Wimbledon Common a couple of days later to dinner with Steve and Reena, our ears can more easily hear the evening birds and the fall of tiny hooplas of catapillers from the trees than they can the buzz of house decorating and school fee conversations in the bars. I head for a discreet bush but stop myself in time: this isn't the countryside after all.

It takes little, though, to become submerged in London. I work for a few days and am lit up with the desire to help the theatre people I'm tutoring. I catch up with recent convulsions in arts funding and want to bring new ideas and new plans to my clients. But all that must wait.

Like a majorette's streamers, the cultural life whips round and dazzlzs us. Shall we go to the LSO's concert at the Barbican or to see Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem dance at Sadler's Wells? What about the Persepolis film? And the last days of the Peter Doig exhibition at Tate Britain? In the end, daunted, we do little but dive into the weekend papers and the bewildering world of Ken Livingstone's defeat and Gordon Brown's disgrace. Should we worry about the economy? Probably. And the world and it's wars? Undoubtedly. The Burmese cyclone puts our good fortune in focus; but there are end-of-year accounts to finalise, VAT deadlines and slow internet connections; and the fractiousness that comes with real life. Because London is rushed, always looking down at its feet and knocking shoulders against the strangers who can't keep up. Always leaping to grab the next thing and throwing the old one, unfinished, on the pavement.

By the end of the week we are ready to regret leaving again. As we walk through The Brunswick we meet more people eager for our news, and these connections are so pleasant they bind us to the place. I want to add my energies to those of the people who make this neighbourhood work. Even a visit to the store sucks me in. The boxes of books call to me to settle down and to keep their treasures to hand on a nearby shelf.

But as soon as we are on the train and speeding back through a sun-filled France, those joint tendrils, the temptations and suffocations of London start to loosen their hold and to wither.

Henry Porter in last week's Observer issued a call that snaps me back to my walking mindset. He decries the cynical, seen-it-all-just-waiting-for-it-to-fail attitude that is the only tone of voice left in art, music, journalism, popular culture or TV. The we-don't-like-success syndrome gone endemic. A pessimistic irony, as he calls it. More than the death of faith or of ideology in our society, Porter sees a fear of faith in human nature. People don't want to be caught committing the sin of trust. In the face of the world's seemingly intractable political and humanitarian problems, he asks us to expect more, not less, from our political and social leaders; and from ourselves and each other. We need to expect ourselves and others to succceed rather than sit around waiting to pounce on failure. "People are ... in the main more trusting, more hopeful, more resourceful and a lot kinder than is ever acknowledged in the public arena."

I remember the kindness of people we have met on our walk, sometimes just smiles and waves as we pass by. The essential simplicity of life on the road is what is good. Even if we might still be concerned about the weight we carry or the vissicitudes of the weather, it is essentially as pure and as unremarkable as going for a walk on a nice day. The calculations, the lists to remember, the deadlines - they are not essential. So long as the people whose company has enriched us this week still remember us the next time we drop back home.

13 May 2008

PS

2008-05-12T09:17:00.001+01:00

I've been able to put more of David's pictures into some of the older posts -especially the 'Walk with me' one - as requested!

Update May 2008

2008-05-11T15:58:00.014+01:00

Another new phase is about to begin. Our past seven weeks of contortions and false starts – and work breaks and holidays – will be over. Almost. For those of you who have observed that you can’t figure out what’s going on or where we are up to, here’s the plot:

After reaching Reims in March and pressing the pause button on the day-by-day walking, we spent a week of pure indulgence around the Lac du Der regional park in the Marne department, followed by two weeks based in a cottage in the Champagne area south of Reims (but a bit north of the Lac du Der), which allowed us to complete our original planned route from Fismes, just west of Reims, to a little village south of the Lac du Der called Lentilles, on the way towards Troyes.

We then drove to Troyes for our week with friends; and fresh from that holiday we skipped south to the Morvan where, from the base of two different cottages, we walked the Santiago de Compstela path from Auxerre north of the Morvan mountain range, via beautiful and moving Vézelay to a little town called Grury in south Burgundy, near to Bourbon-Lancy.

From May 13th there’ll be no more walking backwards and having to explain ourselves to other pilgrims. But it will feel strange to be back in the flatlands, back in the relative north. Because we’re going back to Lentilles to spend about nine days walking from there to Auxerre, starting once again to progress day by day on foot alone, carrying our fully-loaded packs. From Auxerre we’ll take the train south to pick up the route at Grury, where we stopped on 4th May.

It’ll be around 23rd or 24th May, Pentecost, before we reach Grury and can pin our shells back on our packs, hold our heads up among fellow pilgrims and just maybe share their company for more than a couple of miles on the way to Compostela. The walking in the Morvan has been beautiful and tough – higher and with a lot more climbing than we’ve been used to, long days that have reminded our legs what it’s all about. But the warmer weather, the glimpses of cosy hostels hidden away in the hills, and the two fellow travellers who we’ve walked and talked with – the tall, lined and relaxed Dutchman Wim and French Julien, short and sore but with good courage and a calm smile, a student taking thinking time form his social work studies – have made us eager to rejoin the proper route.

As of today we have walked 929 miles (1495 kilometres). It’s about 200 miles short of what we had imagined we would have walked by now. Yet when we reach Le Puy en Velay, around 20 June, we will have covered on foot all 1339 of the miles on our personal route from London.

We will be some three weeks behind our schedule – but the schedule was generous, and we hope we’ll catch up with ourselves and still arrive in Compostela towards the end of September.

So please wish us “bonne route” once more.

12th May 2008

With some exceptions

2008-05-11T15:57:00.008+01:00

Slowly we have grown sure that France is a deeply paternalistic country, one where the government – the little government of civil servants not the big government of the politicians – probably does know best and will safely plan out the details of life. Without the State, we feel, it is doubtful that the French would live to the sturdy old age we can see, outside boulangeries in small villages, that they do.

It must first become evident to anyone visiting the country as they drive the motorways. Those endless ditties in rhyming couplets aimed at keeping the maximum number alive.

“Un trait, danger;
Deux traits, sécurité!”

No advert may be aired for anything that will pass one’s lips without a warning to eat and drink in moderation and to take exercise. The finger-wagging even gets chalked on the bottom of the “plat du jour” boards, together with a nationally-protective website: http://www.mangerbouger.fr/. And the “Pour votre santé, evitez de grignoter!” (for the sake of your health, don’t eat between meals) clangs oddly at the end of ads for Macdonalds or Kinder eggs.

Then there are the TV fillers, five-minute programmes that exhort one to keep cleaning products out of the reach of children, to wear seatbelts or condoms or to plant trees for the environment. They’re not punchy adverts that, sophisticated westerners that we are, we would realise are manipulating us. No, these are mini-documentaries that interview “ordinary people”, apparently even-handed.

And as for the patronising tone taken at the entrance to most villages with their “Soyez sympa, pensez à nous!” pleas with drawings of children playing.

But this fairly benign paternalism is nothing compared to the rampant bureaucracy of lower-level government. Every village with more than a boulangerie and a church surely has its Mairie, its mayor and deputy mayor who are paid a retainer even if they’re only open for business on a couple of afternoons a week. The power wielded locally can run riot. We talked to people whose mayor had been in office for twenty-one years. It’s the Mairie that would watch whether a chambre d’hôte served a meal without the visitor, by regulation, eating with the family. It is the Mairies that knows if a restaurant with rooms allows a guest to stay the night without eating. The Mairies that can check and rescind licences.

But the most frequent example we see of local posturing is at the entrance to roads, and paths of all widths and surfaces. A round white sign circled in red that forbids vehicles to pass.

Except.

The variety of exceptions permitted locally is bewildering. Except for access. Except for the people living here. Except for farm vehicles …

Sauf bus
Sauf desserte riverains
Sauf communaux service public
Sauf gestion forestière
Sauf 4x4
Sauf ayants droit
Sauf engines agricoles
Sauf cars scolaires at carrosserie
Sauf livraisons
Sauf deux roués
Sauf autorisation spéciale décret du 06/02/1932

The fact that it is the local power-brokers who control these things is made gleefully clear by the addition of the regulation being invoked and the date the mayor took the decision to forbid or to permit an exception. On a heavily-wooded hilltop in the Montagne de Champagne, four deeply rutted and rocky paths sunk in mud and tree roots met at a collection of signs with the information:

“Sauf dérogation arêté affiché en mairie” – “Except for a list of dispensations posted up in the town hall”

Oh, right. I’ll just nip back down to the town hall then, shall I, to check whether I can winch my zimmer frame up here?

Or maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe all these signs and regulations are symptomatic of the sheer bloody-minded contrariness of the French that we British would secretly prefer to believe in? Symptomatic that is, that the French really would consider it within their rights and their capabilities to drive a car up a six-inch-wide scree slope.

All these “sauf”s belabouring our eyes sensitised me. But when another “sauf” lodged in my mind it took me in another direction entirely.

“Si on me dit, c’est chacun chez soi, moi je veux bien;
Sauf que chez moi, il n’y a rien.”

It’s a song on the new album by the excellent, poetic, reclusive singer Francis Cabrel – a veteran who I first heard twenty-seven years ago as a politically- and socially-concerned singer-songwriter. This song is called “African Tour” and takes the voice of an African man forced to travel to Europe via small boats to Spain to seek work illegally. Yes, he would rather stay at home; except in his home, there is nothing at all.

At the moment in France there’s a lot of talk about the “sans-papiers”, the illegal immigrants (or asylum seekers – it’s a moot point), many of whom are being thrown out by force. The government has declared that these people will henceforth be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, which seems to have aroused pain in the human rights fraternity. I suppose it depends on what the starting point is. If, for example, most applicants are routinely turned down according to regulations, then perhaps a case-by-case interpretation of the rules might signal a humanising influence.

Or maybe the French are too familiar with the random and personalised application of “sauf” by little people with local power. Maybe the defenders of the sans-papiers fear such personal prejudice or rank injustice will follow in the wake of case-by-case laxity?

6th May 2008

The mountains of Morvan

2008-05-11T15:56:00.031+01:00

From the start, the high places of the Morvan held fear but also promise. Like the echoing Mountains of Mordor in Tolkein’s Middle Earth, few people know of them and fewer can locate them on a map. An empty region, floating somewhere off-centre in France. Granite uplands cast adrift in the chalk of Burgundy.

We’d dreamed of it as rolling hilltops of sparse green through which rasping stones would break. On the map, thin roads cut through the deep valleys unimpeded by towns or villages. Our route would stick to the high ground, encountering an occasional building – a hamlet, a farm or a sheepfold, or perhaps simply a deserted hovel. For all the research we did in advance, we found little accommodation. Our foreboding of long, steep days ending at basic mountain hostels was balanced out by the allure of this undiscovered region. So it became the region to base ourselves in for our cottage-based period.

Unplanned, zooming back to London for kit, we packed The Lord of the Rings cds and Howard Shore’s echoing music became the soundtrack to our Morvan. At first the forboding weighs heaviest, when the border of the Parc Natural Regional du Morvan almost exactly corresponds to the line where heavy rain clouds cluster and we live in a world of fog and shadows. But as the days clear and we trek south from Vézelay into the Morvan proper, I’m reminded of the Derbyshire Peaks for their granite and their height; and of Herefordshire for the small fields and orchards in blossom, and the thick hedges that knit it all together. Plunging ever southwards we encounter ravines backed by steep scars of cliffs; cascades and large lakes. The forests thicken and crowd out the pasture land and the views; and, as the mountain mass tilts upwards towards the south, we finally reach, after two weeks, the summits of 1530 feet at Mont Beuvray and 2730 feet (910 metres) at Haut Folin before gently descending through the sun-lush, white-cattled valleys of south Burgundy.

Though we thought of this area as empty and therefore backwards, long ago it was one of the most thriving in France. There are prehistoric echoes here, in the flints and paintings in the caves above Arcy-sur-Cure and Saint-Moré, of hunter-gatherers who found the plentiful running water, game and fruits a source of life. They cleared patches of trees and discovered agriculture. They heard about metal working and found the rocks here rich in different ores.

By the time the Romans invaded in the first century BC, the Morvan was the busy home of the Celtic Eduens people, traders, artisans, miners and farmers whose capital was at Mont Beuvray. The paths through the mountains were born there.

