walking the walk

Why would read a book about the Camino de Santiago when  you can go it yourself GIY? Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Why start a Blob with rhetorical questions? I was that desperate for e-reading and earbooking material on Borrowbox that I downloaded To Walk the Way - One Pilgrim's Camino (2026) by Mike Timms. I did not take it because Timms is a retired Director of the Centre for Disability Studies at University College Dublin and lives in Bray Co Wicklow. But there were nevertheless a few parallels between his experience and mine along Le Chemin de St Jacques.

Without that common background, To Walk the Way might read like a log-book or journal - which I have recently claimed to be intrinsically poor reading. So you have two (2) glasses on wine in Burgos? Mike, nobody cares, nobody is counting. ditto roncadores = snorers; ditto wrong turnings; ditto blisters; these things exist, they are inevitable to the process of pilgrimage. Readers didn't ask, so don't tell. What can be interesting is the interaction when two pilgrims come together, and get beyond the quotidian Bom dia; ¿Cómo va con los pies?; Avez-vous besoin d'eau? Then you may surprise yourself with kindness or find a richness & generosity of spirit in The Other. Maybe I'm talking bollix about the dross: after all,  a painter covers the canvas with a beige undercoat so that the interesting bits stand out.

Tis myself: July 2004 Fisterra

Timms touches on the exhausting effort required to follow a conversation in a language in which you lack fluency. One of my proudest moment was having a life-the-universe-and-everything talk in french with a monglot francophone - sacked out in the shade of a ruined wall while waiting for the refugio to open. One backstory anecdote Timms shared was from his time helping the Czechs prepare for joining the EU. His working life was all about Diversity, Disability and inclusion and at one venue he started chatting to a profoundly deaf Czech in some institute. ISL is different from the Czech equivalent but he could communicate better by hand than in the school-learnt English of his Czech academic oppos. A revelation for them, less so for him because he'd done the work to learn ISL. 

And here's a nice definition / differentiation from the Timms playbook:

• integration: you have to change if you want to play with us
• inclusion: we have to change to enable you to play with us 

It is obvious which is more difficult to implement.

Another element which had the ring of truth is accepting that extra-ordinary things happen on pilgrimage: water is manifest, or juicy apples appear instead; the hat which was lost is returned two days later; you do find the oomph to climb the last hill of the day; someone is kind when you're feeling crap; you can eat respounchous Dioscorea communis. Timms knows and I know that there is no explanation for miracles but weird collisions happen anyway. When you throw yourself on the mercy of strangers; (or when you give them your last Nurofen) then Thin Places crack open and the world blurfs into the mystic . . . cue van Morrison.

If you have walked the long, you may get tinkles or tingles from this bloke's tale of Camino. If you haven't been, then go. I make no apology for being a camino-bore:

It is an ancient peregrine,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy trimmed grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?'  

A. Because you look like you're lost, preciousss

streetscape

For while in the 00s, I shared the rental of a house in Marino, D3. I was only up in Dublin for 2 nights a week and I could have endured 5 hours a day on the bus commuting from home. But two younger workers at the coal-face of science made me an offer I couldn't refuse on the bed-nights. I also enrolled in drumming workshops in the evening after work. Tuesday "Djembe, dance and body-percussion" with Sinead "sensei" O'Brien; Wednesday "MaSamba" with Simeon Smith. When I got 'home' at 21°°hrs, I was ready for bed. But the lads insisted that we repair to Gaffney's Bar in Fairview and skull pints. I was shattered when I finally got HOME; and couldn't look alcohol in the face . . . until next Tuesday.

In the 1930s, Gaffney's was in  the same place and a little further along Fairview Strand was  "Daly Bros. shop in Fairview Dublin", G. & T. Crampton Photographs, UCD Digital Library. Those premises are now Four Star Pizza; the facade is significantly less 'handsome"; and the range of 'provisions' is markedly reduced as well. If you're curious about bygone shopfronts, Tipperary Studies Digital Archive has several hundred. Many of them are staged with the proprietor and staff standing in their aprons on the pavement outside. God be with the days you could buy biscuits by the pound from a big tin box at the grocer.

Dunno about you, but _I_ am curious about shop-fronts this week because I followed up on the works of Sean Rothery: last met walking the GR5. Rothery walked for exercise and adventure but before retirement he taught Architecture at DIT. That's why he lugged a sketch-book on his walk; it's what architects of a certain vintage did.

