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.

The Reluctant Pilgrim

I've written rather a lot about Santiago and the Camino that bustles its loads of travellers up to the door of the Cathedral in the centre of Santiago de Compostella. The Way is not a single road in the physical world because Latvians and Londoners all finish up in Santiago, or flake out in the attempt, and they can't all leave from the same front door. It's not a single route into the soul either because it takes each person in a different way. I use 'takes' here in the sense of leaves you gasping even if, and perhaps particularly if, you had no intention of being taken (in) by anybody or anything.  From what I saw in my own long walk through Spain, some, maybe many, people go there, do that and take the plane home and and ask themselves what the fuss is all about.  It's like the few occasions when I've tried a little meditation in the Buddhist tradition - I know that I was, despite the external zazen appearance, a long long way from Nirvana.

Last night I went to the monthly meeting of the Barony of Gaultier Historical Society to hear Damien Mclellan talk about "A Sense of Place and the routes to Santiago de Compostella". My pal Russ, who turned out to be the projectionist for the perf, had alerted me. Mclellan lives in the middle of the Barony of Gaultier which was the civil division of East County Waterford until folks started tricking about with the old boundaries. If you have a tourney of history buffs who live in that area, what better name? Mclellan is a long-distance walker who had knocked off all the interesting paths in the WEA, and still had the use of his legs. About 15 years ago he decided for a change to try a Grande Randonnée GR route through La Belle France. For reasons not clear, he plunked for GR65 which ambles from Le Puy in the middle of France WSW towards Galicia via the Pyrenees. He was a Long Distance Hiker who looked with great suspicion at the conspicuous piety of Les Pèlerins Français who were sharing the track. Then one night he found himself, out of sorts with himself and in some desperation, at the door of a pilgrims' hostel long after he'd normally have been in bed. He was greeted by two total strangers with such bluff good humour and unassuming kindness that he was almost convinced by their assurances that he too was a pilgrim.  "You are walking, you are on the way to Santiago, therefore you are a pilgrim, hein?".  It took a little longer than that, a couple more extraordinary openings in the curtain, a few strange, deep, anonymous conversations and he began to believe that, if he was still a skeptic, on at least one occasion the warm hand of the Apostle had helped him through a brutal and frightening section of the lonely road.

Being a local boy, Mclellan has convinced himself that the village of Ballyhack, at the top of Waterford Harbour where the car ferry shuttles back and forth, was the premier jumping off point for Irish pilgrims heading for Spain in the middle ages. He's now padding about the byways of SE Ireland looking at maps and overgrown pathways, standing stones and ruined chapels, trying to piece together a route that hasn't seen mass transport of more than 400 years. Too many chapels along the road north to Dublin and the Irish midlands are named after Naomh Seamus for it to be a coincidence, he reckons.  And if his theories bear fruit? Would there be a call for re-opening such routes in these troubled and restless times. And would the development turn out to be grossly insensitive and commercialised like much of the metalled Camino Frances between the Pyrenees and Galicia? We took a walk along a section of McClennan's proposed route in June - it was indeed mystic. wonderful, and the damselflies were positively gaudy.

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!

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!

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.

Dammed!

In 1989, fed up and plot-lost after six years working in an English University, I left academia and went for a long walk. I was tolerably fluent in Portuguese having taken lessons in order to push forward some field work in the Portuguese Atlantic Islands: Açores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. That decided where to walk (the mainland; not round and round a dot in the middle of the ocean; and Brazil was too far and too big) and my hopelessness with maps suggested that walking up the coast would take care of the navigation: if I veered left I would get wet feet. Accordingly, I took an overnight train London Newhaven Dieppe Paris and another to Lisboa via Hendaye.fr and Irún.es. While in the Portuguese capital, I went to the Instituto Geographico e Cadastral, the equivalent of our Ordnance Survey, and bought a set of 1:100,000 maps to cover the coast from Sagres in the bottom left-hand corner to where the Rio Minho marks the Spanish border 700km further North. The maps were 16 in number, weighed 750g, and when folded were the size of two fattish paperback books. That was about 10% of my pack-load, so must have seemed important. The next day I caught another train to Lagos in the Algarve, then a bus to Sagres and set off North on foot. Sometime in the middle of the morning on that first day, I realised that I had left my roll of maps on the train the evening before and debated briefly about whether I would plough on regardless on the left = wet-foot protocol.  But as I had already gotten lost twice in the chaparral trying to find the Atlantic coast, I stopped at the next village and caught the bus back to Lagos, retrieved my maps (phew!) from the station-master, and set off again.

