Go on! Koan.

 Well, I dunno, which is better? - read a book about Pilgrimage . . . or up-stakes a go on Pilgrimage. My answer from July 2004 [R indicating The Way into the rising sun and across O Ponte do Burgo in Galicia]! I didn't intend to peregrinate, I just went for a walk with The Boy: and that only about 100km. Four days later, we rocked up to Santiago de Compostella . . . upon St James's Day. Big Party. Four days, even with Mass && a fiesta, is not enough for change to be wrought - except in the blister department. But two days later I plodded off to France on my own and arrived in that country 5½ weeks later & 12kg lighter. Something else happened along The Way: I became a Pilgrim. Or at least I became someone who wrote a book[let] about the Process of Pilgrimage. And made several posts about Santiago and related matter. And having got that off my chest, I have been okay to read [and review] books about it: ToCanterbury -  ToRome - ToJerusalem -

21 years after our last walking 'venture, in June 2025 The Boy and I had another bite at the cherry: clocking off 160km in France along the Via Podiensis, one of the filaments of the Camino de Santiago. At the same time, by coincidence, my pal Denécus was walking in the opposite direction along the Via Primitivo. 30 years ago, D and I had parallel jobs in the same Department and ate lunch together pretty much every M-F for a couple of years. He is not the only science friend to go for a Pilgrim.; but he was for sure on my list of likely candidates. Some of my best friends are scientists who are skeptical about everything except science which effectively makes science a Belief System as much as Shinto. Not D. For the first time since ~1995, we had lunch together just before Christmas and compared blisters notes on The Way and its fauna. Because D had his Compostelle [cert affirming his arrival in Santiago], I was able [cw: spoiler alert] to send him a copy of my book about PoP. And he presented me with a >3rd-hand copy of:

The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred (1998) by Phil Cousineau [who he]? I'm not sure it's good to start such a book with a list of prior pilgrims to make first timers feel inadequate: Abraham, Basho, Chaucer, Dante [St] Egeria . . . etc. But I guess that's not the market, which is rather a) those who've bin that done that or b) people who do their pilgrimage from the sofa through other men's flowers. One of the arrows in Cousineau's quiver is acting as a guide on Sacred Travel excursions, and no better man: because he's clocked hundreds of km finding himself all over the world, so c) seekers who might become clients. The ABCDE list above is part of the package; along with quips & quotes [so many quotes] from Augustine, Buddha, Chatwin, Thoreau, Watts . . . etc. Apart from wearing our expensive education on our sleeves, The Art and The Blob have this is common: the terrible quality of the pictures!

p.128 ""Section V. The Labyrinth. We know all too well that few journeys are linear and predictable. Instead they swerve and turn, twist and double back, until we don't know if we're coming or going."". This is bollix not my experience. I've just made a there [going] and back [coming] trip to the cobbler without swerve. I go to Dublin on the train: linear and predictable. I walk up the hill to Cross-on-Fork: linear and predictable. I fly to France: linear and predictable. Maybe the prime benefit of Pilgrimage is that, by teetering on the edge of comfort, thee is a rare opportunity to swerve and turn, twist and double back. and come up with a different Way of Seeing. Cousineau does come to a similar conclusion- but sometimes he trips over his own rhetoric while getting there.

Midway through the book, Huston Smith, one of Cousineau's gurus and writer of the Foreword, lists 4 requirements for pilgrimage

• single purpose
• undistracted
• ordeal hardship penance
• offerings

Though missing some of these criteria, the boundaries for Pilgrimage are deemed to include fans having emotional upwellings at Gracelands or the tombs of Jim Morrison or Jack Kerouac.  Despite the Guide in the title, this is not a text-book to Nirvana, it's more a Pilgrim's Miscellany and some of the tales and quotes are sure to resonate with some readers. Your faves probably differ from mine. Cousineau tries not to be prescriptive about the travel habits [sketching, journaling] which worked for him. 

But to have my final sentence echo the rhetoric in the first, Pilgrimage is something you do on your feet not with your feet up with a book. Verdict: worth reading but not worth buying to read.

On The Way

Rupert Sheldrake cruised over my horizon recently as link from my friend Brian who looks a bit like Sheldrake, and is similarly ready to embrace the strange. Sheldrake is a rather distinguished scientist: but not in the sense that they've asked him to join the FRS boys-club or laid a Nobel Prize in his lap. Maybe distinctive is the word I'm looking for? Not many of us scientists has got on the tits of the establishment so much as to have their TED talk relegated to a broom-closet on the TED website with a Nutjobs Adults Only sign on the outside. How many have riled up the Editor of Nature John Maddox so much as for him to say "I was so offended by it, that I said that while it's wrong that books should be burned, in practice, if book burning were allowed, this book would be a candidate"?  Not many, not me: hence distinctive; an outlier. I've mentioned him a tuthree times before. He has a new book out: Science and Spiritual Practices: transformative experiences and their effects on our bodies, brains and health and he's been out and about promoting it.  He enumerates 7 spiritual practices, and you and I both will have to wait to read the book to see where the science fits in.

• Meditation
• Gratitude
• Connecting with nature
• Relating to plants
• Rituals
• Singing and chanting
• Pilgrimage and holy places.

I am particularly interested in the last chapter because a) I'm a scientist and b) after I walked back to France from Santiago in 2004, I wrote a short book Santiago! 800,008 steps along the Camino or Santiago; an analysis of the process of pilgrimage. The contents gelled, from the turmoil of my pilgrimage experience, over a weekend in Bidarray [split by the Pont d'Enfer shown R] in the Basque country but the title changed depending on how pretentious I felt.  My journey was about 800km or 800,000 paces, the 800,008 was a cheap-shot hats-off to the Buddhist idea of the Nobel Eight-fold Path:

• Step 1 Simplicity & Parsimony
• Step 2 Tolerance
• Step 3 Mindfulness
• Step 4 Charity
• Step 5 Acceptance
• Step 6 Availability and Openness
• Step 7 Courage
• Step 8 Being Positive
• Optional Step Dance. On music and song

There is a certain amount of overlap between Sheldrake's dissection and mine. In his video on pilgrimage explains how the process / practice of pilgrimage: walking with a purpose; walking with others; getting outdoors will help towards getting inspired and getting happier and healthier. Pilgrimage is not [any longer] associated with a particular religion; indeed you are requested BYB bring your own beliefs.There is even a quintessentially English group called the British Pilgrimage Trust  BPT which will source a track / way / camino for you, near you.

A few years ago, Sheldrake proposed to walk to Canterbury Cathedral with his 14 y.o. godson. At least partly because he has made a resolution not to give more Stuff to anybody he knows or cherishes. Somewhat to Sheldrake's surprise the youth replied "I can". And they did, starting a country 8 miles / 13km from the city and walking towards Bell Harry Tower, [R from up close] which is 75m tall and can be seen for miles. On arrival, they paused for a cream tea because 14 y.o. boys are a bottomless pit for calories especially after some exercise. They then attended choral evensong as a spiritual reward for their slight enough pilgrimage.

I've been there, then, 100+ times, attending choral evensong in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral singing The day thou gavest lord is ended and Abide with me. If anyone thinks that the Protestants don't have the best songs, they are welcome to make a comment below. I was there because it was part of my very expensive education along with Latin, team-sports, biology and an 800g-loaf-and-a-toaster-a-day . . . and finishing up an emotional cripple!

If you want an hour more Sheldrake, and can tolerate Russell Brand, you can listen to them chatting in a studio interview.  Sheldrake's controversial position is anti-materialist and suggests that some thought patterns can become stronger through 'morphic resonance'. He suggests that the Times cross-word is easier on the train home because loadsa people have struggled over it all day. People all over the world, independently sending out vibes. Conventional materialist scientists just cannot accept this but are quite happy with other forms of magic like radio transmission and Schrödinger's cat. One peculiarity of data is that IQ scores have gone up by about 30% since they were invented 100 years ago. We all know that folk aren't cleverer than their grandparents, or if they are evolution doesn't work that fast. Morphic resonance explains the increase rather well although we are still hazy about the mechanism. Other explanations for this 'Flynn Effect' scrabble a bit citing better nutrition and more reading.