In 1978, Rothery was inspired to research and write The Shops of Ireland (with drawings by the author). It was midwifed into existence by student projects in 1975 as part of European Architectural Heritage Year. I like that idea very much: the Custom House and the GPO are the Grand parts of the built environment but if they get gutted by fire, ordinary life continues. If The Righteous set fire to Daly's then the plain people of Fairview and Marino won't know where to get their tea.

 Architecture is a lot like book-binding. The main point being to clag together structural elements so the product stands-up & is fit for purpose . . . but if you can make those elements look well, then why not add a bit of bling? And, hey, there are spandrels on some shop-fronts: those which have fancy round-top windows. If you live in Ireland, you could with advantage get this book out of the library. It will change the way you go shopping: maybe be less of a rush about it? Maybe look up and around and wonder at how human ingenuity makes urban life possible.

Splut

They say that, in medieval times, there was a rather intense rivalry between the ports of Waterford (on the R.Suir) and New Ross (just downstream from the confluence of the Rs Nore and Barrow). I don't know nuttin' about medieval trade except that transport by water was considerably more efficient [in terms of, say, ton-mile-days] than by land.  And if that's true it must have been a case of ¿porque no los dos? I mean if the final destination is Carlow, Kilkenny, or Kildare then New Ross is  the best place to tranship to a barge and off upstream. For Clonmel, Cahir or Carrick, Waterford is your only man.

Howsoever, Waterford won that trade war long long ago and became a City. And New Ross declined despite several interventions to prop-up the economy [see Albatros Fertlizer] and is now a local market-town. On Friday 23Oct26, The Beloved and The Blob scheduled separate meetings in New Ross. Carbon-foot-Bonus for sharing the 80km round-trip. I went to the fancy hotel for my meeting and we agreed to meet in the forenoon at the Dunbrody Visitor's Centre. Herself: "It has a great clattery café upstairs which is hanging out over the water, you'll love it, I'll treat you to a flat-white".

My meeting went well, despite me gabbing a deal too much. I repaired, with some bounce to my step, to claim my coffee. Unfortunately, the tide was out and the view out the window was foregrounded with slobby mud the colour of duck-shit [iykyk]. It is sort of surprising that, despite being 25km North of the actual sea at, say Ballhack, the River Barrow is tidal ~4m rise and fall twice a day at New Ross. Indeed, there are still visible tides [1½m to 2½m] at St Mullins a further 15km upstream It is no coincidence that the Barrow Navigation and its towpath starts at St Mullins. 

But look at the sun, the O'Hanrahan bridge across the broad reach of the River Barrow, the Disney-experience Dunbrody! Note to self: stop glooming at the mud, look up and smell the sun. Over coffee, we reflected on how deep the mud might be. Fortunately we were behind a plate-glass window or I would have been tempted to hoik my empty coffee cup over the edge just to hear the Splut! Mud? Projectiles? Crocodiles!

For part of the Summer of 1977, we lived in New Ross with Pat the Salt and his younger children. He was engaged in some building work just upstream from the then new O'Hanrahan bridge [which was opened in 1967]. You can still see the abutments of the earlier bridge which we used to cross every Easter holiday through the 60s driving between Wexford and Waterford visiting agéd relatives. The older bridge was even more decrepit than my rellies. The speed limit was 5mph and there were 55gallon steel drums as chicanes in the roadway to keep the traffic inching across. Impressionable me reckoned that if 10 cars, or two trucks, stopped in the middle then the roadway would sigh and dump itself into the murky river below. Michael O'Hanrahan was New Ross's contribution to 1916 Easter Rising being 2/o/c of the Jacobs Biscuit Factory garrison. He was executed on 04 May 1916 along with Joseph Plunkett, William Pearse & Edward Daly.

