Sisnedop aiv - suite et fin

When the walking stops, the Camino continues. But only if the trudge has tilted the scale a bit?  In Just- spring when the world is mud-luscious early June, The Boy and Me, we walked 100 miles 160km the wrong way up the Via Podensis. Prev I - II - III - IV - V. wrong? only in the sense that most people are walking that section of the GR65 towards Compostella, or at least Roncesvalles, rather than towards Le Puy or Geneva. On the straight sections we saw them shimmering through the heat-haze stacked in diminishing size like planes coming into to land as night falls. Rarely did any pèlerins stop to talk - bonjour et bon chemin was enough acknowledgment. But from those who did pause we gleaned valuable information about our road ahead and its resources . . . and gave as good as we got. There was time enough talk at dinner each night. 

Apart from my trip-and-fall old chap's accident we scraped through uninjured. The Boy confessed to being shagged out at the end of Day 1, a clicking hip on Day 2, and a blister on his pinkie toe on Day 6. My feet had been pushed beyond integrity by a 40km route march towards Santiago in 2004. Too many blisters to ignore, so I went at them with a clean needle >!pop!< and surgical spirit. Truth to tell, my heels never really recovered from the insult. In my preparation for this year's trek, I did consider going to a podiatrist to trim down my keratin burden heel-and-toe . . . either a podiatrist or a farrier. But I put that plan on the long finger for so long, that it was too near to The Off to risk change down there.  Likewise, getting my EU passport in hand. Likewise updating my EHIC European Health Insurance Card. My 10 digit EHIC number from 2021 [enough to give a unique # to every person on the planet] has been replaced for 2029 with a 14 digit EHIC number [enough to give a unique number to every cell in my body].

Because we were walking in a state of grace, we were both spared The Wolf aka Tinea cruris, scrot rot, dhobi itch, jock itch, intertrigo inguinal, Eczema marginatum. But my legs were brightened by a rather wonderful case of Disney Rash aka exercise-induced vasculitis, hiker's rash: an inflammation, commonest in elderly women, of the subcutaneous capillaries of the lower leg [as R on my own-self leg]. The combination of unwonted exercise, high temperature and susceptibility will do it for you. Not the same as sunburn which is a) epidermal b) uniform in colour c) painful. A case of the Disney's is a good example of the breakdown of a homeostatic system as we age. Although it looks alarming, it resolves itself quickly once the insult is mitigated. Children don't get hiker's rash because their peripheral temperature control is much better regulated and their capillaries are springy.

You can see [R] also that socks provide some protection - against sun and as support-hose. It also seems that we made our move in a timely manner. This last weekend the Béarn sections of the GR65 were suffering 40°C daytime temperatures. Phew wot a scorcher!

Lavendaria

The late Duke of Edinburgh had a quip "biggest waste of water in the world: pee half a pint and flush two gallons"; which I've cited before. I give similar side-eye to putting clothes, and household 'linens' through a washing-machine after a single use. This partly driven by the easy availability of the tech [cheap electricity; the complex of builders, surfactants, enzymes, and fresh-smell in detergents; cheap water] and partly by a fear of smelling of anything other than  fresh-smell and flowers. My students generalized this anti-pong aversion from their own and others' oxters to pretty much everything in the lab - especially anything wafting from a Petri-dish. Believe me, you wouldn't be so keen on the scrub-a-dub if you had to suds the clothes in the bath - which I did for a couple of years in a rented flat in the 1980s - let alone toting a basket down to the communal lavendaria down by the river. When I walked up the remote Atlantic coast of Portugal in 1989, communal clothes-washing by hand was still A Thing. In 2004, walking from Portugal to Santiago with The Boy, the village lavendaria were still there, but unused. I packed two shirts for seven weeks. Part of the ritual of landing for the night was to wash today's shirt and hang it out to dry while wearing tomorrow's for the evening.

For the second week in June this year, I was again marching with The Boy, and living out of backpacks. At the first gîte, a washing machine was available for a nominal €2 extra. One of the other pilgrims said we could throw our kit in with his, which worked out well for everyone. It was the south of France, the sun was still up, the clothes bone-dried before we went to bed. At the Gîte Communal in Navarrenx, two days later, Aurélien l'hôte had formalized this water-saving practice: Please don't wash your smalls in the hand-basin, throw them in that basket and I'll put on a wash before dinner. If they are not dry from hanging in in the morning, I run everything through the tumble-drier. I'd rather not, and I guarantee they'll be dry before you leave tomorrow.

Laundry on the Via Podensis is now institutionalized and hand-sudzing is a thing of the past. 