It was lonely but it was lovely to have the world opening wide before me as I ploughed deeper into the dusty countryside. It didn't rain at all for the first week although it was late September, but on the seventh day the heavens opened and I slopped into Porto Covo de Bandeira with everything soaked except my precious maps. I had to decide that night whether to hug strictly to the coast and plod through the town of Sines - famous for its oil-refinery and the largest artificial container port in Portugal - or cut inland heading for Santiago do Cacém - which had a castle famous from the days of the Reconquista. It was a gorgeous morning next day and I headed inland trying to make out which of the maze of dotted lines on the map represented the upland track I was pacing along. Mid-morning, like a character in a folk-song, I met with a shepherd and asked if I was on the right road for Santiago and pointed at my map.  He said that I shouldn't try that road because that road had been flooded when they built the dam:

Albufeira da Baragem de Morgavel intended route = red dots

The most recent available map for this section of the route had been printed in 1970 and presumably surveyed at least 20 years ago. There had been a bit of development in the interim. The shepherd advised me to walk along the top of the dam rather than trying to negotiate the upper reaches of the albufeira (reservoir) to the East.  I took his advice and puttered across the dam and then through forests of cork oaks Quercus suber and past little farmsteads. I was completely lost, the map was on too small a scale to be useful, but I asked my way when I saw anyone and meandered along in a vaguely Northerly direction. Eventually I was spat out of a woodland onto the main road about 5km short of Santiago and after being buffeted by speeding container trucks for a while, stuck out my thumb and hitched into town. I spent three days in Santiago, nursing my blisters, and was more or less adopted by the patrão of Cafe Ribatejano who rented me a room for 700$^oo a night which was about £3 in old money.  I've been meaning to go back for the last 25 years, but I know I'll be disappointed.

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".

Hail to the chieftain

Paddy Maloney [R with Zuckerberg haircut], founder of The Chieftains and Claddagh Records gone die on Monday in the fullness of his years. The Chieftains put Irish Trad on the world stage not least by listening to music from outside Ireland and riffing on that. Let's just listen:

• Irish Classical - a medley of three tunes by Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1738)
• who died 20 years before Amadeus "Planxty" Mozart was born.
• Santiago: homage to Galicia
• La Virgen de Guadalupe with Linda Ronstadt
• Santiago de Cuba the other Santiago with Ry Cooder
• With Ry Cooder on the borderline remembering the Brigada San Patricio who fought for Mexico
• Across another border with James Galway
• They did some film music - Braveheart
• Coast of Malabar
• Lakes of Pontchartrain with Paul Brady
• Raglan Road with Van the Man

O Dia de Santiago

2021 is a Jacobean Year when St James's Day falls on a Sunday. It's an especially big deal for pilgrims and there will be a slightly more extravagant party than last year in Santiago de Compostella tonight. The last time I was there was 25th July 2004, another Jacobean Year, when I arrived with bloody socks and The Boy. We'd walked [following the flechas amarelas R]from the Portuguese border in four days. After the 2004 party, I trekked another 780km to the French border blowing off waist-lard in a cloud of carbon dioxide. I apologise for the consequent sea-level rise. But when the road finishes, the camino continues.