The thing that has really riled up regular science is Sheldrake's assertion that the speed of light in a vacuum - one of the great central cosmological constants - is not constant. Unbiassed estimates of this statistic have varied by as much as 20 parts in 299,792,458 m/s which says that the terminal 58 should be rounded off, for starters. Sheldrake won't suggest that physicists have fudged the data to get everything to agree; no, but he will suggest that "intellectual phase-locking" is going down. A sort of morphic resonance; but he would say that wouldn't he?

The chat bounces along between science and religion in a rather civilised way not least because Brand sees himself as "being quick to see that religious people are right".  If the physicists, or at least their results, get more like each other as time passes, so the spiritual side of humanity might be using
their rituals to entrain morphic resonance. Singing the Nunc Dimittis together at evensong makes people more Christian and maybe better people. Brand neatly wraps it with: "there yer go: more cathedrals fewer iPhones but you're probably not listening to this on a cathedral".

Pilgrim to Pontiff

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?"

Did I tell you about my Camino? I'm not boring you?  Did I mention how pilgrimage can be transformative? If I'm sure of anything on that subject, it is that nobody was ever transformed by reading about someone else's pilgrimage . . . or thinking about going . . . or putting mink oil on yer boots.

Nevertheless, books about pilgrimage can be interesting if the author has been changed by their journey and/or uses the story as a hook on which to hang their thoughts about life, the Universe and everything. It even works if the trudge takes the author to different places and they go deep or quirky on the local history. There is little value in the mundane description of beers and blisters and inconsequential chatter with other randos on the way. And I think we the reader should hold back the accolades when an established literate and literary person is making the journey cossetted by their publisher's advance. Like Bill Buford's Heat.

I'm finished audiobooking A Pilgrimage to Eternity: from Canterbury to Rome in search of a faith by Timothy Egan.[R at the Col du Grand St-Bernard where Switzerland cedes to Italy]. I live a sheltered life, so I've never 'eard of this Pulitzer Prize winning NYT columnist who has written 9 nine! full-length books and gets regularly reviewed in newspapers of record WaPo, NYT (of course), Guardian.

This book is longer than my 800,008 steps along the Camino an analysis of the process of pilgrimage and the Via Francigena from the tomb of Thomas à Becket to St. Peter's in Rome is 2x more steps. It's more discursive, too: Justin Welby, Martin Luther, Jean d'Arc, Victor Hugo, Savonarola, St Lucia Filippini, Dom Pérignon all lived or died close to the route of the V.F.

Egan grew up Catholic in Spokane and his pilgrimage seeks to reconcile some of the disconcerting aspects of belief. For followers of an all loving Christ, Catholics have a track record of killing a lot of people who couldn't squeeze through a rather narrow gate of faith. His community, including his youngest brother, was exposed to one of the many pedophile priests who were rotated through different parishes rather than sanctioned. His brother's bestie later killed himself from the shame of his abuse. How do you become a fan of Pope Francis with all that hurt in your bindle?

Despite being a best selling author and journalist; and despite having access to Jesuit back-channels to the [Jesuit] Pontiff, Mr Egan does not secure a personal interview with the head of his church and has to make do with a glimpse of Francis as he whizzes by on a golf-cart outside St.Peter's. I had a similar fleeing encounter in the drizzle with Pope JP II when he visited Boston in 1980: and bought the t-shirt! He's happy enough with that, because pilgrimage is a process not a destination.

If you've been on The Path, then you should enjoy this book. tl;dr? 25 minute interview with transcript.

Pilgrim's Progress

. . . from this world to that which is to come. [that's Bunyan] I'm sorry to hear that John "Camino" Brierley, enthusiastic writer about, and facilitator of ,the process of pilgrimage, is dead. Cancer; at Dartmouth in the S.W of England.  He's a few years older than me but still had a lot to give. I gather that his daughter Gemma has been recently taking up the slack on the relentless process of churning out his useful and appealing guides to the several Caminos leading to Santiago de Compostella. Few indeed achieve satori from the exercise and many are disappointed that their pilgrimage hasn't worked. But lookit, one of the wise people I met on my Camino in Regresso in 2004 quipped: "When your camino ends, the journey begins". Because change is hard; but the most difficult task is to change ourselves.

It's easy to give a tetchy harrumph to the idea of pilgrim guidebooks. That elusive satori may slip through your fingers if you treat the journey as paint-by-numbers. I remember space-time being disturbed by a turmoil of anxiety when I encountered a group of pilgrims at one of the rare forks in the road which were missing the  ⟶  to show The Way as if that direction was the only option at any intersection. But heck, it's hard enough to walk 100km or 700km to Santiago without doing it on your knees . . . or without a Brierley booklet. No need to go all Joshua Slocum circumnavigating the globe with an old alarm clock for a chronometer - GPS is okay. And, for sure, the demand is there: 1 million copies have been sold in several languages.

 My sister met Johnny Brierley in the 1980s when they were both finding their way in Findhorn. Years later, we all went for a pint in Slad, Gloucs about 5 years after I returned from Fisterra. I was on the fifth draft of my own Analysis of the Process of Pilgrimage and realising that writing the goll-dang thing was enough and it didn't need to be published. As you do, we swapped yarns and ideas about Santiago, the Camino and life-the-universe-and-everything. I liked him and wasn't off-put by the inner light which made his gaze a bit intense. I sent him a message and he replied

I, likewise, enjoyed our brief encounter and stories of El Camino. Thank you for sending me your treatise on the adventures through Portugal and Spain – I found it delightful and illuminating to read and I particularly endorse the tripartite nature of an extended walk and the need to 'allow the time it takes'. It is also my experience that the journey only really deepens to a spiritual dimension once sufficient time has been spent in the physical and psychological realms. Alas too often we allow time constraints to interfere with the alchemical process and to rob us of the potential of achieving altered states (whether body, mind or soul).
Let the journey continue with joy and lightness of step. Johnny.

Gemma Brierley has apparently been instrumental in getting the Camino Inglés to Santiago from Reading to Southampton into a state fit for pilgrimage - more yellow arrows are doubtless needed! Johnny's death created a bit a stir at the time [Obits - Guardian -- Camino Society wch was syndicated to The Reactograph] but not enough to ring my doorbell then. Here's Johnny talking quietly YT-4½min about empty mind. Ultreïa? Sing it!

For heaven's sake

While the people of the the South-East celebrate the high Summer with a lot of fresh fruit and some snogging in the hollows, in the West they take a more directly religious view of the day. The last Sunday of July is known in Mayo and further afield as Domhnach na Cruaiche or Reek Sunday because on that day thousands of people go on pilgrimage to the top of Cruach Phádraig Croagh Patrick, which translates as St Patrick's [hay]stack or rick or indeed Reek. The mountain is made up of quartzite rather than dried grass, which is interesting geologically for two reasons.  First the rock is run through with several seams of gold-bearing quartz of which analysis in the 1980s suggested ore to the tune of half-an-ounce [15g] of gold to the ton. A cunning plan to take away one of the really sacred places on the island in 40 ton dumper trucks was put forward. This had the potential to realise someone $300 million despite the price of gold being currently in free-fall from its highs of nearly $2000/oz four years ago. The plain people of Mayo were canny enough to realise that they would see none of that and so planning/development permission was refused.

The other geological consequence is that the approach to the summit is largely made up of fist-sized scree and lumpier boulders that make for very unstable footing.  About 100,000 people make it to the summit each year; a third of them in a single 24 hr period at the end of July. They have been doing this for 1500 years [Pathe report from 1964] and so the path has experienced significant erosion. There is no grass or heather left to hold things together. Indeed mountain expert Elfyn Jones pronounced last year that Croagh Patrick is the worst damaged mountain path in these islands. You can see the scar of the pilgrim autoroute in the picture [L]. About 2% of the pilgrims make the climb in bare-feet, just like our 10 y.o Dau.I did yomping up similarly sized Mt Leinster. But because of the tiny footfall, and consequent lack of erosion, on our mountain it was possible for her to do her trek with hardly any contact with bare rock.