Apart from the laundry water that disappears down the plug-hole to add enormous volume to the water needing treatment, there is also the residual water in the damp clothes. M'daughers are sharing a tiny flat in Dublin and have to dry clothes on a rack in the living room. The water has nowhere to go so there is a perennial damp problem. Now that everyone has a washing-machine at home, the next white-goods must-have will be a de-humidifier.

There is no truth in the the etymology of laundry having anything to do with laying sheets out on a lawn to dry. Laundry is rather a corruption of old French lavandier one who washes, ultimately from Latin lavar to wash. And lavender Lavandula spica [as above L] has nothing to do with it either, despite the old fashioned custom of putting sprays of that plant in amongst the bed-sheets.  Lawn  n., a fine white linen/cotton 'Cambric' fabric, associated with the vestments of Anglican bishops derives from the town of Laon in NE France. Cambric aka otoh comes from Cambrai = Kamerijk a weaving town 100km further North in French Flanders.

Boo-hoo j'ai tombé

When I was young I used to run downhill. I was too broken-winded [asthma] to make <puf> much <puf> progress <puf> upwards.  I don't mean run on a downhill path; rather my joy was leppin' from tussock to rock planning my route 2 or 3 enormous steps in advance. Nothing bad ever happened - because I was immortal back then. Or more accurately: my tendons were resilient and springy and my eyes and feet talked to each other with me having to think at them. In the 70s, not so much? When she was about my now-age, my mother was visiting. She helpfully gathered some dishes after dinner tripped over a rucked rug in the kitchen and broke her fall with a broken wrist. It was bad timing because she was due to fly back to England the next day and A&E thought it was better to turn her care over to the NHS when she got there.

I spent my last 10 days as a 70 y.o. marching through France with The Boy. It turned out to be possible to walk 20+ km a day without [either of us - he do be pushing 50] crocking up entirely. It was hot, it was tiring, but twinges and pangs resolved themselves within a couple of hours and a decent night's sleep delivered us fresh for another day's graft.

Until, on Day 5, on loose gravel in the hamlet of Castillon-d'Arthez, my right ankle turned and I parachute rolled to my left to protect it. I was off the ground immediately and it wasn't until a few minutes later that I noticed blood trickling down my fore-arm from a few punctures in my left elbow. The Boy <"medic"> said it wasn't worth covering with a plaster until the bleeding stopped. So I trudged on trying to keep blood spattering the dest rather than my trousers. We paused 5m further along the GR65 at the épicerie at Pomps for bevvies and sandwich makings and I went back to the tap behind the Mairie to wash the blood off my arm [to not frighten the horses, like]. 

As well as weakness in the plumbing, my aged at no longer bounce-back resilient body seems to be defective in its Factor VIII response because my elbow was still leaking when we arrived at our gîte for the night. What was really concerning me, as we continued to pound le chemin, was the increasing stiffness in my turned ankle. The boy relented, after I washed my arm for the third time that day at one of the robinets d'église, and applied a sticking plaster just big enough to cover all the holes in my elbow. That night was the first and only time we were requested to stand behind our chairs before dinner while the host said grace. 

Whether it was the prayer, or the excellent dinner, or a tremendous midnight orage thunder-storm, or 8 hours with no weight on my ankle or a bonny breakfast; the next morning my feet were ready to go. I'd left no blood on the sheets, either; although the swelling on my elbow was the size of half a small hen's egg.  My unspoken anxieties of the night before about Uber, bus and stretcher contingencies to get us to Aire sur l'Adour on schedule evaporated as another sunny day in paradise rose up to meet us. We walked 31km that day and were rewarded with ice-cream.

The church as refuge

I promised more copy on the process of pilgrimage. Which seems a little pretentious because we were only a week on the chemin at the beginning of June; we were going the wrong way; I don't believe the credo. Nevertheless we chose to walk the GR65 because it was the direct continuation of my solo run from Santiago to France in 2004. the GR65 also happens to be the Via Podensis, one of the main pilgrim autostriders to Santiago de Compostella. 

Actual practicing religious pilgrims are a minority, even amongst those who are collecting stamps in their credentials along the way towards obtaining their Compostelle certificate when they finally arrive at the City of God. The Boy was toting a [gîte and restaurant locating] device with access to GBs of data. On about Day 4, after asking for requests, he fired up Spotify to play a bewildering number of different versions of Ultreïa. He was in his on-line element. A while later, noting ear buds attached to a hiker, he stopped the feller and offered to swap Spotilists. The other chap wasn't interested: he was listening to prayers with an occasional break for Gregorian chant.