The Eduens already traded with the Romans, so when Julius Ceasar appeared they were ripe for adopting the Roman way of life – even if Mont Beuvray was, for a time, the rallying point for all Celtish tribes against the Romans. Slightly east, the Romans built Autun as an imperial new town to supplant Mont Beuvray and the temples, markets, circuses, craftsmen and money it offered worked. Further north on the same Agrippa Way leading from Milan all the way to Boulogne, we stood in the forest on a naturally-fortified promontory, awed by the size and efficiency of the Roman legion’s Camp de Cora whose remains rose above our heads.

But that was then. When the Romans left, the area slumped and the trees grew back. Not till the Middle Ages and feudalism was there the organisation – and the cheap serf labour – to make clearings and build castles, villages and churches. The paths through the forest revived and multiplied, the local to-ing and fro-ing buoyed up by trade, fairs and festivals, pilgrims and crusaders travelling through. Once more, the people of the Morvan adapted to these crowds of outsiders who brought new ideas and curious perspectives.

Even now the patterns of the Morvan recall those times. The chateaux on high outlooks, the hamlets or villages a little further off, the isolated farms where the lords granted rights of settlement and the use of wood and pasture to newcomers brought in to boost the local workforce, decimated by plague and war. The right to use the forest for building homes, heating them and to make tools and graze animals was enshrined: centuries later, an edict from the King in 1546 gave trees a commercial value so the landowners wanted to exploit them. Their attempts to retrench on those rights sparked a slow resentment that fuelled social unrest and made the south Morvan an independent-minded area ripe to support the Revolution.

Looking at the wooded peaks around us and the many tiny meadows with grazing cattle, it’s hard to credit that the Morvan was, for centuries, most famous as a wheat-and cereal-producing area. Nothing could be further from our memories of the vast plains of Picardy and the Marne which have today taken over that role. But the Morvan’s agricultural past was rich in the days before intensive farming – and may be rich again in a coming post-intensive farming era.

But grain was a seasonal income, and the Morvandieux once again showed their open vision in their willingness to travel for work. Many joined the logging and wood-floating industry that supplied all that wood to Paris. When coal became fashionable instead, they hitched oxen to carts and went off as carters or seasonal labourers out in the flat lands around. They were known as “Galvachers” and their departure each year on 1st May and return on 1st December gave rise to great fairs.

The most extraordinary example of open-minded generosity hospitality was the Morvan women. They became famous as wet nurses – leaving their own babies at home with grandparents to go and rear the rich children of Paris. Many a thatched roof was converted to slate or a smallholding bought on the strength of their milk, and fancy customs were brought back home to the Morvan too. Later, the travel was reversed. Orphans and abandoned children from Paris were sent here to be suckled and raised in exchange for a wage. Not only was the rural exodus experienced in the rest of France log delayed here by these extra incomes; but the new blood of the city children often remained, through intermarriages and work on farms or in trades. A continuation of the old blending and mixing of influences. Perhaps it is this attitude that has forged a special link between the Morvan and the Dutch, whose presence in cottages and cafés all around seems a source of contentment for the locals.

The Morvan is enchanting but changeable. Certainly it isn’t as fecund as Tolkien’s Shire, but the grass is plump and bright and the white Charolias calves are at peace under the snow of hawthorn blossom. Yet the forests can lose us easily and the valleys and hills will soon remove themselves from sight behind their veil of clouds and rain. In the Second World War, even the German occupiers were too intimidated by the forest to chase the resistance Maquis into its depths. Like the elfin Rivendell which sheltered the Fellowship of the Ring, the landscape and the Morvandais’ independence of mind made it the birthplace and headquarters of the French resistance, drawing fighters from all over France. The Morvan liberated itself in 1944, at a heavy cost to which the many monuments along the tracks and the harrowing eye-witness accounts in the Musée de la Resistance bear witness.

But the hospitality we find here floods deep-sprung from the older history of goings away and welcomings in. It is warm and matter-of-fact, a generosity served up in the heart of the homes. In the hilltop hamlet of St-André-en-Morvan the café-tabac is the front living room of a farmhouse where an old dog lies asleep in the mud. We sit at a plastic-clothed table in the gloom from the open door and the one tiny window. On the plain dresser are photos of grandchildren and a row of liqueur bottles that constitute the bar. The farmer’s wife, torn between us and her Suduko puzzle, comments on how many walkers came through twenty-five years ago when the GR was launched, but now she sees only one or two at the weekends. “But I’m here if they want me. I’m always here.” And indeed we did really, really want the ice-cold Orangina she set before us, however old its label.

Le Chalet Renard is uphill from a memorial to the Resistance and may have been one of the outlying farms that fed and sheltered the Maquisards. Now it is a walkers’ hostel with a newly-built extension. But here too hospitality is from the kitchen table where, even though a sign says “fermé” and the family is off to a wedding, the little boys rush inside to fill our water bottles for us.

In Saint-Brisson the young mother running the bar-brasserie on the square used the large, cool barroom as a play pen. I ate surrounded by the screeches of a soft ball game and the crumbs of a baby’s scrap of bread. A toothy baby in an ancient wooden high chair. In the Eco Musée up the road, the story of the Morvandieux’s past bleeds into the present and the future. In the present the open arms of the Morvan continue. This is not the kind of retrenched, enclosed society that shocks many English who think to set up home in rural France. Here the vet is Belgian, the jam-maker is Moroccan and the chambres d’hôte are run by a woman from Senegal. Local families retire into the enterprise of a guest house and campsite and are thrilled to meet the visitors from outside. But then, the Morvandieux themselves still often go away to work before coming back to take up the family living and a quality of life the cities can’t provide.

The Morvan is magical and full of stories and legends. It’s not quite the daunting place we had feared – but it is challenging and deserves respect. As we arrived here the hillsides exploded with wild flowers in yellows and purples. It makes sense that the natural handicaps of steep slopes, forests and robust winters, which prevented intensive farming ruining the environment here, are now being sung as natural head-starts in supply of organic, caring food.

At six in the evening we sit in the garden drinking white wine and reading, and I’m so hot I have my hat on and my feet are bare. At five past six we watch the arrival of a cold front from down the valley, a line of flat grey annihilating out the sun. As it passes, wild winds blow. At seven, we see little from behind the windows but tumultuous rain. By half past eight a red sunset also approaches from the valley and a clear glassy sky into which the birds fling their last songs of the day.

4th May 2008

John-ny, John-ny!

2008-05-06T19:23:00.006+01:00

Johnny Hallyday is stalking me.

He’s been at it since I was thirteen, pouncing on me as soon as I set foot in France. Who is this creep? An old guy with a sleazy voice from too many cigarettes, too old for his look, battering me with his guitar and single-mindedly keeping the long-haired rocker look alive.

I can go for months, years even, without being bothered by him. But just over the Channel, there he is on the radio, on people’s lips. Unheard of on our side, for the French he’s some kind of Elvis. Decade upon decade, still wearing that black leather, still filling arenas and provoking radio stations to count down the tickets sold.

This time it’s worse. Turn on the TV and there he is. Is it the leather or just his bones I can hear creaking? The mottled, aging face is hidden behind sunglasses big enough to do duty in a racing car. Yes, Johnny Hallyday does glasses ads now. Yet he can still fill the Stade de France.

I just don’t get it. I just don’t want to.

And now he’s sly. He’s using a pseudonym: Jean-Philippe Smet. That’s how he slipped in one Sunday night, into our room. And before we could put up defences, Johnny Hallyday was all around us, in a film that – gasp! – suggested a parallel universe where Johnny Hallyday was not famous; was just a loser by the name of Smet.

It was a baptism, that film. A rite of passage, an initiation trial. Johnny’s life and career laid out for our education under the guise of a thin comedic plot. A great many of his songs belted out for our appreciation, usually by his adoring fan, played by Fabrice Luchini – Johnny-worship being a largely male pastime, it seems.

Johnny was slit-eyed and pock-marked, the hair worn extra long only so it could be trimmed to a ‘reasonable’ length. I couldn’t tell if this Hallyday guy’s ego is so big he thinks his not being a star is clearly an absurd joke; or if he shows the most endearing, self-mocking humour in making this film.

Because, by the end of it, we were oddly uplifted, grinning as we hummed along with Johnny and Fabrice to the final rock star anthem, the one that has continued stalking me through every walk since:

“Tout en haut,
Tout en cuir,
Tout en noir!”

Just as he has always been.

28th April 2008

Walk with me

2008-04-29T16:33:00.002+01:00

Up at 1000 feet where we wake our heads are in clouds that condense into tears on our faces. But Accolay, where we start walking, is only 360 feet above sea level and the clouds here are resolved into plaques that shade from white to gunmetal grey. The sky is like Navy camouflage but despite the predictions, it isn’t raining.

At the edge of Accolay is a giant, dirty white pierced vase. It stands more than 12 feet high and is explained by a panel describing the arrival, in 1945, of three avant-guard ceramicists who built a trade here that flourished until the early 1970s. Then it died and the alarming, angular, fading concrete structure out on the main road turns out to have been their shop rather than a petrol station; now long relinquished to weeds and urine.

We pass on the left a gracious Belle Époque villa with a baby pigeon loft at the bottom of a field. It is one of those French manor houses that you long to own and renovate until you realise it sits inches from a main trucking road. Across that road, we start a slow, steady climb up a dirt farm track between fields of young oats. The air pressure is heavy but it is warm, 12ºC, and I feel dozy. A cuckoo, a falcon mewling, a patch of coltsfoot each rouse me momentarily. Then David, a few paces ahead, cuts short an exclamation, and I stride forward to look. A long, thin shape snakes across the path in browns and yellows, but its edges are ruffled. A sloughed snakeskin? And yet it is moving. At the second blink we see it is a caterpillar train: twenty-eight identical caterpillars each an inch or so long, feeling their way nose to tail across the stones of the path. Occasionally one slows and breaks the chain, but it panics to catch up. I’ve never heard of this behaviour yet it makes sense: from the air the tiny creatures will look like a snake, far too large for a blackbird or starling to tackle.

Further along, we see for the first time low purple flowers with bright yellow centres. The leaves and buds remind me of poppies, but the flower petals are pointed and protective like a bell – a kind of anemone, know here as “barbe de chèvre”. It is still before eleven, but with the gentle climb I am already warm and stop to strip off a layer. As I do so, I realise we are back with the vines: a few small parcels here and there on the slopes, the southern edge of the Burgundy region.

Despite nine days’ break from walking our bodies have already found their rhythms: stride follows stride, the poles swinging our arms forward with each step. We can scarcely walk without the metronome the poles provide anymore. At moments like this, when the ground rises, they lever us uphill just as much as they regulate our pace, keep us from slipping or channel the pack weight away from our backs. I see them in my view, as I see my feet. While watching out for stones and ruts, sometimes it seems our feet and the ground immediately around them are all we see of this trek.

We crest the hill on the pale track between low crops and pass alongside a wood. Relief! A place to shelter for a loo stop. Sometimes it’s not easy to be discreet. The heavy air is starting to peel back, too, and I feel fully alive to the views and the smell of apple blossom. But that doesn’t stop my mind wandering now and then to thoughts of last week and the visitors we had. There’s something about the constant pacing that mesmerises and lets the mind wander. I remember Owen waiting patiently for the red squirrel to reappear, and the faces of Charlie and Amelia as they run towards us full of their climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I wonder if they all got home ok.

A party of four older Germans are going the other way. In front, with a guidebook held like a shield, is a barrel-shaped man with a beard and a grey brimmed hat. They are all in shorts and look energetic, like gnome-scouts. They call out to us that Compostela is the other way. We laugh and call back that it is a long story …

We drop down through the neat edges of Cravant, a large village. We’ve seen the Romanesque arches of the tall church tower getting close, and now we can see the ornate carvings around those arches. Too ornate for Romanesque. Someone has given it a Renaissance going-over. But first there is a “lavoir” with considerable presence to duck into. Stone walls pierced with arches to echo the church, and the tricking of water into the large pool between shaded benches. From Normandy onwards, so many villages, even towns, have had their “lavoirs” – called “lavau” in the Morvan. Nearly all are well maintained with solid roofs, though I’ve never seen anyone using them. Now, for the first time, I grasp what a cool, shady place they must be to sit and chat on a hot day. Do people use them like that, for peace, shade and company? Or is the memory of the hard work they represent too strong a disincentive? The only picture I’ve seen of women washing clothes by hand was not in a “lavoir “but in a photo of the banks of the Seine in Paris, in 1956.