I've written about the experience of pilgrimage before: been there, done that, entitled to an opinion. I've also whanged on about the commodification of walking: how difficult can it be? It's what human do; in principle it just takes a pair of legs. The rest of the "kit" deemed to be essential is driven by anxiety or commerce.  Enterprising members of the plain people of Mayo will, for €3, sell you an ash-plant or a blackthorn stick to help you up Croagh Patrick or if that's too steep, will rent you one for €1.50! There is a long tradition of making money from any pilgrim tide. I'm sure you can buy water, fizzy or still, at the standard jumping off point and I'll bet you can buy it cheaper in Westport, the nearest town.

One thing that I learned in Spain is that pilgrimage is hard.  The Camino Frances to Santiago is structured as a physical metaphor for the inner journey.  You start with a brutal climb to a ridge in the Pyrenees and down the other side: that ladles out physical pain - blisters, shin-splints, turned ankles - which you must endure.  Then you must walk for 10 days, often under a broiling sun, through a featureless plain of corn and sunflower fields: you must learn to endure your own company.  Not until you have been through physical and mental fire are you fit to approach the City of God in the midst of the mountains of Galicia. If you could be helicoptered to the top of Croagh Patrick it wouldn't count - there would be no more transformative potential in it than taking a fair-ground ride.

Every recent year, the Archbishop of Tuam has led the pilgrims up on the morning of Reek Sunday and conducted mass from a glass box outside the little chapel. Being the West of Ireland the weather can be unreliable. 2009 was pretty grim and numbers were down to about half the usual amount.  About 18,000 people in need of some spiritual uplift nevertheless went the whole way. This year, 26th July 2015, the forecast was similar but the police and local mountain rescue [promotional video] and ambulance corps prevailed on the holy catholic church to cancel the pilgrimage and hold the commemorative mass in the church near the foot of the mountain. One of the cited reasons was that the Knights of Malta first-aid tent had blown over in the wind. The wind was 'gusting force 7' at dawn but moderating and 25mm of rain fell in the 24 hours. The Man then spent the rest of the day hanging around in the car-park telling people NOT to go up the mountain today, they couldn't be held responsible etc. Well indeed not!  I wouldn't be asking for mountain rescue to rescue me.  Rather "I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” [Minnie Haskins] There are other sources of help other than the mountain rescue.  No I wouldn't expect to have a deity bail me out if I broke my leg in a fall but I would not be surprised to find sufficient compassion and physical strength among the thousands of other hardy souls who were on the mountain that day. About 5,000 went to the top and back this year including a child of 8 and a 12 week-old infant wrapped up in a back-pack.  The child was reported as mildly hypothermic [shivering] when she came down and the city-boy press quickly shed the "mildly" so it looked like the parents deserved a visit from the Cruelty Officer.  I was trying to put my finger on what was jangling my chain on this one and after a night of troubled dreams I reckon it is the word volunteer.  The aid organisations are all run by volunteers: brave and selfless chaps in high-viz jackets who use their expertise and experience to pull the benighted, incompetent and injured off the wild places of these islands. They do what they do because they have it in them to give. They wouldn't be there but for the folly and misfortune of people less fit.  As I see it they have two options: retire to their tents like Achilles or suck it up and perform some challenging rescues which will be good training for an operation in a blizzard in winter.  What they don't have is locus standi to prevent others from doing what they think is foolish. Otherwise the tail is wagging the dog.

Another problem, as I see it, is that in a temperate island, with no poisonous snakes, no earthquakes or active volcanoes, no tornadoes and a hurricane but once every generation Ireland has very little exciting in the way of adverse natural phenomena. So the police, the weather bureau, and the mountain rescue have the vapours and issue yellow, orange and red warnings if a weather event in the 95th percentile comes through. Talk to people living in the Caribbean through the hurricane season about high winds and heavy rain.  It would be probably foolish, as well as disrespectful, to try paragliding under the conditions pertaining last Sunday but a slippy wet walk was not out of the question.  And the stats bear me out: nobody died.  Next time The Man issues a warning there will be some legitimate skepticism about His judgement.  The case is altered if you are on another mountain and/or on your own and/or with inadequate clothing & calories in similar conditions but religious practice needs to be cut some slack . . . for heaven's sake.

Going to the dogs

In March this year, I wrote about failing to track and borrow the only copy on the books of a title in the Irish public library system. I mildly moaned about this to Dau.I the Librarian: books are effective fungible, one is as good as another for my edutainment. It turns out that her current role is Acquisitions, Non-Fiction and she responded brightly "thanks for the suggestion, I think We the Library could acquire a couple of copies". And it was so, and she reserved one for me to borrow, and on 13 Aug I was messaged:

• The following item(s) are being held for you until the date shown below. Title: Winterdance:the fine madness of Alaskan dog-racing Author: Paulsen, Gary

Well, Winterdance (note: not Riverdance auf Nuremburg) is a stitch and deserves to be read much more widely by a dog-loving nation. And yet, because of Der Triumph des Neuen, this 30 year old publication had been remaindered  and culled to make room for 313 copies of The impossible fortune : a Thursday Murder Club mystery (2025) then latest by Richard Osman. And 251 copies of Prize-winning The Adversary by Michael Crummey.

Winterdance is the tale of conjuring up a team of sled dogs [Typhoon Cookie Yogi Max Storm Steven Bill Devil Murphy Ortho BigMac Raven Byron - other people's dogs, other people's names] with the intention of running the 1850km Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race [whc Bloboprev] in 1983.

About 20 years ago 7 y.o. Dau.II wanted a dog so badly that she spent lots of time as a dog - gruffling, fawning, crawling about on all fours and eating weetabix off the kitchen floor. This annoying behavious did  manifest her desire [R.ashers] in short order. Paulsen reckoned along similar lines. I had to sleep in the kennel, I had to be with the dogs all the time, learn from them all the time, know them all the time. More than sleep [there], I had to be in the kennel all the time. I had to, in some way, become a dog. Without that 100% commitment, his future as a (-40°F = -40°C) sled-runner was going to be bleak indeed and could get him and his dogs killed.

Spoiler: Paulsen finished the Iditarod with all 15 of his starting dogs, nowhere near the prize money but well along in his transition to become a dog. Whiffs like a dog, pulls like a dog, eats sketchy like a dog. I recommended it to Dau.II who has lately been on a Reading Running jag: Feet in the Clouds, -- Tarahumara, -- Zatopek. What's not to love about endurance, adversity, sunrise from the top of the world . . . with pups? Winterdance is not didactic, it's not a diary, it's a distillation of a process. It is funny hilarious. There are now three copies in the Library.

My analysis of the process of pilgrimage [Santiago etc etc] concludes that internal transformation can occur at walking pace (indeed on crutches) if there is intention, if expectation of failure is dumped, if you go a little bit more. Pilgrimage is something you do on your feet not with your feet up with a book. I have seen with mine own eyes: Dau.II is running.

Walking for others

Eeee when I were young and institutionalized, I participated in King's Walk Cancerbury. Several hundred lads between 13 and 18 walked 20 miles to raise money for "cancer". It was definitely not my idea and my activity drumming up sponsors was desultory but that community raised a chunk of money from their network. Because expensive education, some rich uncles and doting grandparents were doubtless shaken down for ££££s - not mine. This kind of charity-blagging has gotten a lot more common and I'm not particularly keen on the concept. 

We had our second family film night in Tramore at the end of last month [the first]. Only one film The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry but a hella spread of sushi from Daoti. Pilgrimage was the choice of Dau.II who had seen the trailer and concluded: it's about a scruffy old chap who goes on a long walk . . . that's my Dad. It wasn't until minutes before we tuned in that one of the party noted cw: suicide and we realized that the movie might not be a rom-com. Like Harold Fry we soldiered on regardless. 