Compared to the Spanish section of the Camino Frances, the Via Podensis not too busy, it doesn't require crampons and is reasonably well served for dinner bed and breakfast . . . and water.

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art Water I loved, and, next to water, shade:

The striking commonality of all the medieval churches along The Way is how chill they are; even if the sun is broiling your hat outside. Cool and quiet, a bit dusty, maybe; but there are seats and anyone can afford to take five minutes for reflection. If you can't spare five minutes in your race to the next hostelry; then your need to take 15 minutes!

Churches have graveyards, graves have flowers, so there is usually water somewhere in the churchyard. If it is roof-water caught in a rain-butt, you may not fancy drinking the stuff; but you can slop some over your face and neck. Several isolated churches announced the presence of eau potable from a reg'lar tap. Fill your water bottle chaps, it may be 10km to the next village. 

We had planned to stop in the village of Pimbo on our penultimate night but had been advised by a kind and energetic fellow earlier in the day to push on to a magical gîte in Miramont-Sensacq. But the church in Pimbo had a pretty garden and an invitingly cool interior: so we stepped inside. There to find that the parish recognised that some travellers might be penniless but nevertheless need shelter:

Yes, a rough blanket and a sleeping mat will be sufficient. It was now 13:20hrs, we were 2 hours from Miramont and day's end. We could power onwards in the hope of getting the best bunks . . . or . . . we could wait until 2pm when the gelataria in the square opened. "Black cherry for me" I announced and sacked out under a tree. When I came to, The Boy was coming out of the shop with two bowls of ice cream and two ice cold drinks. "Black cherry sorbet for me", he said "and I couldn't resist a boule de stracciatella on the side".  And that, folks, is how the village became known as Pimbo-les-trois-boules.

Honey I'm un homme

Two weeks ago, I checked in to checkout: planning to catch my first plane in 5 years and make my first trip to continental Europe since I don't know when. A two-handed Thelma&Louise with The Boy was more-or-less mission accomplished and we are now back on our respective, and respected, sofas. Turns out that my français d'ecole affreux is good enough to ask/give directions on le chemin or engage in dinner-table chat. Not enough to make 
1. a convincing political solution to the disaster that is Brexit 
2. discuss the differences between a buzzard and a blackbird 
3. hold a torch for Michel de Montaigne [whom prev], though.

Normal people walk the Via Podensis along the way-marked GR65, starting at Geneva [for hard-chaws and Swiss peeps] or Le Puy and walk West towards The City of God Santiago de Compostella. Very few of those on The Way are through-hikers: it is a privilege of the retired, the independently wealthy and the completely indigent to be able to take 100 days out of their lives to trek the 2,000km in one go. Most folks we met, were doing the pilgrimage / walk is sections: a week or a fortnight at a time over several years of Summer holidays. Wherever and whenever you start, there will be others walking in the same direction at more or less the same pace and they'll keep turning up in your life as you pause to pop blisters or drink beer. You'll talk more to these people, more intensely, than anybody outside your immediate family.

Bat-shit folks walk au contraire, against the tide of humanity, and meet a lot more people but for no more than one night and two meals. That's what me and The Boy opted to dothis year and the way I approached the Camino Frances in 2004: slouching from Santiago to St Jean Pied de Porte in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques départemente of Aquitaine. St Jean PdeP is where started on Saturday 8th June; having bought sandwiches, water, some postage stamps and an Opinel #6 clasp-knife. It will surprise no Irish person that, coming out of the boulangerie, we were hailed by another walker, who lives in the Wexford village about 3km from home. She was yomping the GR10 another waymarked route which stretches from the Med to the Atlantic on the French side of the Pyrenees. All the GRs are designed and marked with 🇵🇱s to go both ways but there is much more additional signage for Direction Compostelle.

We were only led astray through inattention [and super-discrete to absent signage]on three occasions out of hundreds of cross-roads or forks in the path. Last time The Boy and I walked in 2004, Google Maps was not yet born. 21 years later, if you have a phone with data, navigation is a cinch. 

We slept [more or less this route in reverse]

• Ostabat Sat
• Saint Palais WhitSun
• Navarrenx Mon
• Arthez-de-Béarn Tue
• Fichous-Riumayou Wed
• Miramot-Sensacq Thu
• Aire sur l'Adour Fri
• train to Bordeaux for Sat

That's the bare bones, I am still distilling the experience and will have more to say in the coming blobdays. Depending on sources, MiamMiam DoDo, GoogleMaps, many different commercial, municipal and non=profit URLs we done walk ~170km. Power User Hint: don't buy the Miam-Miam Dodo guide to the Vezelay Chemin de Compostelle  = GR654 if you're determined to walk the GR65 Via Podensis! The GR65, GR655 and GR654 all converge on the (one church, one boulangerie) village of Ostabat one stage North of St Jean PdeP causing accommodation to creak at the seams.