Cravant’s church is surrounded by the grass of a little esplanade with benches and pollarded trees. That’s how we know the village is more prosperous and proud than many we have seen in all these months. A grandfather is walking there with a child, and they wave to us. We pick our way through the village. It’s no wonder we wander in the middle of roads these days. In silent stone streets like these there are rarely any pavements and if there are, their twenty-centimetre width is occupied by parked cars. Away from the main road though, there’s rarely anything moving except us.

We decide not to stop at the advertised bar for a coffee, but carry on through the back of Cravant where two women with shopping bags stop their gossip to stare at us and then look away. I feel it is on their tongues to point out we are going the wrong way for Compostela. The red and white stripes of the Grand Randonée markings are on a fence post behind them, showing the way uphill past another church. The route has been well-signed today so far; there’s little need to study the map.

Like the other church – like most churches unless they are touristic highlights – this one is locked. We’re out of the habit of trying the doors of most churches; but just occasionally we do and are sometimes rewarded with the magic of some humble interior with mossy walls and dirty cracked tile floors, or sometimes a delicately carved capital or a gentle statue. In such places it is a parishioner who bothers to keep the church open, leaving fading notices in school-perfect handwriting to point out the aspects they are most proud of. If there is a box inviting donations for the church or for keeping it open, I’m so grateful I always drop money in. The boxes invariably sound empty.

This is a steep tail-end of a street and I’m conscious of my hip grinding as we go. But not too badly; it will probably wear off. And we quickly slant long and gently across the contours through more vineyards. We have the impression that vineyards are a meaner employer here. We see only three people working in the whole area, although they look up and wave to us. In place of people, the vines are brought to life by colour. Strips of fruit orchards alternate and scatter white blossom onto the brown rows. Between the rows blue is painted in by grape hyacinths, or pale mauve by alyssium. Even invasions of dandelions become attractive.

The day and the pace resolve into a succession of newly-blooming flowers that go beyond my knowledge; of buzzards hunting overhead and of butterflies. We take photos and leave the naming of them to research in books back home.

We’re still on chalk tracks, easy walking. After climbing steadily we level out and even drop slightly. We’re making a big loop around a hill called “Belle Vue” – a diversion from where we will end up, but the plotters of the GR obviously think the views will be worth it. And they are. The valleys on our left open out to the narrow plain of the weaving Yonne river below, studded by towns and the occasional smoke billow. Each hillside is a palimpsest of green, of orchards, vines and small woods. Now that all the trees are clad in a shimmer of leaf, we can see how each species has its own shade, height and silhouette. The fruit trees briefly make me think of the apple orchards below the Střahov monastery on Petřin hill above Prague.

We make a sudden turn to the right and after all that lazy gazing out into the distances my head goes down, my arms start pumping and my knee immediately twinges: it has seen the long, steep climb up the stony side of the vertical vineyard. I pant and I plod. Plod and pant. David is behind me, preventing me from slacking. Mid-pant, I reach and put on my sunglasses against the brilliance of the chalk. At the top, in a hollow of bushes, I wheeze and take a big glug of water. It is warm from my back, but welcome.

Now we skirt the hill on a narrow, winding path between scrubby bushes. The path is over-full of the white chalk stones cleaned from the fields. Our feet twist and tilt on them, bruised; and chippings work their way down between our socks and the boot leather. There are no vines here, just grass or plump green crops. I have a passing image of the North Downs Way, heading east. The land falls away on our left where the Yonne widens out into a marsh of small lakes, glinting between trees.

When the path leads down again we enter Irancy, a lovely small wine village concentrated in a horseshoe valley. It is less claustrophobic than the Champagne villages; houses have gardens, even courtyards that give glimpses of the family orchard beyond. Instead of dusty plaster walls sheer from the road, the buildings here are in stone with carved touches dating from Renaissance times. We sit in the sun on the Mairie steps to eat our sandwiches. Walnut bread and the tangy shock of Bleue d’Auvergne cheese. I drool with joy. An old woman leans out between her brown shutters, sees us and says hello. Stopped, no one can tell we are going in the wrong direction. Down the street a tiny poodle and a matching long-haired terrier cross and re-cross the stillness, kings of the village. After an apple, there’s the Restaurant-Bar-Tabac “Le Soufflot” to visit for a warming coffee and toilet stop. A buzzing place, it has a smart, glass-roofed courtyard where respectable people eat and a down-to-earth bar where we, dusty decorators and slick office-workers who drove up in sports cars are equally comfortable. The barman has pined up an email from a local off travelling the world. There’s a poster extolling the Irancy AOC wines, made from Pinot Noir grapes and two ancient local varieties, César and Romain. I like Irancy. I’d like to come back. It has beauty, it has some life. Or maybe it just has sunshine and coffee. As we climb out, we see the way it snuggles into its vines. Then we see an old wooden cart, once updated with rubber wheels but now abandoned. And we see orchids. Irancy is behind us.

Just before we enter a wood, two women and a child walk towards us, lean and fast. It’s ok, they’re not carrying packs; they can’t be pilgrims. But that doesn’t stop them telling us Compostela is the other way. This time David tries to imply we’re on our way back, while I just laugh and pretend not to understand. We’re too embarrassed to stop and explain the whole thing, so leave them with an odd impression of unfriendly ex-pilgrims, clearly unaffected by the spirituality of having once reached Compostela.

The greater part of today’s walk circles the heads of three valleys, tributaries of the Yonne. As the day grows and we tire, it helps us to imagine the day into thirds, punctuated by cafés, and therefore to pace ourselves. The second café is at Champs-sur-Yonne, just after we miss our way through an excess of enjoying the walking and peering at orchids. We earn an additional 2 kilometres along a busy road as a forfeit, so deserve a rest. The pretty café near Champs-sur-Yonne’s main esplanade is closed, without reason given. But at the back of the town is an ugly commercial complex, a concrete square of supermarket, DIY depot and carwash; and a tabac that is open. One of our faithful PMUs, with the usual silent bartender who is persuaded to serve us Oranginas and to point to the toilets. After walnut and blue cheese sandwiches, cold Orangina is my second favourite sensation of the day.

So far we’re lucky with the weather. The sky is full of clouds but somehow wherever we turn a channel of sunshine opens up to lead us through. Now we turn to the river and for the rest of the day we know the path will be flat. It’s an actual riverside walk, not one that hangs above the river on a cliff. There are chalets and cottages on our other side, tree-shaded and dishevelled in their overgrown gardens. One is new: we eyeball a glass wall through which we can almost stroke the lacquered doors of the fashionable kitchen.

At Vaux our luck changes. The clouds close over and remove our energy source, while the river is impassable. The bridge is a-crawl with workmen, netting, dust and sparks. We think about blagging our way across but see it is too dangerous. If we were in a car we could follow the diversion, but no one thinks of walkers, so the end of the day is a foot-mashing six kilometres along roads. We’re tired now, coming up to twenty-five of what ends up being a thirty-one-kilometre (or over nineteen miles) walk that has included lots of climbing. It was only meant to be twenty-four kilometres in total, but we’re too tired to figure out how that happened. I switch off and retreat into myself. It’s all about slogging it out to the finish now, like the ends of so many days are. Just getting it done, getting there, fills my thoughts. ‘There’ being a shower and a bed to stretch out on. Even when there’s a chance, today, to go back onto the riverside path from the road, we’re too tired to bother at first. The ill-named “Rue de l’ile de Paradis” squeezes us between a building site and the railway, while angry Doberman dogs stake us out.

And then, just at the end where we succumb once more to the river path, a final reward. We see a different side to Auxerre from the medieval cobbled city inside its wall that was closed and silent on a rainy Sunday afternoon. This Auxerre is a city of football practice, of joggers and cyclists, archery and canoeing clubs.

A record day for length and almost for ascent, and although tired we’re not too beaten up. But I can tell I will regret this evening staying in a cottage with stairs.

Day distance: 19.3 miles / 31.1 km
Overall distance: 801 miles
Time walking: 6 hours 16 minutes
Average speed walking: 3.1 mph
Total ascent for the day: 1437 feet / 437 m

22nd April 2008

Spilling over

2008-04-20T17:48:00.001+01:00

When I look back over these six days, in my mind is a brown hessian sack slung over a red shoulder. It’s a full sack – over-full you might say – and the shoulder belongs to Father Christmas. His sack is lumpy with odd-shaped packages, some squashy and rounded, others whose sharp corners tear through the weave of the bag. Each one is thrilling and although the sack is awkward, Father Christmas carries it along expectantly.

The party was in the light-hearted Hotel Ibis on the edge of Troyes’ magical centre, all cobbles, half-timbered buildings and improbable gravity. We two arrived peacefully last Monday morning and by five o’clock we had become six when Cathy, Andy, Owen and Bryn arrived from Gloucester in time for tea. Two days later we swelled to ten with Kevin, Chris, Charlie and Amelia down from Chipstead. A gathering of directions in a town we might never have visited but for the coincidence of school holidays and long-promised journeys to find us.

Some packages inside the sack were teasing and some were absorbing and educational. They were cuddly and quizzical. They were loud and colourful. There were party poppers and dull socks. There was chocolate but also apples and oranges, at a picnic table by the Lac d’Orient:

Owen quietly prowled behind and around us, camera in hand, weighing the shots and taking them unobtrusively like a true photographer. Tall and lean as a telephoto lens.

Amelia’s daintiness and old-fashioned style. A perfect mini Parisienne in her belted mac of bright flowers, tripping in summer frocks whatever the weather.

Bryn the detective, following the children’s tourist trail of a mammoth thirty-three questions. No matter that it was all in French: with remembered words and sprinkling of help he leapt like a born linguist from the French to something similar in English and worked out the sense and the answers to them all.

Cath delighting in the absurdities of shoe fashion in the shop windows, from the frankly frumpy to the delectably insubstantial.

Charlie speaks the French he knows but his awareness of ‘foreign’ equals his awareness of ‘shy’. There are policemen, museum guides, hotel staff, waiters and random passers-by throughout Troyes whose baffled faces greeted his life story and ambitions.

The feathered and beaked heads of the chickens and ducks nestled coyly by their naked bodies on the market hall counters. Those heads disturbed no-one; but the crab stuck upside down on the oxygen bubbles in the vast lobster tank was too much for tender-hearted Amelia.

Andy’s enjoyment of the way old Troyes architecture was echoed in modern and refurbished buildings, bringing to life for us the wooden slats and tiles and the geometry of natural colours.

Bryn, introduced to espresso coffee by David, having to be bodily restrained from imbibing two double-shot cups before 10 am.

Owen bridging the ages on our ambles to and from the restaurant in the evenings. The open piazzas of polished cobbles were too tempting for the young ones, but Owen was always alert to bring them to a halt before the pavement ran out.

Amelia’s dedication to keeping a low volume all morning to earn the joy of a ride on the mermaid ‘with the big boobies’ on the carousel.

The long minutes with Owen and Bryn watching the sci-fi ugliness of a cock turkey who was too stupid to figure out the persistent meekness of his hen. We adults holding our breath at the kitchen sink drama.

Charlie transfixed and silent only when reading or creating worlds of adventure round the toys in his hands. A totally different boy to the one who shouts so loudly he takes the precaution of putting his fingers in his own ears.

Chris slipping from her chair with giggles when I accidentally introduced a B word into the pirate story I was reading to Amelia.

Kevin’s thriving schoolboy humour finds its outlet in the dreadful jokes he whispers for the twins to repeat out loud. After the groans and chuckles, Chris’s deadpan timing with “Do the children still find you funny” earned roars.

The first sip of lager in the Latin Quarter restaurant as our day in Paris ended. A steamy and cacophonic day of Eiffel Tower queues, perplexing pyramids, traffic-versus-child races, double-decker metros, springy spiral staircases, toilet trips and broken water beakers had finally paused to let us catch up.

Bryn, David, Owen and Andy in endless Top Trumps challenges as we picnicked in the bedroom while Troyes, Cathy and I went to sleep over lunch. Jabba the Hut’s Sailbarge was the winning card.
Owen, edging close to the time he’ll be off to University and adulthood, is mature enough already to enjoy sharing our carafe of wine or to choose to stick to water, as he sees fit.