Imperfect

I've been on a P.J. Kavanagh jag recently. Paradoxically first reading a more recent memoir (Finding Connections 1990) which focused on the old dead; and now his first book (The Perfect Stranger a memoir of love and survival 1966) about a tragic young death. The death of young people is normally tragic, dying in the fullness of his years less so. The ever young [Sally 24] and the finished up old [PJ 84]are buried in the same grave, same churchyard [R] in Westwell, Oxforshire [photo Tom Robinson wikimedia commons]

The Perfect Stranger apparently found it difficult to find a publisher. It's partly because PJK is not as good a writer as he thinks he is: some of his run-on sentences baffle me and I'm a native speaker. As a poet, he claims a pretty good internal critic, but if the lines cross this bar then the poem is Good, and several examples finish up in this memoir. I'm not judging - I skip embedded lyrics because they are a detour or paraphrase. This self-satisfaction extends to other areas of his life. Recently, Dau.II accused me of weaponized incompetence when I said that such-a-thing was outside my wheelhouse. Blokes are allowed A Lot of this even in these modern times: can't cook, can't do laundry, can't make a bed (it's only a duvet, wot's to make??), can't clean a toilet. Thus when PJK is called up for National Service, he can't march, he can't make his bed, can't master army book-learning. When, through privilege, he lands an entry-level job in early television it was "by this time I more or less agreed with the general tacit assumption of my uselessness" because infrastructural grunt work is beneath him.

In a 1991 Foreword to a reprint of The Perfect Stranger, he is irked because 25 years of librarians and booksellers have classified it as autobiography rather than the memoir of love and survival which it seems to the author. But FFS, the love interest doesn't walk on stage until the final quarter of the book: the first ¾ is solid autobiog fodder: cruelty at school, continental adventures, getting shot in Korea, being employed [he is apparently too useless for it to be called work] on the stage, in telly, in publishing. 

In 1989, I retired (again!) from working in a British University and looked for other work. One of my ventures was to apply for/to the British Council  - a UK govt quango that shows the flag abroad through culture and things intellectual / educational. I passed the first round of the hiring process well enough to be invited to interview in the London head office. It never went further for me [who knows? wrong tie, looked stupid, sounded stupid, went to college in Dublin?]. In 1958, it went much better for PJK and his shining new, not to say numinous, wife Sally. He was deemed appointable and they were posted to Indonesia; which everyone agreed was the shittiest, most dangerous station on the British Council register. 

There, like Pat the Salt at about the same time, they kicked over the traces of colonial exclusivity and talked to their staff, respected their students and trenchered down the local food. It was going to be wonderful and then ". . . at four o'clock in the morning, midsummer's day, Sally Died"

The End 

Austen, Boelo: double whammy

Storm season starts 1st September  [you have to start somewhere] but the first named storm "Austen" slugged in from the Atlantic last Th/Fr night NullSchoolWind windspeed snapshot 20:00 22Oct26 [L]. At Caislean Blob, it has been standard policy at least this year, maybe a bit longer, to heed MetÉireann's weather warnings and park the car in the next county, if the deluge is scheduled for overnight. I've been banned [you're too decrepit for that nonsense you blitherin' old ninny] from nipping out of the house at 02:00 with a head torch and mattock "I'm awa' off to see to the drains". 

I did clean the drains of this year's brambles, but in advance, in daylight, indeed in the sunshine. It's part of adulting in the country that y'have to do this every year. It's a chore. But a single bramble is like steel wire, and can snag a water-impelled twig; which may catch another twig with leaves; which holds back a trundling rock long enough that a clot of dead sycamore leaves forms a dam . . . and rushing water blurfs out onto the gravel of the lane and two hours later the lane has been delivered as heap onto the county road. I also beefed up the berms which run diagonally across the lane surface: slowing down any running water and delivering it into the drain .

If the lane gets washed away as it did in July 1997 and Jan 2010 at least we'll have a vehicle on the outside for shopping or hunting around for a JCB and 40 tonnes of 804 gravel. Parking in the next county? That is formally correct but rhetorically over-dramatic. My neighbour farms the other side of the river (which marks the county borrrder) and I park in a corner of his yard. Sometimes scones are exchanged. Tea-time Thursday I drove down our lane [300m], along the county road [500m], up his lane [300m] and tucked the car in  against a [solid] wall. But I walked home parallel to the county road by completing the rectangle crossing his fields, the river and our fields. It's much shorter and much more hello trees hello sky than dodging 18-wheelers and shit-spattered tractors on the road.