This film is a parable for our times. There's a lot more excuse for existential dread than anyone had back in 1970 when I walked for cancer larked about and got blisters on summer bye-ways in Kent. Nina Singh playing the Girl with Blue Hair [R] tells Harold Fry that she saved her aunt from dying by giving good vibes. This gives Mr Fry the oomph to pay his respects to an old pal who is dying at the other end of England. Berwick-on-Tweed is only 8 hours away by the M5 - M42 - A1 but because impulse he elects to walk - setting out forthwith without going home to pick up his toothbrush or say goodbye to his wife.

He becomes a transitory tabloid celebrity, attracting a circus of 'lost' people who decide to travel with him in "I have his sandal" way. Eventually he shakes this ragamuffin band loose to continue his own introspective journey: meditating on the mistakes he made with his own life - especially as it involved his family. Processing grief is hard and requires compassion from those who are most damaged and least able to give. Lots to unpack, and your journey likely won't be neatly sorted by having looked at Harold Fry walking for a couple of hours.

Author Rachel Joyce BBC podcasts [27m] about the book.

Slouching to Jerusalem

 I was quite snitty about Tim Egan's reportage on the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome. My main gripe was that he embarked on his journey specifically to monetize the experience with another of his well-crafted books: it was performative. My experience of pilgrimage is that it can be a massive fail if you start with expectations - those expectations tend to blinker the pilgrim to the new . . . including the numinous. I remember St James's Day 2004: lining up with The Boy in the broad stairwell to get our Compostella in Santiago. Slumped on a step another pilgrim wailed "is that all?" to his mates: all that trudge, all those blisters and still untransfigured - robbed.

The Lawd The Borrowbox Algorithm must be calling me back to The Way because, no sooner had I ticked off Tim Egan, but I was reading The Crossway [2018] by Guy Stagg. He walked the Via Francigena in 2013 starting in midwinter and crossing the Col du Grand St-Bernard . . . in a whiteout. He should have died, but he figured that in the old days many pilgrims made it, so it was possible. Being from The Arts Block, he didn't care to get out the back of an envelope to determine probable? He arrived in Rome, did the sights but had not intended to stop. Rather, he set out across Italy on the Appian Way to Bari, picked up the Via Egnatia in Durrës, Albania and walked to Constantinople. Loving but leaving a green-eyed Albania girl called Esme.

He had a tent and a sleeping bag but generally he was handed off from one refuge to another, sharing dinner with monks and sleeping in austere bunks. He stayed briefly in Meteora, Greece [R] as well as Mount Athos. The week he arrived in Istanbul, the riots against Erdoğan kicked off and the journalist in him hung around to get tear-gassed . . . but not pepper-sprayed or, like, shot. But The City, like Rome, was only a way-station to The Promised Land. 

Turkish hospitality took him further along the way to more flat-bread, olives and cheese in Cyprus, Lebanon and Israel. He couldn't go through Syria because Sarin. He arrived in Jerusalem and did the round of sites in the various quarters of the city. He had accepted that he too was going to be untransfigured at the Dome of The Rock but healing and redemption had been dumped from his agenda a good many miles back along the journey. Like a real pilgrim, who goes beyond Santiago to Fisterra, the End of the World, Stagg shoulders his pack and heads East into The Desert. That's not enough either, but it doesn't matter because he's been there under his own steam. If he doesn't believe, he can at least roll back through the (gorgeous) photographic evidence of his journey. Because he is not the same, troubled, youth as he was before he left London. 

Pilgrimage has much to recommend it for unbelievers.

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Quaternions 170 today.

There are a few, well-churned, stories of how a creative insight came to someone in a flash at a particular place and a particular time.  Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was a French mathematician known as The Last Universalist (le dernier grand savant universel).  As I quoted J.B.S Haldane earlier "Keats and Shelley were the last two poets who were at all up to date with their chemical knowledge” so Poincaré knew all the then available mathematics.  Einstein was writing his key papers before Poincaré died and after his death things mathematical went exponential so that no single brain could retain it all.  As well as making major contributions to several different fields of mathematics, Poincaré was also a philosopher of science with a notable interest in the where ideas spring from.   In his 1908 book Science and Method he describes one of his own experiences getting onto a bus in Coutances in Normandy: "At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformation that I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-euclidean geometry." I can see that I'm going to have to come back to Poincaré later, because he is really so interesting.

Poincaré will be always with us, but not the fleeting anniversary of the discovery of quaternions by Ireland's own polymathematician William Rowan Hamilton: that comes but once a year.  I've mentioned him in passing before acting a bit of a groupie over the Ordnance Survey team that was mapping Ireland in the the 1830s. Hamilton was born about 50 years before Poincaré, so he had much less difficulty mastering all the mathematics then available, because he was quite as smart and there was much less maths.  He was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin at the ripe old age of 22; the position came with a house at the Dunsink Observatory NW of Dublin.  On 16th October 1843 he went for a stroll with his wife along the Royal Canal, and as he passed under Broom/Brougham Bridge on the tow path he had an amazing revelation about mathematical relationships, which he hastily scratched into a stone on the bridge:

i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = -1

NUI Maynooth hosts an annual pilgrimage walk from Dunsink Observatory to Broom Bridge or you can just go out on the Maynooth commuter rail and descend at Broombridge.  When I was last there 20 years ago, on pilgrimage with a friend of mine who had a degree in Mathematics from Cambridge, the area was all derelict rough meadows filled with old bedsteads and piebald horses.  Now, as you see from Google maps, the Celtic Tiger has passed through depositing now derelict rough sheds and warehouses.

For those with elementary maths, Hamilton's formula plainly does not compute because it violates the convention that minus x minus = plus, so there is no way two identical things can be multiplied together to make -1.  But Hamilton's equation has a bunch of such assaults on this agreement i x i = -1; j x j = -1 etc.  For those who have a tiny bit more maths, the Quaternion times table shown on the left violates the principle of commutativity.  The elementary maths chaps are leaving for a strong cup of tea at this stage because they can't remember ever being told about commutativity.  A commutative relationship is one where the order of application doesn't matter.  Regular multiplication and addition are examples of commutative transformations:  3 x 2 = 3 x 2; 7 x 6 = 6 x 7; 15 + 5 = 5 + 15; etc etc. the times-tables are much easier because of this symmetry, as is adding up a long column of numbers - the answer is the same if we start at the bottom and add from there or if we start and the top and add downwards.  Non-commutative operations include minus and divide:  5 - 3 .ne. 3 - 5 and 3/5 .ne. 5/3. [.ne. - not equal]
From the table it says that i x j .ne. j x i .  It does matter which order you multiply the elements in quaternion mathematics.  You can, idly, use the table to verify Hamilton's bridge-scratching "ijk = -1" (it's the same as i x j x k = -1) can be processed in two steps:  i x j = k ; k x k = -1.

"So far, so what?"  I hear you say, and for 100 years that was the consensus.  Quaternions were a clever game that mathematicians used to play with, trying to discover inconsistencies and mapping the results onto other weird branches of mathematics. Then it turned out that they were an extremely powerful, compact and useful way of representing 3-D movement, particular turning.  Where did we need to mobilise that insight?  First in space travel, controlling the yaw, pitch and roll of Gemini, Soyuz and Apollo with minimal expenditure of fuel.  Latterly, quaternions are key to being able to write code for computer graphics that is compact enough to execute in real time.  Without William Rowan Hamilton's insight 170 years ago there would be no Lara Croft, and the world would be a far duller place for 13 year old boys.

Beneath

Robert Macfarlane is the poet's perambulator.  He writes like An Old (although he's younger than The Boy) and is a regular contributor to Resurgence, the English alternative woo glossy magazine. I'm a bit pissed off with Resurgence since they refused to take my essay on the process of pilgrimage [Santiago etc. bloboprevs] in the 00s. They said that they had Santiagogo covered by an upcoming piece by one of their regulars. We had and still have a sub but no such article has appeared. I may have transferred some of my resentment to Macfarlane as a usual suspect quite likely to write about the process of pilgrimage; but I never really got into his books. 