Bryn’s perfectly logical sulks and “Why ask me what I want if you won’t let me have it?” on learning he could not order the vodka-laced ice cream like David.

The avenues of mud and water-filled moats on our walk through the Forêt d’Orient. Bryn chose pole-vaulting but for us it was log-balancing or falling in: Andy was resignedly exasperated to learn Owen had brought only one pair of shoes …

In turns the lounge and large bedrooms of the hotel, the restaurants in the old “maisons a pans de bois” near the main square, the whole of Troyes’ “bouchon de champagne” district bounded by avenues and the river in the shape of a champagne cork became the sack that was filled to bursting with laughter, stories, colours, music, conversation, competitions and, like those hard corners pushing out of the sack, sometimes with screams, tears, jealousies and misunderstandings. Like a Christmas holiday, the atmosphere was special, the food rich and the treats overdone. As we waved goodbye to the final four this morning David and I turned back to the silent hotel and sighed, at once lonely and calm; unsure how to entertain ourselves but relieved at the thought of plain food and housework.

20th April 2008

Joey: a story

2008-04-13T13:50:00.003+01:00

Not many people come down this lane. Not much happens here at all, really. The odd car puffing out dust as it slams in the potholes. Sometimes a mother with a toddler in tow, both too bored to stay at home and out looking for something to stare at. If they catch sight of me, I’ll do.

So if there is some movement I’ll glance up. Of course I will, it’s only natural. If I’m awake. It might just be the woodpigeons come to brag on the wires. But it’s something.

I can’t remember how long I’ve been living here. Four years? The days run together and so the years slip by. It’s not a bad place, in itself. Spacious. But when the wind howls across the plain beyond the village and whips rain around the eaves, I can’t help shivering. So I know when the seasons change. When I first came here I could get about quite well, but recently my feet have been getting me down. They throb, and I can’t seem to put them down with the confidence I used to. They’re unsteady and all I can do is hobble. Sometimes it’s too much of an effort to go and get something to eat even. Maybe that’s why I sleep so much these days.

The truth is, I don’t mind being left alone and forgotten. Far better to be left in peace to fend for myself as best I can than have to put up with a constant mothering by a crowd of folks. Being tapped so gently and pityingly, my hair smoothed. Always asked, how am I? Told I’m doing fine. Being patronised like a youngster. Wanting to keep me clean, make me take exercise. Or having to behave how they think is right. Having to be friendly and accommodating, sunny-tempered. No: better to be left alone that to put up with any of that.

- O -

When I hear a car door slam and men’s voices, I look up. It’s one of those upright cars with high tyres that the farmers round here seem so fond of. One of the men looks familiar, the one with white hair and a face mottled purple by cold and drink. He’s wearing old brown cords and a blue anorak and his hair is flying in the damp wind. He looks impatient. What you’d call cheesed off. For some reason he’s carrying a bundle of old ropes in his hand. With is other hand he slams the car door shut.

The other two I don’t know. You can’t tell them apart hardly: both built like barns and dark heads of hair like they’re wearing helmets. They’re scarcely less colourful in the face than whitey, but tending towards the red.

It’s unusual enough to see people stopping along here, so I haul myself up to look closer. It’s not easy, on my feet. But I said that already, didn’t I? Those two – the ones with whitey – have got big thick jumpers on. I can practically smell the wet wool and body odour from here. They’ve got odd flaps on their legs. I’ve never seen that before. Stiff planks, like, that seem to tie up behind. But not so stiff as the planks in the barn wall, nor as long. I’ve got it! Leather.

I edge closer but keep myself half hidden. Whitey comes right towards me across the lane and now I can hear him clicking his tongue in that impatient way. The others follow him, and one of them even unlatches the gate to come in. OK, so now I’m concerned. I come out from hiding and march straight at them, thinking they’ll get wary and back off. Well, I say march. Of course, I’m capable of no such thing. There’s no authority in my shuffle, which is why they hold their ground and whitey even moves closer. He seems to be talking but in that low, would-be-soothing way that they all put on when they visit, so I don’t quite catch what he’s saying. Both of the leather-legs have brought some sort of contraption from the car. A wooden stand which the taller one is unfolding, and a green canvas bag with poles sticking out at all angles. Now what’s all that about?

I can sense that something’s wrong. Smell it, you might say. I’ve always had a fine sense of smell. But these leather-bound men with their rough jumpers and even rougher faces and their contraptions – it’s all new to me. I stand at bay a few moments, wondering what to do. I can’t make out their intentions, you see. Facing them off didn’t work, so should I turn and flee? I’m hesitating, but already my leg muscles are twitching with the memory of running and my heart in my chest is pumping expectantly. I feel my eyes have widened. My nostrils certainly have; the air is surging into them, a slippery cold that reaches down into my throat.

Just as I’m on the point of turning, whitey reaches out a hand and slaps it down on my head. I jerk back, but his fingers have twisted deep into my hair and he hangs on, painfully tearing the roots as I thrash to free myself. With his other hand he shakes the pile of ropes and the fear runs cold through me. It’s a harness of some sort, a way of trussing me up, for sure. Suddenly he’s in charge as he slides the rope behind my head, grazing my ears. We’re nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye, but there’s no triumph in his, just the same grumpy impatience.

I pull back again, tugging hard, and I’m sure my eyes are rolling as if I were crazed. We tussle in a tug-of-war that, if it was left to whitey and me, I would have won. I can see the rope is burning his hands as it’s burning my cheeks but, you see, I’m desperate to escape whereas he – well, he seems irritated. It’s not an emotion that would win wars. But this war isn’t just between me and him. There’s the other two, the lumps of walking rock with their leather legs. They start hitting me, not hard it’s true; more like slapping me around, forcing me slowly forwards till we’re near the tree by the gate. That’s where they tie me up, finally, with a length of rope so short I can do nothing, barely even shake my head to clear my thoughts.

And straight away they’re back to all that soft-talking and gentle taps and strokes, like I was a pet. The "Come on, Joey, calm down now, there’s a good fella." The "Won’t take a moment, you won’t even feel it." The "It’s for your own good you know, you’ll be much better afterwards." As if I could trust them one second. As if I was an imbecile.

I can feel leather legs number one run his hand down my thigh, ever so gently, ever so crooningly. He can see I’m about to kick him so, sly bugger that he is, he sticks me with some kind of pin just above the ankle, and as I draw my foot back in surprise, he grabs it and twists it up against his leather thigh. His mate hands him a piece of metal covered in ridges. Now, at last, I understand, as the grating shudders up through my hoof, along my shuddering back and down into the teeth that I bare in whitey’s bored purple face.

11th April 2008

Lac du Der

2008-04-13T13:48:00.004+01:00

The desiccated beech leaves crack like breakfast cereal and we stop, taking shallow breaths with our lips parted. The scent of decay and dark fungi jostles closely, but lighter is the lemon-tinged pollen. Now we are still and our breathing has stilled too. The skin above my lip prickles with damp in the fragments of sun, expectantly.

The woods are a morning market for birds, each crying their wares in repetitive four- and five-note tunes, sung simply, over and again. The trees are not yet in full leaf; barely have their buds broken, yet the songs sound distant as they career through the high branches. Tree-creepers with pearl-pink breasts reward our silence by shuttling beak-down or beak-up on the bark. A dynasty of blue tits sweep their family disputes into the bushes nearby. The chaffinches and gold crests are distracted by breakfast and robins throw their voices across clearings while woodpeckers play the glockenspiel of dying trees. We are the only ones to hear it.

The morning advances and the smell of sunshine wins over that of spring floods. Where the trees thin, rays of sunlight have been brought to earth as cowslips; then the cowslips themselves lift and dance around our heads in the bodies of brimstone butterflies. A cream-feathered buzzard dives to the ground a few feet away, close enough to see his prize.

We’re after bigger prey. The mud that is black with leaf mould holds prints well. The smooth, forward-pointing ovals of deer have taken on an inward tilt and a slight point at the front. Wild boar, and in numbers, were thrown into an ecstasy of acorns at this crossing in the paths. But why did one of them leave behind these fringes of black and white bristles, half trampled into the bracken?

A razor of wind cuts our ears, reminding us that today’s sun is coquette. But the wind reaches us only at the water’s edge along with the ghosts of the drowned villages. A bird we don’t recognise flashes its rust coloured tail as it farms the stony beachlets between the cut rocks of the causeway. A heron frowns and takes off with the sound of wave on shingle to find a quieter bay. Cormorants, mallards and grebes ignore us splendidly. Here, the white tumbles of pebbles merge into drifts of wood anemone whose meek blushing bells are slowly gaining confidence and raising their yellow hearts to the sun. Periwinkle flowers so darkly violet in the undergrowth we look at it for several seconds before knowing it is not green. The purple-white of meadowsweet fringes ditches where stagnant water seethes black. A thousand tadpoles have chosen today to hatch and fight their way to oxygen.

Beside a wooden hut, two women spread their pale ample shoulders along the backs of plastic chairs. They are quite content to gossip the day away, but smile still to see us and thank us for stopping. They pour us juice and cook fresh waffles that smell like birthdays and feel like eggshells as I bite through the sugar crust to the warm inside. The owner describes the winter when snow lies thickly and the boars come to dig right at the doors of the hut. Her husband has shot his share of them, she says. In summer and autumn she picks wild strawberries and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms to serve from the kiosk. When she retires next year, while her husband is hunting birds and deer and boar, she will spend all her time gathering food and making jam, and teaching her grandchildren the to profit from the woods.

8th April 2008

Life in the vines

2008-04-07T14:25:00.004+01:00

Back in early January, on our third or fourth day of walking, we were in the Denbies’ wine estate near Dorking speculating that the next time we would see vines would be in the Champagne region, beyond Reims. And so it has finally proved.

The gently rising slopes of brown look lifeless: not a promising time of year to be visiting. But as we walk through them over several days, we see the chalk and clay tracks are speckled with dozens of vehicles, and that the tiny dark blobs are the hunched backs of workers. These brown days are a time of promise and fierce activity. The countryside is alive.

In the agricultural swathes of Normandy or Picardy farms were mastered by machinery and just one or two workers. Here, a single glance shows twenty or more intent people; the degree of labour needed for wine production explains its price as a luxury good. The labourers look up and nod a hello, but rarely stop their hands to talk. They hint at an old-style countryside, where hundreds lived and worked together through their annual tasks and festivals - although it is no doubt much emptier even here than in the past. Nowadays five full time workers can service a three-hectare estate, rising to twenty-five people for the week-long harvest. There’s a medieval echo to life. At noon, all the church bells sound long and loud to call the vineworkers in to lunch, and again at five to end the day. In two bars, the workers nodded and smiled, but still didn’t attempt a conversation; and when two o’clock sounded they drained their coffee cups and headed back out into the clay and chalk lanes.

Living with the vines means living utterly at the rhythm of the seasons and the weather. When winter turns you must prune, and you must prune before the sap rises again. But not too soon, or the vine will channel its strength too quickly and risk frostbite on the new shoots. If a frost threatens, you must offer protection – spraying water to encase the buds in an icy nest of 0º; or burning resinous wood to build a warm smoky blanket; or fleece ‘socks’ over the vines. When the shoots and leaves start to grow it is time to pinch out all but the main branches. And when the grapes are ripe, you must harvest them. Then and there. No matter that the changes in climate mean your grapes are ready a fortnight before normal and your grape pickers have not yet arrived for the season – you must rally them as quickly as you can. "Si juin fait le vin, août fait le goût".

After several days of hiking between the vineyards and the forests of the Montagne de Reims, we are full of questions. This is the season for pruning, a job that lasts a good couple of months and follows rigid rules for the number of shoots left on which year’s growth, and for the height at which the shoots may begin and finish. There are four pruning patterns, authorised or forbidden according to the type of grape and whether the village is grand cru, premier cru or a simple champagne. With familiarity it should be possible to tell, from the pruned stalks, what kind of vineyard you are standing in.

There are as many women as men working, we notice, all swaddled in woollen hats and padded jackets with hoods, hunched against the fog and frost, the wind or rain and sleet. They work peacefully and rhythmically. Homemade or sophisticated, the winegrowers use tools uniquely evolved for the vines. They sit to their tasks on low plastic benches like skateboards on six-inch high wheels. The width of the gap between vines. The wheels point lengthwise so the worker can roll themselves down the slope as they go. After pruning, the chosen stalks must be attached to the horizontal wires, and for this a tagging gun was invented, like a shop assistant’s ticketing gun, except this one shoots out, twists and cuts the tag in one whirring motion.