Storm Austen duly came and duly went, and there was no more rainfall that any other front. The following morning, as soon as it was light to see by [and I'd consumed a quart of hot tea] I went to retrieve the car. I wore m'wellies because stream crossing. 16 hrs previously the stream was 15cm deep and 75cm across now it was grey with crud, 2m wide and of indeterminate depth. But there was a stable looking rock awash in the middle of the current and I boldly used that as a hopping stone to reach the far side. I did not fall on my arse and fill m'boots as I did at the same place in 2023. Win! Friday turned out fine: lots of sun to clock up some solar-kWh; some of which baked 800g of brown soda bread. And the Polish Stove-guy [artisans of '26 prev] came back for coffee to refix the seal round the door of our new wood-burning stove. 

Storm Austen grazed the South coast of Ireland. Storm Boelo, 36 hours later, debladdered itself mainly on the North and West coasts but the whole country got stormy rain all day. A day for huddling next to the toasty stove . . . !?! . . . the stove was out of action Saturday because the sealant needed 24 hours to set. Fall-back plan: huddling under a weighty-blanket with a hot-water bottle. With occasional forays outside to count sheep and look sternly at the drains.  Amazing skyscape on Sat/Sun night: not quite full moonlit mackerel skies with stars, planets in the holes. And Sunday morning started gusty but sunny & all sheep reported in with the requisite number of legs. Come on Storm Chloe we're ready.

Ploddy

To my great surprise, then and now, I walked 700km [aged 35], then 800km [aged 50], then 160 km [aged 70] through Europe. The last walk, with The Boy, was crammed into a few Blobs. That middle walk to & from Santiago was transformative: I even wrote a book(let) about the transformation. I never imagined that my detail-filled journal-of-journey would be of the slightest interest to anyone, even me, except as une aide mémoire. 

Sean Rothery (1928 - 2014) was an academic architect from Dublin, who retired from UCD in 1994 and took himself off for a long walk in Europe to clear some cobwebs and stretch his legs while he still had the use of his knees. More ambitious than me, he started like Patrick Leigh Fermor from Hoek van Holland and walked to the Mediterranean along the GR5. He was already a published author, having written books on vernacular architecture Everyday Buildings of Ireland (1976), The Shops of Ireland (1978) [looks interesting, I've reserved a copy in the library]. He was encouraged to write a book about his trek which was published as A Long Walk South. An Irishman's Trek on the GR5. (2001). It was re-released in 2014 both as paper and an e-book.  Over a short week in mid-October, I stomped along in his footsteps from the mists and polders of the North Sea to his plunge into the Med at Nice.

I found it very difficult to publish my analysis of the process of Pilgrimage in 2004, 2005, 2006. It was too short for one thing. Collins Press of Cork, otoh, undertook to publish Rothery's book in 2001 at least partly because it was of normal book length. It only achieved this threshold because it's bloated with quotidian detail. I got blisters. . . I met this bloke . . . I stopped for a beer . . . there was a surly waiter . . . it rained . . . it cleared . . . it poured . . . there were butterflies . . . I lost the way . . . I met this couple from [insert place] . . . we ate dinner together . . . more injuries . . . the bed was lumpy . . . the refuge had a snorer . . . Mont Blanc! . . . another 'revolting' slab of pork-fat for dinner . . . I hate ski-resorts. This is just the unavoidable infrastructure of distance walking - it's not going anywhere.

That being said, Rothery has an eye for vernacular French architecture and upland landscape. He prefers to stop and capture a scene in his sketchbook [another addition to the 1994-weight back-pack] rather than snapping a pic and moving on: " The intense blues of [Cezanne's] pictures; cerulean, prussian and ultramarine, could be sensed in the distant views, while the wonderfully overlapping greens; viridian, olive and sap suffused the foreground. The approaching autumn tinted some of the flat planes of the Provence landscape from light siena to dark umber."  [colour-prevs: flowers; flags; fonts]

What is interesting is how things have changed since 1994, or indeed 2004 when I walked the GR65 from Santiago. Rothery rocks up to the Tourist Information guichet to sort his in-advance accommodation. The Boy did all this for us last year on his smart phone. Rothery is lugging maps and guide-books rather than getting a location fix with GPS and satellite maps. Cash-points exist in 1994 but he pays a premium to convert punts to francs. He makes arrangements to meet up "see you in two days at the first bar in Vadoncourt" because only Richard Branson has a cell-phone.

And some things hadn't changed in 80 years. Parts of the GR5 teeter through the static killing fields of WWI. The upland wilderness disfigured with rusting barbed wire and warnings not to leave the marked way.    