Which is a shame because his writing really is my jam. Adjacent to Meg Lowman, the Sheldrakes, EO Wilson, Tim Richards. Indeed Macfarlane was the literary executor for his good friend Roger Deakin. And i'm pretty sure he was cited or referenced by Richard Nairn. I did finally read Macfarlane's The Old Ways [2012] and was entranced by his account of a voyage over the whale-road to the Shiants. 

My latest audiobook is Underland: a deep time journey [2019] by Robert Macfarlane.  It is read, effectively, by Roy McMillan although we could have done without the Norwegian accent. First time I've heard the tree pronounced as it is written rowan rather than roe-an. The audioPublishers Penguin have used the change in medium to add some very understated background sounds. I had to switch off at one stage because I heard a distant dog barking which turned out to be on the tape. 

At some point in the introduction Macfarlane says that Underland is the book which all his previous work has been pointing at and laying the foundations for. It's a compendium with a theme, like Tim Richards' Outposts. The theme being the world beneath. There is a [good] chapter on the wood wide web and the vital importance of fungi for the sharing of resources among the plants of the forest which is largely informed by the beautiful Merlin Sheldrake, a family friend.  But, having read Sheldrake's book, I know all that. 

What I knew less about was the labyrinth beneath the streets of Paris. The Ile de France is bedrocked with limestone which has been extensively quarried for building material. Only occasionally do the citizens fall into the abyss as a section of tunnel and gallery subsides under the weight of years. Such an incident starts off Parisians: an adventure history of Paris by Graham Robb. But really, Macfarlane's description of the extent and purpose of the tunnels is much better. Perhaps because it is informed by Macfarlane's actual adventures with tunnel rats beneath the streets of Paris. In one escapade he spent a week down below without seeing the sun; camping out on stone shelves and benches and attending wild parties in the sous-terraines. Pictures and history at SoloSophie [L]

otoh I knew nothing at all about the Boulby Underground Laboratory near the River Tees on the NE coast of England. The lab is down there because, among other ventures, they are clocking the appearance of neutrinos and evidence of Dark Matter far away from the electronic jangle of the above ground world. The UK scientific establishment couldn't have afforded to dig hundreds of feet down, let alone pay for the up-keep and infrastructure of such a facility. BUT they can piggy-back on a huge and largely invisible commercial enterprise to extract potash and other minerals from the deep. The visible surface commercial site at Boulby is big enough at 200 hectares but it services a network of tunnels over 8,400 hectares in area running back under the the North Yorkshire Moors and far out to sea. If these galleries are more than 1,000m below the surface they don't worry unduly about unplugging the sea above. It's hard to appreciate, after two million tonnes potash and halite have been extracted and brought to the surface, that none of this was here before 1968, when the first shaft was sunk. Chekkittout with the BBC [2m].

Macfarlane estimates that there are 30 million miles of man-made voids beneath the surface of the Earth: roads, railways, sewers, mines: enough to circle the globe 1000 times. 'tis a wonder folk don't fall through the surface more often. Good book, recommended.

Bangor to Bobbio

I've been circling round Teagasc, the agri-food semi-state institution, since it was An Foras Talúntais. Some of my best academic-adjacent friends have worked or are working there. But despite this leaven, Teagasc is generally conservative, complacent and dull. This long week (18th-25th August) is Heritage Week and Teagasc's Friday agri-zoom call went early with a talk: Discovering Heritage Through Old Routeways - Ireland's Pilgrim Paths by John G O'Dwyer (Chair of Pilgrim Paths Ireland) with promo by Ronan Healy (Project Manager National Heritage Week at the Heritage Council). With a redundancy typical of the feather-bedded Irish semi-states, it requires two Teagasc people to introduce these talks, one of whom is nail-bitingly poor at public speaking; did I say 'dull'?

This year there are 2,200 events comprehending a very broad definition of Heritage: walks, talks, bees, lighthouses, gardening, painting, baskets, céilí, science. Chekkitout? especially for kids?? they've made efforts to be inclusive.

John G has written The Book on Irish (hill) Walks, but more to the point he's written Pilgrim Paths in Ireland - A guide from Slieve Mish to Skellig Michael. He was also one of the main movers to establish St Declan's Way from Cashel to Ardmore which was officially opened in 2021 [Event tomo!]. Dau.II and I clocked the finger posts where the St.Dec crossed the N25 on the couple of pandemic trips we made to&from Cork. Here's a JGO'D mnemonic D.A.R.E.S. to suss pilgrimage:

• D iscovery, self-
• A ppreciation, for grace and favours from the almighty
• R emembering those gone before
• E scape from the press and stress
• S implify, simplify [Thoreauprev]
  

Oddly enough, in the question session on Friday, O'Dwyer professed to know nothing about Turas Columbanus despite the fact that the local-to-me part of that trek has finger posts all over Co Carlow.

"All over" because the route zig-zags back and forth across the county after it lurches away from the River Barrow at Borris or at Clashganny heading for Mt Leinster and Myshall before rejoining the River at Bagenalstown. We cross the Turas 3x getting to our nearest Aldi. This turns a lovely flat [kingfishers, dragonflies, swallows, otters, buzzards, fish] 12 km walk along the towpath of the Barrow navigation into 36 km of schlep along country roads shared with litter, boy-racers, tractors roaring past with trailers of livestock shitting themselves on the way to termination. There are no verges on much of this voyage, let along footpaths; so you must be prepared to plunge into nettles and briars or meet your maker plastered on a front bumper like an extra in Herzog's film about driving-while-txtn. Much as I deprecate sanitizing the Camino de Santiago by taking all the hard bits out; I can't approve of paying for and setting out a set of laminated pilgrim story-boards linked by finger-posts without contemplating how pilgrims are going to navigate with reasonable safety. 

Turas Columbanus follows the life story of St Colmán aka Columbanus starting at Bangor, Co Down and jinking hither and yon until it finishes in Bobbio between Milan and Genoa in N Italy. It takes in pretty much everywhere where legend has it that Columbanus laid his head or knelt at a tomb. Fermanagh, Cornwall, St Malo, St Coulomb [no surprises there?] Rouen, Luxeuil-les-Bains, Soissons, [Hildegard von] Bingen,Tours, Nantes, Schengen, Koblenz . . . all over.

When they / we do the Camino de Santiago, most pilgrims acquire their "credential" = passport at the start of their journey, and get it stampe at each refugio and hostel. Although there are many Camino to Santiago, they all finish at the City of God. In Ireland it's more of a free-for-all. Several Saints, several destinations. Presenting your credential at an office in Santiago gets you your Compostelle: a document asserting that you've walked at least 100 km in the right direction.  Ballintubber Abbey in Co. Mayo has taken up this bureaucratic mantel: taking €5 for a passport and €15 for your personalized Teastas Oilithreachta:

Whoa! and, like, Whoo-hoo. There's our own St Fursey hanging out with more famous saints like Patrick, Kevin, Brendan, and Finbarr. Maybe Ballintubber will up-date their docs to include St Declan of the Déise. At least we know where to walk in his footsteps. I cannot get any handle on a Camino Fursana, but hazard a guess that it involves Headford.

Time was that tourists came to Ireland for the fishing - they said in 1990 that every rod-caught salmon added £1,000 to the economy (B&B, pints, car-hire, dinner, céilí, souvenirs). But we sacrificed the salmon on the EU altar and shat in all the rivers, so that was the end of that. Folks like John G O'Dwyer are starry-eyed about the possibility of making up the deficit in the rural economy through pilgrimage. May the road rise to meet them!

Anti-pregabalin pilgrimage

Book Review

The Salt Path

Optional background: Don't Give Up 

Peter Gabriel & Paula Cole

Ray and Moth were /are like us, with similar off-centre aspirations: to find and run their own gaff and see what it was like to live a more immediate life: where the hens laid eggs just in time for the children's tea. They weren't interested in making sensible contributions to their pension as a hedge against an uncertain future in old age and infirmity. That's one way to progress; although reg'lar people wouldn't see much 'progress'.  Accumulating a fat pension pot usually goes with a high octane life-style: climbing the corporate ladder because the increments seemed necessary to support the stuff that you need to spend money on. Sometimes you can only get ahead by having the kit [suit, car, shoes, the right sunglasses] that shows you deserve it.