Sometimes the cut stalks are taken to the woods and left to rot down, but mostly people burn them. Oil drums are slit lengthwise and eased apart, then mounted on a one-wheel frame like a wheelbarrow, to carry fire and smoke up and down the rows and consume the waste. Looking across the valleys with the ugly, modern rectangles of Reims a constant backdrop, smoke pillars are everywhere in the morning mist. Now rising tall, now billowing thick and sideways with the vagaries of the wind.

Why are some vineyards full of snails on the plants, and others not? Why are all the snails a translucent yellow-green? What is in the brown capsules hanging on the fences and at the end of some rows? What is being sprayed from the absurdly tall tractors that straddle the rows like a praying mantis? Is there such a thing as organic champagne? Not even our visits to the Musée de la Vigne or the cellars of our hosts, Patrick Soutiran, have yet satisfied the questions that come to us as we walk.

The region of the Montagne de Reims was born out of the huge sea that once covered the land. Blame millennia of sea creatures for the claggy soil that weighs our boots with extra kilos in these still damp weeks. The landscape is less monotonous than expected. The vines only love the poor soil on the slopes of the hills, where they are oriented plot by plot to be sure of full exposure to the sun. Below them, the soil of the plain is too rich and has been cultivated for wheat, rye, and oats and for rapeseed and beets. On the ‘mountaintop’, really a hill plateau, the forest takes over, a tangle of undergrowth and mossy fallen wood, boar and deer tracks and, very rarely, neat piles of harvested logs. We roam constantly between these landscapes, partnered by the exuberance of skylarks on the plain and echoing woodpeckers and nesting bluetits and blackbirds in the forest. The vines themselves are knobbled like arthritic witches’ hands in a flamenco dance. Birds do not love the vines, or not yet; but when the sun breaks through a mist of bees and insects takes us by surprise. Spring is another step nearer.

The scene looks unchanged for centuries; but in fact up until the 1920s, when re-planting after the phylloxera disaster early in the century was finally completed, the familiar rows did not exist. Vines then were plated to grow up on posts rather than along on wires, and the plants were higgledy-piggledy across the slopes, defying mechanisation. Then, too, roles were strictly divided. Wine growers grew the grapes and passed them to presses from where the extracted juice was sold to the champagne houses in Reims or Epernay for the complicated and slow process of turning it into wine. With the economic collapse in the late 1920s, growers taught themselves to make and sell the champagne themselves. Now there are no less than 320 crus or classified villages, and many more individual champagne producers.

The villages which camp at intervals between the vineyards and the forest are larger than we are familiar with: dense pockets of construction, every second gateway leads to a small Maison de Champagne with vast warehouses and small offices. Not a scrap of ground is wasted for gardens, pavements or squares. Despite the vaunted tourist routes, despite even the number of people supported by the work in the vines, these villages are as under-serviced as ever. The streets taunt with their painted and wrought signs, but each is for a champagne house to visit. There are no shops and rare bars. The shops have been replaced by vans that tour the villages and toot to scurry out the housewives: one for the bread, one for the butcher, one for the fishmonger.

Back in our flat in Ambonnay, we pass the evenings with books and big meals we prepare together, a fusion of British (kippers, roast beef and potatoes) and French (Normandy pork in cider, ratatouille) and, of course, compare the wines of the Montagne.

4th April 2008

On being flexible

2008-03-27T10:59:00.005Z

We were convinced that when we finally turned south at Laon everything would – figuratively speaking – be downhill all the way. But one way or another, we’ve hit a brick wall instead.

From the southern Champagne region onwards there is an increasing need to stay in walkers’ hostels and on David’s trip home he had picked up extra weight in the form of sleeping bags and towels. It’s also an area where we are having to carry greater quantities of food to cover longer gaps of uncertainty. The camels’ backs had met the straw.

All along we had assumed that the changeover of equipment would coincide with shedding considerable weight in winter thermals ad excess hats and gloves, not to mention the kettle. Spring, you see, and In The South. But lo! March dawns and with it what the French call “les giboulées de mars”. Which roughly translates as snow, sleet, hail torrential rain, gales and calm sunshine all in the space of twenty minutes. I understand the UK has been experiencing something similar.

It just wasn’t reasonable. With some sadness we have decided to sacrifice the purity of the concept and try a different tactic for a few weeks: a succession of bases from which we will cover the route in a succession of day walks with light packs. Such is the fate of grand plans.

As if in confirmation of a jolly good idea #2, the morning after our decision we woke to a white landscape onto which more snow fell horizontally. Worse, while we’ve been sorting ourselves out and passing through the area in trains and cars we have realised that much of the areas we would have been walking in are meters under water. Rivers, canals and lakes in the Champagne-Ardennes region have broken their banks; beyond them the rain has created new lakes in fields and forests. Some of these we have already waded through, but we had no idea it was so extensive. In Britain it would be headline news for three weeks, but in France it must be a normal occurrence unworthy of comment.

So back once again to Reims to regroup. Back indeed for a third time to the friendly Hotel Porte de Mars where the staff roared with laughter and then claimed us as part of their family. I’d recommend anyone going to Reims to stay there (great facilities and breakfast at good prices), while for ourselves the manager is planning an itinerary of his secret Reims in case we return for a fourth time.

I have mentioned before that one of our evening entertainments is listening to BBC radio podcasts. In Our Time is a favourite and I find some comfort in at last relating one of the erudite debates directly to our experience. “Guilt”. There are, apparently, guilt cultures and shame cultures. Shame contains the notion of saving face or losing face, it is concerned with outward appearence. Guilt culture is concerned with the internal voice of conscience and self criticism.

Well, on balance we don’t feel much guilt over our change of tactic. We do intend to return to full pilgrim mode in a few weeks, although maybe with a jumping about of the order of sections to chase the weather. But perhaps we feel a little shame, in the eyes of others …

The pink wave

2008-03-18T13:38:00.006Z

Crossing the dark car park that separates the town centre from my hotel, I frowned at the music that made windows and car lights jump almost as far back as the main street. It was the first antisocial behaviour (besides the dog dirt and the impatience of museum staff) in a week in Reims. And on a school night.

At the top of the park the arches of the Porte de Mars face Roman peace and stability off against the memorial to Rémois dead in two world wars. Alternating blue and orange flashing lights told me the police were there; but they weren't censuring the noisy party, rather they were protecting it, waving cars on round the roundabout past the blocked-off road.

Last Sunday, the Charles de Casanove champagne house next to my hotel had been covered with rich blue placards. It was the campaign headquarters of Renard Dutreil, the mayoral candidate of the right-wing UMP party. By Monday morning the placards were gone: Dutreil was out in the gutter and two women would fight it out at the second round of elections - one from the Parti Socialist and the other an independent right-winger.

But whose victory bash was going on just down the road? If I had realised it was the PS maybe I would have gatecrashed. I like Reims; there's a lot going on. After a week here I'd started to take its municipal entanglements to heart.

French local elections take place every seven years, so journalists' and political commentators' eyes gleam as they settle in for weeks of analysis. Back in my room the presenters were talking of "la vague rose", the pink wave spreading through town halls across the country. One or two had held on to their blue credentials but of the biggest cities only Marseille had done so. Even Toulouse, a right-wing local administration for thirty-seven years, had gone pink.

Of course, much is being made of what this swing to the left means for France. The right-wing losers claim that every town has its particuliarities and the results cannot therefore be read as a national critique of the Sarkozy government. The socialists, naturally, claim the opposite. "Sarko" and his prime minister Fillon are about to publish the much-trailed Attali report into fiscal reforms aimed at boosting enterprise and attracting capital. The French are worried: even pensioners came out and demonstrated last week. Sarkozy, himself, hasn't yet commented on the local elections.

Meanwhile a new party, MoDEM, for whom these elections were the first major test, has been severely trounced. They had set themselves up as a French "third way", able to communicate with both left and right without having to be in formal alliance with either. But it seems France isn't ready for that yet. They scared themselves when they elected the "modernising" Sarkozy and the equally modern cult of the individual that he heralded. Now they are retrenching. It isn't just the rejection of a middle way that makes France feel twenty-five years behind the times. It is also the strikes which have assailed the country in recent weeks and the sight on posters and TV screens of the heavy drawing of a fist with a rose, the logo of the Parti Socialist, that was last in common currency in the UK in 1980s student politics.

This Monday, local life was moving on. From my window I watched the mayor-exaunt and the mayor-elect with several dozen dignitaries and journalists lay a wreath to Lazare Ponticelli, the last "poilu", foreigners who had come to defend France in the Foreign Legion in the First World War. He died last week, still witnessing to the absurdity of war. Across the road, the trucks of the Easter funfair were rolling into town.

17 March 2008

Losing and finding my Way

2008-03-15T17:20:00.010Z

I'm sitting in the garden behind the apse of Reims cathedral, feeling sad. The yellow citrus smells of mimosa and forsythia climb above those of damp chalk paths and the pinkly-dangling, summer pudding smells of flowering current. A Japanese student with a scared sprouting of beard is sketching the street scene - quite a good sketch - and a young couple are slowly wheeling home their baby and their market baskets. While I was forgetting to look, horse chestnut leaves have broken free of their buds. For one day only we have a respite from rain and wind. A light high haze is between us and the sun, smearing but not stealing the brightness.

In Laon nine days ago we finally turned south. When we leave Reims at the end of next week we shall, at last, be following one of the recognised paths to Santiago de Compostela, the one leading from Belgium via Vézelay. We shall stay with it as far as Vézelay, or possibly Nevers, and then cut down through the Massif Central to Le Puy en Velay.

Even three weeks ago those two events filled me with excitement, especially the prospect of meeting up with other pilgrims in the act of walking. Along with some kind of terror at having our hard-won rythmns disturbed.

So why my sadness? In the hiatus we have fallen into I feel that we shall have to start the challenge all over again. While David is off in London, recounting stories to friends and burning for a return to what he sees as our 'real' life of packing, walking and unpacking, I find I have lost the knack. Lost my way, almost. No sooner installed in my hotel for the week than I have the urge to buy flowers and settle down. I remember Normandy as a golden era of quiet remoteness and gentle valleys. This enforced break, valuable for my health, is dangerous to my head. I know now more of the difficulties before us, and the fact that we haven't yet encountered a mountain is sobering.

Yesterday I looked at the great Pilgrimage to Santiago website that had been a source of so much information before we set out. It led me to other people's diaries (here and here) and I felt small. Their accounts are full of joy and optimism despite great pain and illness. These are people who bite on a piece of wood and carry on marching on their bleeding stumps. They're walking in winter like us but make only passing reference to being unable to find food and the lack of hot showers. Yet I'd been assumeing it was all going to get better as we got further south.

Compared to those people, we're just playing at the pilgrimage thing. We're the kind who would pay others to go in our place. My fears were confirmed by the welcoming man in Reims cathedral who was confused that we're staying in a hotel not in the international hostal across the square.

But the memory of others we have spoken with bubbles up. A woman shopping in Cabourg who saw our shells and tapped us on the shoulder to say a quick good luck - she'd been there herself. The blue-eyed glow of the woman in the woods above the Seine as she remembered the approach to Santiago; or the be-leathered motorcyclist sitting outside with his beer and his cigarettes in Ry who also, surprisingly, admitted his trip there once, a long time ago. Each of them had that same glow, the Christmas-morning secret they couldn't put into words but wanted to share. It intrigues me, this difference that comes upon people once they've arrive in foot in Compostela.

And I can't let my courage fail because of José and Josette who will be setting out from Gournay-en-Bray in about a week. When we met them they were half-way between exhilaration and daunted, between fully-planned and innocence. They seemed to draw strength from the fact that we were laughing and looked healthy. So for their sakes we have to tuck in our chins and carry on.

And the lovely Dominique et Marie Brigitte Ernoult. Dominique caught up with us leaving Senlis and invited us in for coffee and cake or lunch, if we would accept it. The fact that they are slowly making their way to Compostela with a group of friends in one- and two- week blocks takes nothing from their joy at doing the walk or from the peace and space to think that they find there.