Lessons in Chemistry

It was surprisingly easy to find Lessons in Chemistry as an earbook on Borrowbox. It was named book of the year 2022 and adapted as a TV mini-series the next year: so I didn't expect it to be persistently available on Borrowbox. Eventually I downloaded and heard it through. Spoiler: it is not a chemistry textbook. In fact the overt chemistry in the book is kinda terrible - a mere dusting of needlessly obscure science-adjacent long words where any normal scientist would use plain English sodium chloride? salt! Trimethylxanthine? coffee!

But that's plenty okay because 'chemistry' does a lot of heavy lifting in the book at different levels of abstraction / metaphor. Cooking is Chemistry. Love is Chemistry. Rowing is Chemistry. Cynophilia is Chemistry. It's also okay because the author Bonnie Garmus was Arts Block at college and worked all her life in the media and doesn't apologize for not taking a degree in Chemistry in order to write a novel. Instead she bought a 1959 General Chemistry text on eBay and scraped that for $5 words. The novel also features a talking dog, so try to suspend belief in order to take on board the universals.

As reg'lar readers know I've written A Lot about women in science. The underlying theme in many of those short biogs is how so many of their careers are a daunting and depressing slog up Mount Impossible through the Vale of Misogyny. Perhaps the 1950/60s, when the novel is set, was the worst time to try launching a career in science as a woman. Before that, only the most ambitious, lucky, privileged and well-connected even tried. Afterwards, it got steadily easier as the dinosaurs died off and society became more willing to accept equality in the workplace. And believe me, I know we're not there yet 60 years later.

Lessons in Chemistry is heart-warming and funny and introduces a handful of not-all-men who support and encourage the Heroine Chemist in her quest for truth and recognition. Do not read the Spoiler synopsis in Wikipedia but rather snag the book on Borrowbox - I returned it a week ago. Okay this clip won't ruin everything.

Garden update

If someone said it was Ireland's driest Spring since records began, I wouldn't immediately call Rubbish! Lack of rain hits our food-growing capacity harder than some, because almost all the productivity is inside a 9m x 17m polytunnel. At the end of May, we had a delegation of Hickeys come by from the US for lunch. As best as we can tell, their family owned our farm up until ~1873. Many years ago, the whole family returned home to their Patrimony and I rendered them some trifling service. I was happy to do that because you couldn't meet a taller, sunnier, kinder bunch of people. I was adopted by the recently widowed matriarch and included in her Xmas round-robin Annual Report. Over the subsequent years various septs of the clan came by for tea and scones, most recently on St James's Day 2021. When my foster-mother died over Christmas 2014, I had a Mass said for her in our Parish church and was able to double the audience at early mass on my way to work in The Institute.

Mais revenons nous à 2025! #1 Son and #5 Son and their spouses came for lunch. Na mBan Hickey had a tour of the garden afterwards and were delighted to be presented with the first two fat pea-pods for dessert. As well as peas [free from the Library last fall], we've also planted some saved haricot beans [which are taller than me already, but have few blossoms]. Also tomatoes of several different (named but unknown to me) varieties: so that will be a pot-luck bonanza. Actually half these tomatoes are growing up against the sunny front of the house, in the biggest pots we own: where they will get free watering [rain and kitchen rinse water] and a thermal boost from the in🌞ated wall behind them. No pressure to produce, Toms!

I have described the 1 tonne IBCs which act as rainwater reservoirs in and around the polytunnel. I wrung every drop out of these back-up reserves during the Spring 2025 Drought and had to keep things going with water pumped from 35m below grade through our domestic plumbing system. I'm really reluctant to do this because our bore-hole water is really acidic . . . and also because it's really cold. Whatevs, I rinsed out the external IBC and moved it away from the ash-dieback dead ash Fraxinus excelsior to a new, shadier position as ◎ L. It is also 0.5 m higher than before, which should make irrigation run faster. I was ready when we had a drought-breaking storm which delivered steady rain for about 6 hours. It took that much time to ¾ fill the IBC by pumping from the water-butt which takes all the water from the gutter running along the S edge of the polytunnel. 10 days later, it was brimful from drizzle and showers. 

In contrast to [solar] electricity, you can store water against an [un] rainy day!