Anyway, Ray and Moth made their bed and lay in it and had two children and a small holding with sheep and chickens and a few paying-guests in the restored barn. It was hard work, living remote in Wales, but that's what they wanted. Somewhere along the way they invested some cash in a business venture of one of Moth's oldest friends. The business failed and the legal small-print said that Ray and Moth would, not only lose all the money they invested, but were jointly and severally liable for all the debts of failed company. After wasting a further three years of life and all their remaining money on lawyers; their home, their farm, their B&B business, everything was all repossessed by the Corporate Patriarchy and they were thrown out on the road with nothing but a peculiar tax-credit / windfall / pension of £48 /week.
That same week Moth was given a name - corticobasal degeneration CBD - to attach to a peculiar set of neurological conditions which had been dogging his active life. Imagine a toxic melange of motor neurone disease ALS, Parkinson's PD and multiple sclerosis MS. CBD, as the second word implies, gets worse as time goes on; the connexions between brain, nerves and muscles get progressively more wonk until sepsis or pneumonia finishes you off because the lungs can't clear themselves. It takes 7 ± 2 years from first presentation to final curtain. Ray and Moth go into denial, as you do when you get a terminal diagnosis. But also because it is now 6+ years since first symptoms and Moth is a long way from being dead.
Could it be something else? they ask.
I am the Consultant! the Consultant replies.
He can't be much more use because CBD is incurable but he give Moth a script for Lyrica / Pregabalin, which we have met before. Pregabalin, (and the alternate treatment for CBD Clonazepam) gives a boost to GABA γ-amino butyric acid, the most well known inhibitory neurotransmitter. But extra GABA will bring a truly frightening array of side-effects [full list] including tremors, vertigo, dry mouth, constipation, vomiting, flatulence, erectile dysfunction, fatigue, peripheral oedema, abnormal walking. That shows you some of the task list for GABA around the body - one of the great multitaskers. It also shows what a blunt instrument oral pharmaceuticals are.  It's like killing a woodlouse with a shot-gun: you may kill the woodlouse but there is a lot of collateral damage to innocent bystanders. On a human level, those symptoms don't give the best launch to a 1000km back-packing camping trip in SW England. But that's what Ray impulsively decides they must do, and soon. The next Summer, as soon as they gather their traps, they start off on the South West Coastal Path from Minehead to Poole and every tide in between:
Vertigo for the cliffs; flatulence and vomiting for inside the tent; oedema in the legs for the walking; erectile dysfunction & fatigue for their intimate relations; tremors for taking notes on the wildlife; and constipation for holding a really crap hand dealt by fate. Neither of them is young any more and their progress, certainly to begin with, is painfully slow and, well, painful. With limited resources [except in bottle!], they inch along the map in their SWCP guidebook. It is a long time between showers, and they would rather eat than use a laundrette because their money won't stretch to both.

It's an interest apolitical political book. It exposes government delusions about the state of homelessness in England: wilfully undercounting those who cannot afford to put a roof over their heads in post-Thatcher Britain. This selective blindness allows The Man and the comfortable middle-classes to believe that all homeless people are druggies and alkies whom nobody can help. Several times in the book it is made clear that dogs especially my dogs are privileged over dispossessed people. More worryingly othering the homeless allows a yobbier, younger jugend to urinate on people curled up in shop doorways because they are untermensch. The standard reaction to homeless people is to shrink away from them or give them a sandwich - because money would only go towards the next bottle of Thunderbird [BBC's take]. My research reveals SocksAndChocs which supplies that sort of thing to the homeless. As Peter McVerry explained to us two years ago, the very best thing you can do for The Down is to recognise them: eye-contact, a greeting, a comment on the weather . . . like you'd do for the bus-driver or the check-out lady. There are people who refuse water - which falls from the skies, after all - to Ray and Moth when asked for it. It won't surprise you to hear that Moth is in the habit of giving his last few coins to someone who patently needs it more than he does.
Q. How do water-refusniks sleep at night?
A. Just fine because their cold-sore is much more distressing than His stigmata.
The Salt Path was a Sunday Times bestseller: you may hope that people come for the escapism of this week's travel book and stay to look at their own reactions to those insufficiently fortunate to be able to buy a £7 book. Indeed the cost of the book is almost exactly the same as Ray and Moth had budgetted each day for ALL their needs. I reflect often on the fact that I am comfortable, sitting on my own sofa in a reasonably warm, dry house simply from the accident of being born in the 1950s. We could buy a home in England in 1986 for £21,000 when my annual salary was £16,000 = ratio 1.3x. 30 years later Dau.II is looking at a home/income ratio of about 15x. It is iniquitous!

The other arresting sub-plot in the Salt Road is that Moth and Ray realise that they've left his spare vial of Pregabalin meds on the garage floor by mistake when packing their bare essential kit. Without the  medicine which the consultant is sure is the only thing between Moth and perdition, Moth begins to make a miraculous recovery. From being barely able to walk and in constant pain, he limbers up and recovers his libido enough to have some beachy bouncy bouncy with a delighted Ray. They surmise that it must be the oxygen as well as allowing his neurotransmitter to return to a more potent equilibrium.

On the very last day of their walk, a positive encounter with a random stranger lands them a place to live within commuting distance of Plymouth where the miraculously revitalised Moth has enrolled for college. In that flat Ray knuckles down to write her book which is its own small miracle. Those of us who have been transformed by pilgrimage are not richer or more sucessful but have shed a few certainties - and probably a few kilos - along the way. Ray gets to appreciate that Home is a state of mind more than a roof of slate.

Here's a fair-enough executive summary of The Salt Road and its back-story. Penguin's inner view with Raynor Winn.

Santiago

I wrote earlier about decluttering my life into a rucksack in 2004 and perambulating through Spain. The implication was that I had engaged in a trek like Eric Newby's insouciantly stiff-upper-lipped "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush".  
"I found that the blood filling my boots from the many blisters and leaking from the lace-holes was rather a good thing because it kept the flies from my face" 
It wasn't all like that, although there were blisters. Through a combination of accident and constraint, we (The Boy and I walked the 120km from Valenca/Tui on the Rio Minho together) arrived in Santiago de Compostella on this very day 9 years ago.  I know and remember because it was/is the Feast of St James the Great, Dia de Santiago. Although I was emphatically not full of Chaucerian

 "Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes"

it would be disingenuous to maintain that we knew nothing of such matters when we set out from England immediately after my sister's wedding.  There was the most almighty party in the square next to the Cathedral on 25/Jul/04 not least because 2004 was a Jubilee Year when The Day falls on a Sunday.  Those things clearly make a difference to people because

you can can see that those years find especially favour for travelling to Santiago. (The Compostella is the certificate you get from The Church for walking at least 100km to arrive in Santiago.)  Otherwise it looks like a classic exponential curve with a doubling time of about 6 years.  At this rate, by 2063, the entire 80m population of Germany (the second most common country of origin after Spain) will be turning up in Galicia looking for god, a good time or themselves.  In most examples of (quasi-)religious practice in the West - Mass, Singing Workshops, Meditation Circles, Yoga - women outnumber men by a considerable margin but on the Camino  the sex-ratio is consistently 55M:45F.

The next day, 26/Jul/04, we set off for Fisterra/Finisterre/the End of the World and had the immensely satisfying experience of watching the sun setting into the Western sea while downing a cold beer and imagining what watching the sunset must have been like for pilgrims in 1300 CE when there was no New York, no Barbados and no Samba.  Heck, the Azores weren't there either, not being officially discovered by Cabral until 1431.

A couple of days after that The Boy continued up the coast looking for places to surf and I resolutely turned East for France.  If I was expecting a quiet and contemplative walk such as I had experienced walking alone up the coast of Portugal 15 years earlier, I was quickly disabused.  I was travelling back along the Camino Frances, the pilgrim motorway and I was met by, and had to weave and jink my way through, a tide of humanity.