As I collected my 'stamp' in my Pilgrim Record in Laon cathedral, I wondered at a cerain hollowness over clocking up yet another Gothic edifice. The medieval pilgrims' insistence on traipsing to all these places must have amounted to more than a "been there, done that" automation? Then it struck me with the force of a revelation: of course, they were threre to pray, weren't they?

Well. Occasions for quiet thought are a start.

15 March 2008

Sorry and update

2008-03-14T17:24:00.003Z

I'm sorry for the huge gap since I last posted - a chronic lack of internet access mingled with being distracted by the lights of the city and then illness - but I've been saving them up. Here are a few of the things I've been mulling over. And a few more will get typed in over the next day or two ... though they won't always appear in a logical order so you might want to look hard.

How to be ill

2008-03-13T12:38:00.006Z

"Try to describe the smell and taste of things, not just the appearence," tutors on writing courses insist. In this case, best not.

Was it the toasted goats' cheese in the hotel restaurant in Fismes, left in the oven till the cheese curdled yellow and the bread hardened to a slate? Or an out-of-date bottle of orange juice, its deposits dusty in the bottom? Maybe it was a fleck of mud on my gloves as I'd piled in the dried apricots in Oeuilly. Whatever; one o'clock in the morning in the bathroom in Fismes was not a place to be.

I'd come to France with a small number of preconceptions, one of which was that French pharmacists fulfil a role of proto-doctor, a first point of advice on a range of illnesses and mushroom identification. Alas, I'm out of date again. Cherchez le white coat if you will, but hold tight on the mushrooms. Most people working in pharmacies shrug their shoulders and wander to the nearest shelf selling ... lice shampoo?

Above all don't, like I did, put on a heavy rucksack and go for a 6-mile hike after two days of actively evacuating all your food. Around St Leonard my head swam with red lights and my knees had to hand over to the walking poles. God smiled: we staggered into a handy bar with a cheerful pre-lunch chef offering tisane, toilets and a taxi back to Reims. We didn't have the energy to explain, just accepted the derision of the office workers (at 11 am?) when they saw such hyper-equipped walkers bottle it into a taxi at the first drop of rain.

That walk out of Reims along the canal had used up every last calorie I had in me. For the next two days my world shrank to a hotel befroom and an intense pain as my stomach swelled with the effort of processing something that wasn' there.

Ten years ago, living in Turkey, we fell foul - very foul - of e-coli poisoning, fondly referred to as Ankara Arse. After two weeks I called in a doctor whose advice in such circumstances I've followed ever since. Eat green lentils, boiled chicken or white fish and boiled potatoes. Drink mint tea. Avoid dairy and citrus, sugar and refined anything.

Fast forward to France 2008 and your only hope is to find a city with a Monoprix not too far from your hotel. Monoprix is a source of rotisserie-cooked chicken (pull the skin off first) and mounds of hot mashed potato that they'll happily shovel into a plastic dish and sell by the kilo. Wholewheat bread and bananas for fast, simple energy, and a carton of gazpacho, designed to be eaten cold, for the vitamins.

On his husbandly foraging trips David had come upon a shop selling books in English. Importantly, Agatha Christies, the most effective palliative known to man - or at least to me. David was just being understanding. Lying on my tummy with a pillow massaging the pain, swinging between sweat and clammy shivers, I let the mantra of death and blood and class and race prejudice soothe me.

A week later and I'm tentatively wondering if I'm over it. Not so over it that I can wholly enjoy walking through the magnificent Saturday market, but over it enough to eye the fresh salads in the brasserie and to order a small one with - gasp - a medicinal glass of red wine.

13 March 2008

Bons souhaits

2008-03-13T12:36:00.012Z

I think I've found a softer side to the French. It goes beyond mere good breeding. They are so immensely good at wishing you things. Good things. The wealth and variety of good things we have been wished, and the precision with which those wishes are bestowed, is humbling. We must start the search, right now, for an English equivalent.

Bonjour and bonne nuit, of course. Bon matin and bon après-midi are elegant refinements. Bon apétit is practically English anyway; and bon chemin, bonne route, bonne randonée and bonne promenade are all becoming familiar as the vocabulary of the walk. Then there is bon courage, spoken bracingly or pityingly. On the other hand, we rarely get a bonnes vacances.

In shops, bonne fin de journée or bon weekend trips off the tongue of every assistant while we're still fumbling with the change and the door, forgetting our manners. Restaurant waiters go even better. Bon apétit is followed by a bonne continuation or two, then bonne fin de repas and finally bonne fin de soirée.

So what can we do to measure up to all this niceness? I manage a "à vous aussi", but it sounds belated. I dream of one day getting in there first with a beautiful, appropriate, timely bon SOMETHING!

6 March 2008

Girlie weekend

2008-03-13T12:35:00.013Z

I felt uneasy at interrupting our walk for a girlie weekend in Paris; it was strange but exciting. This is an annual appointment, though usually for the middle of January and usually in London. It would have been easy to cancel this year, but David insisted: if we made an exception this year it would be far too easy to skip another year ... and then another. Childhood friendships are too important for that. And he was absolutely right. It may be only once a year, for two days, but we talk intensively, ritual conversations that revisit old incidents. An annual repointing and reinforcing of the stones.

This time we had rented a small suite with a little kitchen permitting regular consumption of tea. So we lay in a row on the double bed, our shoes kicked off after five churches, two existentialist cafés and a market. And we giggled like a wide, rippling waterbed as we recited the names of all our teachers and their foibles.

Which is not to say we didn't exercise our brains. A visit to the Pantheon (dead white males in a funky maze) with its reinstated original Foucault's Pendulum led to a complicated coffee stop with radiating saucers and swinging salt cellars as we checked the science. Sue showed an alarming passion for the reasoning behind Gothic architecture which tested my new-found knowledge. I admit it, I made some things up. And Helen kept asking the date of this or that war or treaty - Sue and I had done A Level History - then supplied the answers herself.

As for the girlieness - it was a poor vintage, I'm afraid. Champagne with our feet in the bath, but not much shopping. I seriously could not get the point of scarves in multiple colours. Though there was one skirt ... I fear I may have dragged the others down to my new standards. As we packed on Sunday morning Helen bewailed the clothes she hadn't worn. "We never even thought about changing for dinner last night!"

Gone are the days of dancing; not yet here those of evenings in jazz clubs.

So we nosed the shops of pointless gifts, looking for shiny things and chiffon things for their children. I knew I had returned to the shores of normality when I found myself urgently scanning the keyrings for a present for David. Important friendships were confirmed, the warmth would get us through to next year. It was time to start walking again.

3 March 2008

Picardy who?

2008-03-13T12:35:00.012Z

Around a bottle of burgundy and a meal refreshingly full of vegetables and fruit, the Mariani family teased us about our route. "The Aveyron is empty; there's nothing there. You want to go via Burgundy. It's where the French make wine with their souls not just their pockets!"

Earlier in the day we had crossed into our second French region, from Normandy to Picardy. "Normandy, it's clear: it's apples and camembert, thatched cottages and calvados," David challenged them, "but what is Picardy?"

There was a confused silence. "Beh! Nothing! Picardy has nothing." And these were Picardy people. A fortnight later, Jaqueline Dru in La Forestière in Cessières took issue with that. "Non, non, non - ça m'enerve quand on dit ça!" She produced a charming book of old Picardy recipes. "Picardy is Ficelle Picard - a rolled pancake with ham, mushrooms, leeks and creamy sauce. It is Marouille cheese and the little pyramid cheeses dipped in pimento. It is Champignons de Paris and pork with leeks ..."

We came across the champignons de Paris - aka button mushrooms - where they are grown in old stone quarry caves around Soissons. Marouille cheese we had eaten melted as the stuffing of baby marrows and creamy as the sauce with a pork cutlet. And we ate it again for breakfast as we listened to Jacqueline, raw so we could taste its sharp crumbliness that disappears into sweet creaminess when it is cooked. And we've seen leeks aplenty in allotment gardens.

To us, Picardy is also the stone villages of the Soissonais area, pretty and well-tended and calling to mind the affluent grey Oxfordshire Cotswolds. Their gables, old and new, on every building from Mairie to dog kennel are of stepped stone blocks, serrating the sky and known as "monks' staircases".

Picardy is the department of the Oise with its wealth revealed in the big and royal or 'small' and bourgeois chateaux. It is the beautiful thoroughbred racehorses and the wide sandy tracks they ride on, meeting at white signposts that section the forests like a game of Chinese Chequers. It is money, and endless open fields, made larger and ever larger to drive that money; and it is mud and wind across the plains and it is rain. It is echos of the Great War and the trenches in those open, muddy fields, on our cold and lonely afternoons.

5 March 2008

The modern saint

2008-03-13T12:34:00.008Z

We are following paths that lead to a saint. There are saints everywhere, in the names of churches, in the names of villages. Bits of saints in jewelled cases. Even one of the French kings was a saint. But the saint I remember most has a contented half-smile on her rounded, homely face. She's in a black and white photo that emphasises the whiteness of her face, the blackness of her eyebrows and the echoing head dress. Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus.

We met her in almost every church in Normandy, and again in Paris. It's got so I say "Hi there!" when I see her. Born in Lisieux in 1873, she joined a convent at the age of fifteen but by the age of twenty four was dead from tuberculosis. In Bayeux Cathedral was an excerpt from her diary: "I came to Bayeux with my father to pray before asking to take orders.... The rain poured down outside...."

I read the words as the rain poured down outside.

Why she was made a saint, I still don't know. I guess you don't have to be martyred anymore. Perhaps all you have to do is miracles, in which case she's been busy. Churches everywhere are lined with little marble plaques thanking her for her help after someone had prayed to her. They give dates and initials, but few specifics, and few miracles are mentioned. Maybe it's like a celestial X-Factor contest? The more people you get phoning in - or putting up a plaque - to support you, the more likely you'll be chosen ....

1 March 2008

Sodden' Soissons

2008-03-13T12:33:00.016Z

Just like winning or losing a job interview in the first four seconds, it takes very little to raise a deep and eternal hatred for a place. Soissons, I mean.

We'd told ourselves the rain wasn't heavy; it was warm and not wholly unpleasant. So we failed to put on waterproofs for the half-day walk into Soissons. And yes, we knew our hotel was on the main ringroad two kilometres from the city centre. But everything else was entirely the city's fault. Soissons doesn't have any hotels in the centre, and out of all the flea-pit sounding alternatives in the tourist brochure, only this one had made it into the Michelin guide.

Trailing rucksacks through post-industrial social housing is never edifying but when the rain is lashing and the flats have been built on stilts to accentuate the wind, it is soul-numbing. By the time we spotted the half-extinguished neon of our hotel's name, Soissons had almost blown it.

Then it tried harder.

A locked hotel door and a note promising a return in five minutes wasn't encouraging but we were newly practising a pilgrim mentality and merely leaned against the wall to wait. The woman who eventually opened to us had a face like a black line and glared without a greeting. She had children around her feet wanting lunch, and two dripping travellers were of no importance to her.

We said we had a reservation. She disagreed. But she could see that I could see the computer screen and the ranks of empty rooms, so eventually she gave us one - up a dark corridor, cold and damp-smelling. The carpet was stamped with the hotel's name, a carpet so meagre we took it for underlay. On either side the rooms stood open and abandoned, exposing personal belongings in some, piled up furniture in others. The low-lying smell of cigarettes stirred as we walked.

Our room was one of those with piled furniture, which presented a problem: there was space only to put our dripping bags down on the floor, or to remove the furniture from the bed. There was a single, threadbare towel between us, and no heating.

In fresh clothes we sought escape in town. On the way out a teenage girl with her eyes wedged in the TV denied all knowledge of taxis or buses, but promised to get the heating sorted.

The best Soissons could offer for lunch was a burger bar that did paninis and hot chocolate. At the tourist office a young man proudly used his English to tell us that no, they didn't have local walking maps. No, it was not likely anywhere else in town did. No, not many trains or buses to anywhere. But yes, there was a laundrette and even an internet café, of sorts. He pressed upon us "Let Soissons tell you its story", a lush and elegant brochure outlining the history of the city and its chief sights. Beware tourist officials bearing spot-varnished print: they are likely to be overselling. Headline news was that some Barbarian king had once chopped the head off one of his soldiers after whinging that the soldier hadn't cleaned his armour properly - but secretly it was in cowardly revenge for the soldier breaking a vase belonging to a bishop a couple of years before. Wow! So no miracles then?