Also interesting for me is that Rothery was great pals with Frank Winder [prev] when they were both young rock climbers ca. 1950. Winder taught me Biochemistry 25 years later and was still active as emeritus prof 25 years after that when I found myself in the same academic department. I liked him because a) he always remembered my name b) he had a wide-range of interests and miscellaneous domains of true expertise.

Exec.Summ. A Long Walk South reads true: so much matches my experience. But being true doesn't make it interesting: walking is not a spectator sport, you have to do it yourself, or better by yourself.

Descendant of kings

I had a great idea in my early days at The Institute, which finished up creating a Dr Kavanagh, PhD, while generating some quite noisy [ie useless] data about Lithium in the groundwater. There are so many Kavanaghs hereabouts [like Powers down the Déise, and Burkes in Galway] that nicknames are given [Butt Kavanaghs; Bonesetter Kavanaghs] which adhere to descendants long after the actual short-arse or healer is dead. 

I forget the inducement, but, in September, I reserved a bunch of books at the Library by poet, journalist and novelist PJ Kavanagh. The first to arrive was Finding Connections (1990). The conceit is that this Kavanagh was born, lived  and worked (1931 - 2015) in England, wore tweed jackets and spoke with a middle-class southern English accent but had a distinctively Irish surname. He goes on a road trip to try making a connexion with his Irish Catholic ancestors starting in Co Carlow and then shipping off after their trail through Tasmania = van Diemen's Land and New Zealand. Along the way he meets several genealogists (amateur and professional) but enough vaguely interesting people to fill out the book to 200 pages. I was stuck off-site for the weekend with no internet and the one book, so I plugged away through a blizzard of dead Kavanaghs, Cullens and Pauls. 

Turns out two of my collateral relatives, brothers, left King's County [with a pot of gold] for New Zealand in the same decade (1860s) as Patrick Kavanagh. One went on to the USA, one stayed and started a family from which eventually popped my Cousin Trevor. Lookit: the three biggest islands of the archipelago were named New Ulster, New Munster and New Leinster.

PJK's memoir only came together in the last couple of chapters, so I'm glad I didn't fling it aside [borrrrring] somewhere between Auckland and Wellington. In this wrap up he mentions a line by Henry Mayhew (1812 - 1887), from his mighty research tome  London Labour and the London Poor (1851): "The Irish are unusually clear about their origins". But PJK is quite skeptical about whether any evidence or actual history sticks to this clarity. As illustration, he quotes from correspondence between his Uncle Paul and his father Eddie = Ted. Paul writes that, ~100 years previously, Cardinal Cullen, a collateral relation, funded the elopement of PJK's Gt.Grandmother and even married the besotted couple in Dublin before they upstakes for the Antipodes. But documentary records show that the youngsters were a) really married in Carlow b) while Father Cullen was for sure in Rome that year. Which was yonks before he returned to be Archbishop, Cardinal and Primate-of-all-Ireland. "How did he, barrister, editor, student of racing form, pass on this hearsay as truth when a glance at a reference book would have shown him it was impossible?".

We do this all the time. We bumble through life and shit happens. Our brains work overtime to make sense of these buffets and come up with a compelling narrative which is internally consistent. The idea that life is series of uncontrollable random assaults is too hard to bear. And we also chop and dice the memories so that we come out kinder, cleverer and more in control than we actually were at the time. "The present can be looked at and interpreted with more confidence than the past, it is under your nose" (PJK, Finding Connections Ch.19). Massaging the story?? see also recent Word of Mouth podcast in which Michael Rosen and Jamie Tehrani talk about how Fairy Tales evolve and diversify over space and time. Tehrani Bloboprev on the phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.

Another nice object lesson is that Paul and Ted were supported in the education by their at-last-affluent Kiwi father. One was destined for the Law, the other Medicine. But in their youth both boys booted their respective careers through heedlessness and lack of commitment. Nevertheless they went on to be stellar in other professions [Paul: legal journalist & editor; Ted: comedy writer]. This is why my advice to young people about going to college is: don't sweat it. At 17 you are such a n00b that you don't know what 'Medicine' or 'Law' actually entails. Your capacity for happiness is an internal matter, not predicated on what course you choose and/or finish.