70% of the pilgrims who arrive at Santiago have come along the Camino Frances, and as I reached the Pyrennes in the beginning of September, I met and saluted pretty much everyone who arrived in Santiago in August (N=46000) and September (N=23000).  That's (23000+46000)*70% = 50,000 times  bom dia, buen camino, bonjour, G'day, Gruß, Que tal?, dia duit.   The last greeting reminds me that St. James's Gate, Dublin, where Guinness and StJs Hospital are, is where Irish pilgrims gathered to set off together before Ryanair made it all too easy to goon on pilgrimages.

Nobody met as many different people that summer as I did unless they too were walking contrario, and I met two of them as well.  That's a lot of data and when I finally arrived in France I wrote the whole thing down as "An analysis of the process of pilgrimage".  Nahh, I wasn't such a pretentious git as to call my essay that, but I did write it all down.

I've written before about the Open University (OU), the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and the Jack and Jill Foundation (J&JF); extolling them for nurturing heroism.  We need heroes.  The Camino de Santiago is many things to many people.  The pilgrims can't all be binned as "sincere catholics" or "woo-wah tree-huggers", and atheists are welcome.  But one thing the Camino engenders is kindness.   In a month, I had 50,000 opportunities to share (and it cut both ways) blackberries and water; a smile and a song; a solicitous word; a helping hand on a steep path; a safety pin; a shoulder to weep on; a bowl of pasta and a glass of tinto.  We need heroes, sure, but we can't have enough of kindness.

Rockie Cake

Part of my adoptive US family (4) have moved back to Colorado. They (there are six in my generation) all grew up in Michigan but liked to acknowledge that, in the 19thC, they came from the same Townland as we now reside. I rendered them, particularly their Mère, a trifling kindness 20+ years ago and they've been visiting ever since. It's nice to know that me and mine can find a cup of tea and a sandwich in several widely scattered locations across the contiguous 48 states. Anyway, Coz Tom and his 3 generation family are back in the Rockies and their youngest member had a birthday at the end of July. As is my wont, I facetiously sent them a picture of an extravagantly decorated cake in lieu of an actual card.  Tom replied "Thanks again for thinking of us and wish you were able to bring that cake in person. Looks delicious!"

That tumbled me down the rabbit hole of memory to baking Betty Crocker cakes in Boston 40+ years ago. I did so make from-scratch cakes also but baking cakes straight from a packet - just add water and 1 egg - was/is part of the American Dream. One of the intriguing / evocative aspects of reading the packet was special hoops that people from Denver had to jump through lest their cakes failed to rise and/or experienced a soggy middle. Denver is affectionately known as The Mile High City because it is 1,600m above sea-level.

Because air pressure is lower, cakes tend to be fizzier, boiling temperatures are lower and liquids evaporate faster, and you shouldn't follow the standard recipe. The scientists at Betty Crocker give some hints about what to do above 3,500 ft = a tad over 1,000 m. The atmospheric issues require some of:

• less fat
• more flour
• more water
• more time

But the exact details are probably too much for the average recipe-following cook to work out for themselves - and why re-invent the wheel? 

But here's the thing, I went for a yomp up our hill (1500m horizontal; 300m vertical) for reasons with 3 other people, two of which were struggling [1 sinus; 1 smoking] for wind. I'm good for that but the ould knees are less resilient than they used to be for the downhill. Just getting to that elevation (500m) let alone Ireland's highest mountain Carrauntoohill (1040m) requires exertion. Our effort occurred on Dia do Santiago a date notable for aspects of pilgrimage and at least one member of the party crossed themselves discretely for/at/to the Blessed Virgin: perhaps in gratitude for not pegging out on the way. Meanwhile Coz Tom and his family are cruising to the Mall (and adjusting their cakes) without a bother at 1,500 m.

Silver apples

William Butler Yeats, the poet, was born in Sandymount, Dublin 4, 150 years ago today: 13th June 1865. He died in the South of France in January 1939 as the world was tipping inexorably into WWII. He'd discussed the possibility of an exile's death with his wife and asked to be buried in the cemetery on the hill above the hotel.  Accordingly he was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.  Nearly ten years later a rattle of bones was bundled into a box and transported with pomp and circumstance back to Ireland aboard the Irish Naval Service ship the LÉ Macha.  There is some doubt as to whether there is any piece of Yeats, let alone his whole skeleton, lies beneath the gravestone to which poetry people, including my younger self, go on pilgrimage in Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo. The epitaph:

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

Could as easily be written:

Move along please

Nothing to see here

Doesn't even smell of Yeats.

There is plenty of ammunition if you want to show that the great poet [Nobel Prize for Literature 1923, so he must might be good] had feet of clay.  But you cannot reliably claim that he had a surgical implant of 'monkey glands' to assausage his anxieties about impotence. That's wrong wrong almost right, in that he underwent a vasectomy in 1934 under the mistaken impression that recycling his sacred spermatozoa would cause more testosterone to course through his aged frame as if he was in his 20s again having the hots for the symmetrical Maud Gonne. She famously and repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly rejected his proposals of marriage, and had relationships in and out of marriage with several other men which has a sense of anyone but Willie about it. Yeats seepily started proposing to Maud's daughter Iseult as soon as she was old enough as if mother and daughter were interchangable in his rather two-dimensional view of women. It's certainly ludicrous to write off Maud Gonne as a mere poet's muse as she was clearly a person in her own right with decided and revolutionary views about the status of women.

Gonne, Gonne, gonad is about all most people know or care about Yeats, who has been a penance to generations of Irish school-children in the same way as Camões is forced upon their counterparts in Portugal. But if we look too hard at the foibles and failings of poets and only rate those who passed muster as to financial probity, sexual conduct, attitude to drink and/or consideration for others; why then we'd have a very short reading list.  It would be reduced to a handful of young people who died of TB before they could get up to any mischief . . . and the quintessentially nice Seamus Heaney.  Anyway, WB Yeats: it's his day today and I have to acknowledge that his earlier easier poems played a big part in my life and love when I was young and foolish.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Грілка Зеленського

Julian Barnes, English littérateur with an affinity for La Belle France, was short-listed for the 1984 Booker Prize with Flaubert's Parrot. I might have read it at the time, because it's a bit off-kilter and "post-modern". But I can't really remember the story of one man's obsession with the stuffed parrot(s) which may have sat on Gustav Flaubert's desk. Something set me to thinking about other left-field object-person associations: like Captain Danjou's artificial hand.

Грілка Зеленського [Hrilka Zelensʹkoho] = Zelenskyy's hot-water bottle might be a contemporary example. €4 hot-water bottles were on special in LIDL at the beginning of December. Dang! that was effectively two weeks too late because I'd already made my annual November pilgrimage to McCauley's pharmacy to buy a tuthree of their fleece-covered bed-warmers. For several years they were €5: less a 15% Black Friday discount if you're there on the right day. In 2022 they'd gone up to €6! and this year they're asking €7. I bought some anyway because they don't last forever: as a family we've had a few injuries sustained from water bottle failures.

We were passing through Waterford to put Dau.II on the train back to Dublin after a couple of days of driving lessons. She asked to stop in LIDL to see if they had more of their €4 hot-water bottles, they were sold out in Smithfield. And that's how I was persuaded to buy an olive drab hot-water bottle - not my first choice; my only choice. My McCauley hotties tend to shocking pink or polka dot. 

You can maybe see where this is going? We all know that 

• it's Winter in Kyiv and even more Baltic than, like, the Baltic
• there's disruption in the fuel supply
• President Zelenskyy eschews suits and power-ties, preferring olive drab T-shirts which don't show the dirt

I may be over-empathizing but I can imagine him sitting in the Pres Palace when the central heating is fritzed again. If only I had a Грілка he might muse. Although he has a sense of humour, hugging a pink polka dot hot-water bottle might be a bridge too far in the propaganda war. A LIDL olive drab number might supply some discrete core-body warmth.

You are at liberty to imagine Julian Barnes' grand-daughter writing a post-apocalypse memoir about her search for the authentic hot-water bottle with which Zelenskyy saw Ukraine to victory. Lionel Messi's world cup soccer shirts sell for $1 million each.