We plodded round the circuit. A street corner near a roundabout is announced as the hillside where the Roman circus - the largest in Gaul - was probably situated. A piece of broken stone lower down might have been a defensive tower. The town centre cathedral was eighty-percent destroyed in the 1914-18 war and has been rebuilt in a business-like way. Elsewhere, an arch here or there is extrapolated to describe an entire abbey or school.

In the Monoprix was a woman with dyed sandy hair and a square chin under thick orange make-up. Her mouth was hard and straight. I say "her", but it might have been a man in drag, deciding that femininity was defined as one of those supercilious French toiletry counter assistants. He performed the function to perfection, unable to even look at oh-so-very-unfeminine me as I asked for my Oil of Olay.

Soissons' one redeeming feature is the single remaining wall of the beautifully ornate abbey church of St Jean des Vignes, with the frame of its rose window absurdly enclosing nothing but sky. I read dry the accompanying exhibition with its audio-visual content in bad English. Everywhere people offered us the same glossy leaflet. "Yes," we said, "we've heard the story. What else?"

Back at the hotel with our only dry clothes now soaked by another downpour and no taxis, the heating still didn't work. We lay in bed and phoned the hotel in Compiègne to make sure we could arrive a day early.

But Soissons had a last barb. Next day we idled an hour in a café by the station waiting for the time the coach should leave for Compiègne. We had the time down in black and white, in a timetable. Ten minutes before it was due, the coach pulled in, spent fifteen seconds looking around then drove off, just as we were running towards it, waving. The driver in the coach behind said, "No, he won"t be coming back. Come here in an hour. Maybe I'll take you ..."

27 February 2008

Dog tired

2008-03-13T12:33:00.014Z

David was musing on what makes walking in France feel so different to walking in England. Was it the signage? We've become so used to looking for the red-and-white painted flashes on all sorts of walls, posts, pipes and old farm implements. Was it the role of the English pub in the countryside? Was it that in France we can walk down roads for hours and see no cars?

No, he concluded. It's the dogs. We're English; of course we like dogs. Any straw poll would suggest that English people own far more dogs than the French. But if that's the case, where are they?

French dogs are in their gardens. You know that because they start barking as soon as they hear the tap of our sticks in the distance, and by the time we're level with their little empire, they have flung themselves against the fencing in a rage of noise. Some days it is an almost constant sound track as they pass the message from dog to dog, guardian to guardian along the road.

But why is it so different in England? We realised it has to do with the architecture here; and perhaps a little paranoia. In England you have a front garden and a back garden. The front is where strangers can come, or friends. The postman, the milk man and assorted leaflet delivery people can come right up to your door and transact their business. The dog belongs in the back, out of sight. In France, houses sit in the centre of a pool of land through which the dogs roam freely. The dogs know that everything within the perimeter fence is theirs. No longer can neighbours just pop in at will: they have to call and be let in. And the letter box is safely constructed outside the fence, to reduce the number of law suits brought by postal workers. Thus, to the dog, anything approaching their domain is an unauthorised intruder.

Having kept visitors firmly outside the home enclosure perhaps it's not surprising that the dogs adopt with such vigour the mantle of suspicion. But what came first - the owners' fear of the stranger or their alienating of all outsiders by their argumentative dogs?

Everywhere we see signs boasting of the dogs in simpering, infantile terms: "Je veille pour mon maitre", "Je monte la garde", "Attention au chien méchant", often with a sketched picture of a certain ferocious breed. Only twice have we seen a gentle mocking of the French obsession with their guard dogs. In Honfleur a house claimed possession of "Un chat très méchant et peu nourri"; and later, disarmingly, a cottage owned up to "Un chien pas du tout méchant".

"French men love their dogs more than they love their families," we were told (by a cat owner). Certainly, even in the lost ends of towns where everything is closed there will be a dog-grooming parlour open for business. "What about the English?"

"The English live with dogs," we decided, "not as little princes - but just another member of the family."

28 February 2008

Public and private life of trees

2008-03-13T11:56:00.023Z

The chief, undeniable feature of our walk so far has been trees. How many days - how many photos? - have featured a long track through arching branches. The tracks have been chalk, or sand, or mud, or leaves, or paving; but the trees remain. The branches were bare when we set out and now their buds are breaking to reveal the first green haze of spring.

So many trees: the forests of southern Picardy are vast. Once again familiarity is helping us learn different ways to understand what is around us. Yes, we know that the general shape and character of a beech tree is different to that of an oak or a birch tree. But now we see that between two oaks or birches the differences are even greater. Where has the tree split, where have new branches joined it? What patterns do its arms make? Is it strong and healthy or old and failing? These things we note and weigh rapidly as we pass.

Each tree writes its own story on its skin. They have a resilient force that would leave me unsurprised, now, to see one move across my path, walking. Blight bulges and torments with growth under the bark and the smooth outer cannot bear the writhing. Sometimes the bark splits open under the pressure. Or barbed wire wounds constrict and deform the tree. Yet we have seen trees that have joined together to become one new tree. Others that are slowly consuming their surroundings, digesting metal notices pinned to them, absorbing them into themselves.

Trees are part of French history. These swathes of forest in Picardy belonged to the vast empire of the tree that covered northern Europe. Bit by bit they were cleared and cut down, creating gaps for humans to live in, to grow crops in, to travel through, build homes and wage wars in. By the time the Romans came there was already open land enough for important orchards and vineyards to be planted. Forests became the hunting preserve of the feudal lords of the Dark Ages, symbols of their power and wealth even though trees were essential to all to build and to heat.

By the Middle Ages, deforestation and the consumption of trees for war and for iron foundaries had created shortages that influenced the development of the famous great churches of Normandy and Picardy. The Romanesque churches had solid wooden roofs upheld by large beamed heavy wood frames. These were prone to catch fire, taking the stone walls with them. The ending of the feudal wars brought a period of prosperity and population growth; and the churches needed to be rebuilt to house ever greater numbers of faithful.The master craftsmen turned their minds towards stone. Rib-vaulting, lauded as a way of opening up the walls to light, also paid off in the lighter need for trees.

Northern France's large forests were snatched early by the new kings of France as hunting grounds and pleasure grounds. Over time, they cut the networks of wide straight alleys and rides that are today still marked by pretty white signposts. The gift of the right to hunt in the forests became one of the ways the kings asserted their dominion. Of course, such arrogance hurt the poor and the peasants, excluded from the natural wealth. One of the first laws passed at the Revolution was to make the Royal forests into a national property, owned by all.

But revolutionaries don't always make good woodsmen. In some forests, like La Hallotière, the planting of vast areas of the same tree - beech - left the forest vulnerable to blight and storms. Today, France's Office National des Forêts prides itself on managing the forests sustainably. They produce wood for commercial use, certainly, but they are careful to implement a rolling pattern of harvesting and replanting. As they point out to the public taking their Sunday walks, it takes seven generations of woodsmen and women to bring an oak tree to harvest.

The ONF needs to show this example. In the face of rising fuel oil prices more and more French people are turning back to trees to heat their houses. All over the forests are sections cleared for timber and people with trees on their property cut them down. Some mourn the loss of trees; but the announcer on the local news beams as she tells of a new move to bring private wood-sellers more profits. No Normandy house was complete without its wall of cut logs stretching for meters along the property ready for a hard winter. Les Sources Bleues, where we stayed, boasted a central heating system fed by steam from a vast water trough hanging over a permanent log fire in the kitchen.

For now, the forests remain a much-valued public good for leisure and health. Each weekend we are shaken from our solitude by dozens of walkers, cyclists, hunters or flower-pickers. Around May Day, we're told, the woods will be full of lilies of the valley and people will pick bunches to sell as love tokens by the roadside. It is the one thing, on the one day of the year, that a French person can sell without paying taxes.

24 February 2008

Boredom, beer and fags

2008-03-13T11:21:00.010Z

Something like a nuclear shock-wave seems to radiate out from Paris, and we walked into the grey dust of its fall-out just outside Beauvais. A disaffected ugliness of soul and place had settled over the land, and seemed to deepen the closer we drew to the capital.

The first signs came on the edges of country lanes and at forest-side parking places. Every few metres lay discarded a beer can of "Bavaria 8.6": super-strength brew for super-strength anaesthesia. The frequency of these missiles told of people - young men, we assumed - driving the lanes drinking, swearing, throwing the cans out as they went. At times there was a regular orgy in a single spot.

Looking round at the villages, it is hard to blame them. Small cottages, run-down or of that recent, imagination-destroying construction of cream Monopoly houses with dusty plasterwork and muddy gardens. Few of the villages had so much as a boulangerie at their heart. Though nearly all could boast a Mairie. No restaurant, no café, no bar to be a meeting place for the people, a place for them to talk and drink companionably. An occasional Salle des Fetes stood empty: sanitised echoing halls of stacked chairs, preserve of the very young or the very old.

Larger towns might manage a PMU Tabac, those formica hangouts which the state has designated to supply the populace with cigarettes and gambling. Desperation drove us into a couple. Their clients were exactly the men we had imagined behind the scattered Bavaria cans. In their twenties and thirties, in long greasy hair or skinhead cuts, they mostly wore old tracksuits with hoods pulled up. Chalk-dull faces, like their houses, with the tang of inbreeding in some. In the middle of the afternoon they were not at work, for there seemed no work to be had. The small factories: tanneries, cement works, dairies, chemical works, sugar beet refineries that had flanked the villages looked closed, graffitied; the work consolidated to bigger plants further away, if at all.

On the news there are reports of a growing divide in wealth between people in France, an increasing depth of poverty and homelessness which counterbalances the ease of those riding the wave. The inequalities often crystallise around a simmering racism. People are quick to say "the blacks have taken our jobs". Or the Muslims. We had seen very few non-white faces in the deep countryside but at Créil, an industrial city of chemical works and tower blocks, the station concourse was a sudden shock of dark faces; as if all the immigrants of France and their descendents had been collected together in a few designated locations to serve the factories and to travel to Paris for low-paid cleaning work. Deportations, harassments, violence against immigrants - these issues are being raised by journalists, but not the politicians.

With local elections coming up we hear what does concern people. Transport, jobs, security. The socialists still have a strong showing in France. One of the posters in the official campaigning areas shows a fist clutching a red rose, with the legend that the most important thing for France now is to better share out the wealth between people. The almost daily strikes in one sector or another across the country would seem to agree.

Low incomes are clearly deep-rooted in this troubled zone. The farms have agglomerated and cut down their labour; but somewhere in the past the response was to find pockets of land for allotments around every village and town. Something not seen before Beauvais. And they're still being worked, by old men and their wives, sometimes with holiday-marooned grandchildren in tow, learning the idea of self-sufficiency and graft.

In Senlis we found a pool of stylishness and comfort. Restaurants and cafés were open, there were concerts and markets. Within the walls of this ancient city we were on the other side of the wealth divide and the drab, mind-numbing villages were temporarily forgotten.

Back in the villages, there is nothing to do. In a long, empty afternoon in St Leu d'Esserent, we sat on a bench by the church, waiting for something to happen. The kids, filling their half-term as best they could, practised kissing in the far corner of the garden, practised throwing stones onto cars from the wall. Like them, I felt an overwhelming urge to smoke, simply to have an activity. The hours stretched away without relief, till we could reach the safety of an evening meal and the inanity of French TV. Until the they, no doubt, could peel back the rings on their first cans of "Bavaria 8.6".