Master class

Sir Thomas Beecham once said "In this life try everything once, except morris-dancing and incest". I was never particularly interested in the latter, but I've given a lot of things a try including morris-dancing, bookbinding, genome analysis and sailing. Not all of these ventures have been happy but each has put me alongside true experts at their craft and that has been truly amazing. Over the last couple of years abloggin', I have had some things to say about singing together, on pilgrimage, in competition, and in community. I guess I am now an interested amateur.

Back about 30 years when I was living and studenting in Greater Boston, I was induced to go to masterclass for trainee opera singers by my friend P.  She was a bit of an aficionado and had a sister who was in the process of turning into a professional voice.  Back then it was not the sort of thing I'd usually walk to the far end of the BU campus for, let alone spend two hours largely out of my depth in a sea of song. The event had been arranged because some big star of the opera world was in town and had offered to hear and critique some of the students. I suspect that many of them were not destined for a career in grand opera but were, in the can-do way of performers, prepared to give Puccini a whirl if it meant getting some really good feedback from a pro. The process generated its own compulsion and it was all quite wonderful listening to a succession of young people giving socks to this or that aria.  One particularly large and resonant young chap was stopped in the midst of his blast and asked if he had any idea of the meaning of the Italian that he was singing.  He sheepishly confessed that he'd meant to look up the translation but in the rush of rehearsal for his big chance, he'd let that detail slip.  The expert, being expert at her craft, and despite being American, was not only deeply knowledgeable about the repertoire but also had acquired a sufficient fluency in Italian, French, and German.  She suggested that he shouldn't sound so jolly about the tragic events he was singing about . . . and could he give it another go with that in mind.  The devil is in the detail and the difference between someone who sings for joy and someone who earns money at it lies in working really hard at getting the colour, the timbre, the pace, the raw emotion into and on top of the correct notes.

This dim and distant memory flooded back a few days ago when, after some restless rabbit-holing down the interweb, I found clips I, II on youtube of the real Stephen Sondheim helping two young voice students of London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama to sing his iconic song Send in the Clowns. Two ordinary young women are encouraged to find the true meaning within the music which is a huge ask because they are about 30 years too young for the part. It is nevertheless an extraordinary meeting of minds as student and teacher discuss the multiple dimensions of song and how the written lyrics can be turned upside down by changing the tempo of a phrase - hey, that could be a definition of irony of which I am something of a devotee. Sondheim is completely involved in the scene: perched on his stool attentive, rapt even, with his head cocked like a bird to better hear the music. It's also rather wonderful how respectful the Great Man is of these young women and their native talent - while knowing that it could just be a little improved thus and so. Send in the Clowns has been covered by everyone from Catherine "symmetrical but hammy" Zeta-Jones to Frank "wrong sex" Sinatra but you can't see it better done than by Judi Dench who is the right age having, like Desirée her character, been round the block a few times.

Should be banned

What will seem grotesque unbelievable bizarre and unprecedented about today's Ireland from the standpoint of 2039 or 2069? Apart from eating meat or sporting a load of bling? I'm on record as wanting to ban boxing as a spectator sport because it's degrading to watch two people punching each other in the face for entertainment or money. Yes, yes, there are other sports where participants are likely to sustain contact sport encephalopathy but I'm okay with those because the violence and brain damage are incidental to the sport not its entire reason for existence. I don't think we should wrap up youngsters in a risk-free environment - putting yourself Out There is deeply ingrained in our culture if not in our genes. 200+ people have offed themselves by taking dopey selfies since 2011.  It's possibly good for the gene pool in a Darwin Awards sense. But even with boxing, there's a element of informed consent so long as adults are the participants in the ring. On a my rights end where your nose begins basis what adults do in the privacy of their gym is none of my business. My gripe is that grossly unfit people can sit down and watch organised fights, sink a few drinks and put on bets. For shame!

There was a big flap after the airing on RTE last Wednesday of a documentary about dog racing. If you're not squeamish, you can watch the whole of Greyhounds Running For Their Lives. [I'm squeamish].  A number of politicians got up in the Dáil to say how they were against that sort of thing.  Even if they hadn't seen the complete programme. The main complaint about greyhound racing in Ireland seems to be that dogs have rather large litters (compared to, say, humanity and horses) and that at replacement level there are a lot of young dogs which are surplus to requirements in a business that needs only the fastest dogs. I guess that dog breeders are using experience, good judgement and good luck to put 'good' dogs together in the hope of a 'better' pup. Some people in the greyhound trade are casual about what happens to the surplus 'empty mouths' that their breeding programmes and selection regimes will inevitably produce. The TV programme is presumably editted to portray some examples where casual bleeds into cruel. A couple of years ago greyhound racing was banned in some parts of Australia at least partly because of undercover TV footage showing 'live baiting' . Live baiting is when greyhounds are trained to run faster after a squealing piglet suspended by one leg and whizzed around a track. The best that can be said of the human participants in that clip is that they have blunted affect. Life would be a lot simpler, and much kinder, if dog racing was banned.

Segue to donkeys Equus asinus in Ethiopia where we were recently picking teff out of our teeth. Donkeys are essential to the rural (and important to urban) economics in Ethiopia like they were in Ireland 70 years ago. They do all the haulage and owning one is the first step out of abject poverty. Nevertheless, they are, in Ethiopia, to both Christians and Muslims, emphatically unclean. Imperial China had a cunning plan to convert old, dying and dead donkeys into skins and meat and money . . . but it all unravelled. 10 minutes of Rare Earth explains all.

We've moved on from donks in Ireland, they are small and retro. Now we have a peculiar vicarious love affair with thoroughbred horses. More people go on pilgrimage to Cheltenham for the race meeting in March than walk the Camino de Santiago. Now me, I don't personally do sports: since the age of 14, I've only participated in team sports as a form of piss-take. But I do recognise sport's value: it gets people outside, running about aerobically, shedding some kilos, working cooperatively, treating The Other fairly (mostly). Horse racing is not a sport in this sense: indeed it is in many ways the antithesis of sport - the only exercise most 'participants' get is moving the binoculars to see who is closing out the horse on which they've wasted a €10 bet. I say 'wasted' because everyone except the bookmakers are nett losers in any form of gambling. If you want to make a case that, through insider trading and other corrupt practices, some people are making money betting on horses, then I'd listen with attention because it seems likely. £4.5 million is riding on the winners of the ~28 races, there must be a temptation to square some of the jockeys. But the prize money is but a tiny fraction - maybe 1% - of the money which changes hands during the 3 or 4 days of the Festival.

All good fun, you may say. A flutter on the nags; drinks all round if you back a winner; a nice lunch; a lavish dinner; hanging out; memories and war stories. In 2019, however, 3 horses died at Cheltenham; down from 6 the year before and !11! in 2006. Less fun for the nags, who are a long way from informed consent about being put through their paces as part of a raree show. Sir Erec died of a broken leg in 2019 and two other horses were "put down" after "sustaining injuries".  The picture [R] shows Wigmore Hall being done to death 'humanely' and behind a screen after breaking a leg at Doncaster in 2014. Why are race-horse owners allowed to discard their horses when they are beyond the possibility of winning races? We don't do that to retired people anymore. The case can be made that horses are particularly incapable of living through the trauma of a broken leg. And come to think of it we get all tut-tutty about the games in Ancient Rome when there was often a holocaust of animals for the amusement of patricians and plebs. You can make the case that deaths in the Colosseum were integral to the games but peripheral to Cheltenham races. I'm with you on that, and have made a parallel case w.r.t. boxing vs rugger at the start of this piece. But if something like 500 horses run at Cheltenham [and they do] and 1% of them die each year [and they do] then death at the races becomes almost inevitable and therefore integral. Not really that much different from boxing and also shameful.

I am not alone in noting the carnage. At least 1,000 horses were killed on US racetracks in 2018. Our grand-daughters will scratch their heads in wonderment that a civilised society was so casual with the lives of other mammals in the course of entertainment.