21 February 2008

Winter packing list

2008-02-28T10:45:00.014Z

Which brings me to the full packing list for winter walking:

Bags
Rucksack - Lowe Alpine Tucana ND 65 +15 L with Torso fit system, with built-in rain cover
1 Mountain Equipment rolltop waterproof bag with air valve
3 Exped waterproof compression sacks size S for clothes
2 Life Venture showerproof lightweight drawstring bags size 8
Large plastic bag for wet clothes
3 spare plastic bags
Pack Mate AnyLock Freshness Bags http://www.anylock.co.uk/
Plastic carrier bags normal
Plastic carrier bags heavy duty
1 Onya bag

Clothes
Berghaus Extrem Goretex Packlite shell jacket size 14
Terranova Equipment Ltd pair of goretex Extremities waterproof overmittens with wrist strap and drawstring
Dents mohair beanie hat
Berghaus Windstopper gloves Size M
Snow & Rock silk spare liner gloves size M
Kama thin skiing balaclava
Peter Storm Stormtech waterproof overtrousers size 12R with side zips to knee and pocket slits
Paul Smith cotton headscarf
1 Icebreaker Body Fit 200 merino wool long johns size Women M
3 Icebreaker Body Fit 150 slimfit boxer shorts size Men M
3 Shock Absorber bras size 34
3 North Face base layer short-sleeved vests, smell-resistent size W M
3 Oakley long-sleeved vest size W M layer 2
1 Helly Hansen layer 3 long-sleeved top, zip-neck slim fit size W M
1 Spyder layer 3 long-sleeved top, zip-neck slim fit size W M
1 Snow & Rock layer 3 long-sleeved fleece, zip-neck size 14
2 x North Face sip-off trousers Meridian ??? size women medium with stow pockets
1 Patagonia jumper fleece with popper neck
3 pairs thin socks
2 pairs Snow & Rock walking socks
1 Karrimor boots
1 glove liners
1 pair Lowe Alpine fleece mitts with slit for finger and plastic grip
1 North Face Polartec fleece hat with ear flaps and drawstring neck size M
Muff in plastic bag

Evening-only clothes
Northface goretex boots in plastic bag
1 Icebreaker Body Fit 260 merino wool long johns size W M
1 North Face Flight Series zip-front fleece with zip pockets size W M
Fleece bootees
Looped polyester bed socks

Accessories
Pair of Goretex Extremities waterproof over mittens, size small
Mobile phone in waterproof carrier
Lightweight glasses case, cloth
Glasses
Glasses keeper band
Contact lenses and carrier
Lightweight Julbo Alti Spectrum sunglasses in plastic case
1 shoe insoles
1 lipsalve
2 Paul Smith mens cotton handkerchiefs
spare contact lenses
contact lens cleaning (30ml) and soaking (50ml) solutions
protein tablets (12) and disinfecting case for contact lenses
small mirror
tweezers
2 spare lip salves
6 hair grips
6 small hair bobbles and 1 scrunch
10 cotton buds
1 hair slide
1 sample size mascara

Food
1 bar Kendal mint cake
1 Lightmyfire Spork
Anylock resealable plastic bag with dried nuts and fruit (c.500g)
Other food & fruit as needed
small bag nuts and dried fruit
Camelbak: 2-litre capactity generally carrying 1/2 to 1 litre
1 sealable plastic bag with fruit infusion sachets
1 sealable plastic bag with up to 6 cup-a-soup / minute soup sachets
travel kettle with 2 beakers in plastic bags

Health
1/2 roll toilet paper and small plastic bags in a plastic bag
1 child's plastic spade in a plastic bag
Anylok resealable plastic bag with varying amounts of sanitary towels & tampons
small packet handwipes
1 - 2 months supply tablets for raynauds, colitis, oesophagitis, joints, circulation
3 sachets lemsip
Zovirax
Paracetomol
Synodol - 12 tablets
nail scssors
compeed – 5 pieces
6 inch strip of plaster
2 cotton wool pads
small piece lamb's fleece
Canasten cream – 30ml tube
Tea tree essential oil - 10ml
Chamomile essential oil - 10ml
1 small tin vaseline with aloe vera
100ml tub of foot rub
2 Boots reusable handwarmers
Some sheets of newspaper
2 silica gel sachets
1 packet dextrose tablets

Other
4 small aluminium carabinas
toweling wrist band
125ml Plastic bottle of NikWax conditioner for leather
Pilgrim passport
Thin cardcovered Moleskine notebook for blogs
letters from doctor
headphones for phone, memory sticks & UK sim card for phone
spare pen, pencil, highlighter pen
small wallet with English money, spare credit cards
1 small wallet with Euros and credit card
1 passport in waterproof bag
1 small notebook & pen in waterproof bag
small roll packing tape
small roll sellotape
small sewing kit
spare plug adaptor
Lightmyfire flint fire lighter
3 elastic bands
1 Black Diamond head torch in sealable plastic bag
Travel hand towel
towelling waist band
Kohla Alpen Compact Absorber Pair walking poles with rubber spike covers
Sigg bottle 1 litre
Florescent strip
Scallop shell
2 small sachets drawer freshener
silver foil survival blanket

David carrying for both uf us:
Plastic comb
Moisturiser with UVA abd UVB filter – 50ml
2x 30ml bottles dandruff shampoo
150 ml bottle hair conditioner
50ml tube toothpaste
toothbrushes
Gillette deodorant
Lightweight Shower exfoliating mittens
Small plastic nail brush
Condoms
Razer and spare heads
2 elastic clothes lines
2 small plastic nail brushes for boots
Small square boot cloth
5 nappy pins
GPS and batteries
Camera, spare battery and charger
Phone charger
Maps for section
Accommodation list print out for section
Overview map
Compass
Whistle
Camelbak sterilzer tablets – 6
Bar of chocolate
Other food and fruit as needed
Opinal knife
Mini Leatherman tool

A few of my favourite things

2008-02-27T17:08:00.007Z

Among pilgrims and long-distance walkers there is a lore - a regular competition - to reduce the weight one carries on one's back. The advice to saw off the handles of toothbrushes is widespread; people calculate the weight:value equation of each T-shirt and each sock. We met a couple once who rotated three socks (socks, not pairs) so as to have one on for a first day, one on for a second day and the third washed and drying. These were the same people who read in turn each page of their single book before throwing it away as they went.

There are things that no self-respecting walker would ever give pack-space to. Therefore I must be a walker with no self-respect. For anyone who feels a similar pull towards the Grand Tour style of pilgrimage, here are my secret treasures you might want to consider taking with you:

* Ankle-length bootees with fleece outers and fake-fur inners. Mum saw them on a market stall and bought them for me. They're lime-green with big pink and orange flowers, and I love them. They keep my feet warm while padding around on bathroom tiles and bare floorboards, but are a relief in the evenings after the stiffness of boots. Any they're better ventilated than walking socks.

* The violent-pink looped-cotton bedsocks that Helen sent for Christmas - such a good combination of warmth and ventilation that I've worn holes in them and have sent for another pair.

* A little, lightweight plastic tub from Muji that I fill with Marmite as and when I can. How people can stomach jam at breakfast time, I know not!

* Badger foot balm (or Body Shop as a substitute). A bonding and healing experience.

* Another Christmas present, this one from Sarah. Two Onya bags from, apparently, Newport Pagnal. Super-lightweight but super-strong, they're made of parachute silk. They pack away to nothing but mean we can leave our rucksacks behind while we do the tourist thing.

* And another: the smart mohair beanie hat from Ann that gives me a stab at looking stylish in towns.

* My mirror and tweezers - already lauded elsewhere, but it seems I can excuse the tweezers as medical - for pulling out ticks in the summer.

* Some neoprene toe-covers designed for ski-ing. They slip on over my socks for extra warmth if the temperatures plummet.

* Another suggestion from Sarah: a one-litre Sigg bottle that can be filled with boiling water for warmth, but is of aluminium so weighs almost nothing when empty.

* This is one for the girls at Tate: my muff. My HAND muff. An old friend I bought from a stall in Leeds years ago, it is a tube of fake fur inside and out that I slip my hands into until they're toasty warm. For use on slow winter days, in emergencies and in the inside of French cathedrals.

* The crowning folly: a small travel kettle with two plastic beakers that fit inside. Yes, I know. But honestly, it's worth the weight! With sachets of fruit teas we can recover and rehydrate in the evenings, and make cup-a-soup when food is scarce. It give boiling water for the Sigg bottle and guarantees to reactivate my hand warmers if need be. I may relinquish the kettle in summer. But for now I cherish it and pack it away carefully each day.

18 February 2008

Grandpa David

2008-02-27T17:03:00.008Z

Do you remember the film "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"? Not the recent version but the one from the seventies: full-on colour and surreal midgets singing bad-tempered ditties at every turn.

And can you picture Charlie's grandparents, lying top-to-tail all day in a big bed in the living room? Well, that's us, in the evenings in the countryside, lying snug under the covers against an evening chill, all our entertainments to hand to save us moving our aching bodies.

I look across at David, his glasses perched on his nose, raising his eyebrows like a satyr above them to comment. He has a big bag of walnuts in his lap, donated by one of our hosts, and he is contentedly shelling them with a twist of the knife, while chatting in the peace of the dark woods.

12 February 2008

Memorable hosts #1

2008-02-15T17:40:00.004Z

Since Honfleur we have mostly stayed in Chambres d'hotes, and the character of the people who are our hosts has become key. Often we will have walked between people's homes deep in the countryside and not seen anywhere to eat or even to buy food at any point in the day - so have fallen on the generosity of their 'table d'hote' in the evenings.

The hosts can affect everything, and can redeem an unpromising lodging with their memories, humour or kindness. So here is a paon to some memorable hosts along the way:

- Julian Wood, the then-new owner of The Bell in Alresford, was great fun, chatting long about our adventure and sharing his experiences of recently cycling all the way to Istanbul through the Balkans. He has plans to make an already good menu and wine list even better; and was a lovely, engaging person.

- Chrissie Johnston and her husband at 5 Clifton Terrace in Winchester served up grand breakfasts and made sure all the guests got to know each other round their large dining table. They had lived in many places, she said, including Papua New Guinea - where their gardener was a canibal! Thanks Chrissie for the laundry and for squeezing us in for an extra night.

- Odile Anfrey at La Ferme du Pressoir in Conteville juggled raising calves, making cider, and all the needs of a kitchen garden with the demands of the guest bedrooms in converted barns. Out of kindness when she heard we were on foot she served us an evening meal snuggled around her big log fire, while she chatted about farm life.

- At Les Sources Bleues in Aizier, Yves Laurent was voluble in the massive old bourgois house that had been in his family for decades. He was a source of information on just about everything and his wife, too, was charming and humourous. Together they were perfectly natural with guests, bickering and finishing each other's sentances like in all families. The meal was a delicious secret recipe and afterwards Yves gave us many tips for our walk through the forest the next day - all invaluable - and insisted that if we got into difficulties we should phone for him to rescue us and take us to Jumièges. We didn't; but for the offer I'm deeply grateful and thank them also for sharing their old family home and memories.

- Marie-Lys and Jean-Yves Aucreterre of Sweet Home in Martinville-Epreville had given up their busy jobs as purchasers to take up a life where they actually saw each other - and now the rooms keep them more than busy. Jean-Yves spoke with regret that he has no time anymore for journalism, his passion; and Marie-Lys has had to stop going for long hikes for the same reason. They had given us shelter despite having a big family party to prepare, so we were doubly fortunate that they found time to chat and get to know us over breakfast.

- At L'Epicerie du Pape in Vascoeuil Karine, Nina, cats and dogs spent the most leisurely breakfast yet - and the most family-feeling since we'd left our friends' house in early January. Nina could count to ten in English and was keen for her mother to know the word 'lollipop'. She drew us a picture for our record book, full of angels and butterflies, while Karine unembarassedly quizzed us on how we got our clothes clean along the way.

- Alain and Liliane Javaudin of Le Clos de la Normandière near La Hallotière run an almost permanent house party from their five chambres d'hote. They offer lunch as well as evening meals and organise parties and festivities for groups. For them it's all about spending time with people. We were part of the family: they ate with us during a long, delicious and well-thought-out meal. Great company, we shared a lot of laughter and learned many things from them and their eclectic house in its south-facing valley garden.

- Anne-Marie and Claude Tirel of the Clos des Avettes in Espaubourg are like a favourite aunt and uncle. Within minutes they were joshing us about getting lost and we were teasing them back. They used to run restaurants in Paris and had this cottage for holidays and for produce for the kitchens. The chambres d'hote and meals became a semi-retirement, though they're planning full retirement soon. They were both lovely and talkative: we now know the lore of cider- and calvados-making and of keeping bees - and much more besides. They're possibly descended from the first person to write a recipe book in French, in the 14th century, so good cooking is in their genes. In the morning they contacted the daughter and son-in-law of friends who are also about to set off to Santiago de Compostela. Then Anne-Marie, Claude, José and Josette and we sat round the table all morning, drinking coffee and talking all things pilgrim. And we all drank to chance encounters and new friendships.

14 February 2008