• Sing it?
• Cantiago by Cecilia Samartin
• Camino Song by Suzi and Mario
• Somewhere Along the Way by Dan Mullins
• Ultreïa
• Ditto with nuns, drums and chorus
• There is life after Santiago:
• Tally Ho: fair exchange and graciousness.
• The Irish Economy explained. Lovely drone footage.
• AirTags track your parcel
• Foil, Arms and Vaxx explainer
• Leave Her Johnny vocal coach crit
• Bo Burnham Welcome to the Internet
• Waymo autonomous cars

Spirit of Place

Que vengan los peregrinos! Not everyone who walks to Canterbury, or Rome, or Jerusalem is a believer. But such pilgrims are likely to be changed by [getting off the sofa, leaving the daily and] going. It's a bit like people with an OU degree: it's often worth biding a while to talk with those who've been there, done that. My book about Santiago and the process of pilgrimage remains [ahem!] unpublished. As they say, though: "When the walking stops, the Camino continues".

Over the last tuthree years, I've been sitting on my sofa watching two men, once-and-future-pilgrims, getting physical with, and making their mark upon, the unforgiving terroir of a mountain in Piedmont. It turns out to be quite close to the Franco-Italian borrrder, where we were graciously - miraculously - sustained with Found Soup in 1978. 

• Martijn Doolaard is a graphic designer and film-maker from Amsterdam with two Long-distance bike trips [A'dam-Singapore; Vancouver - Patagonia] behind him. [TMI about his prev life]
• Fr. Johannes Schwarz is a diocesan Catholic priest from Austria. He walked from home to Santiago as a chap in 1998, then from home to Jerusalem - and back. Fr.J. also has a photographer's eye so, as well as chasuble and pyx, he toted a GoPro along The Way.

These two men washed up on different sides of an inaccessible mountain in the Italian Alps. Both chose to restore tumble-down stone buildings clinging to the side of the mountainside by their finger-nails. Both decided to document the process of transformation [internal, external] in the medium in their tool-kit. Both have established successful YouTube channels by doing stuff the hard way. Both were helped to YT-click-fame by the attention of Kirsten Dirksen who takes a film-crew to aspirant sustainability steaders and asks them to explain themselves: Johannes [05 Dec 2021] and Martijn [01 Nov 2021].

I have a couple of things to say about The Hard Way - informed by 25 years experience of chopping water and hauling wood. We spent the month of July 1996 camping out on our newly acquired property: with hand-tools, two wheel-barrows and a sack-truck. It was fine, we were putting manners on the place while finding trades-folks to do the skilled work. Doran-the-Well lived at the other end of the townland and he came to see how close he could get his drill-rig to the house. Which was not close enough: because the original farm-gate required too tight a turn for his mobile derrick to get in the yard. But, his BiL was Nolan-the-Digger [bloboprev] and he could surely open up that ditch . . . next Saturday, maybe? Not only could the digger move rocks impossible to shift with hand-tools; it also moved a lorra regular dirt and could scart off the bushes from the top of a ditch with a single comprehensive sweep. I didn't stop using a wheel-barrow but I did thereafter book a day from The Digger when heavy lifting was required.

Me and Johannes agree on the virtues {warms you thrice} of reducing firewood to billets and stacking them by hand. Chain saws are so bloody noisy you can't work away while listening to an ear-book. But, it's a good idea to leave felled timber at the cutting site [under rain-cover] for a few breezy months before moving the logs to the firewood processing place nearer the house. Wood gets lighter as the water blows off. Martijn does this, Johannes apparently not. Likewise no sane person will carry building stone up-hill if there's a choice but it's got to be possible to use gravity to help stones downhill that doesn't involve having gravity destroy your knees [as above R].

And further to the picture: building drystone walls is a doddle if the geochemistry generates parallel flat sides as above. If you have a choice don't settle in granite country, the stones are irregular, lumpy and too hard to shape with a hammer-tock or two. Ask me how I know!?

Vernacular architecture inhabits a known place and can build on [lit and fig] the lived experience of those who sojourn there. Johannes' gaff faces South and is tucked into the hill. So, like our place, the snow and frost burns away soon after the sun comes up. And he can see the prevailing wind thrashing the trees on the other side of the valley but not feel it. Martijn's place is, rather, exposed to the weather which can be darkly destructive [L tumbled solar panels] so high on the ridge. And, for him, the sun rises later and sets earlier so the snow lingers for days or weeks longer. Yet, these two steadings are only 1 km apart.

Like the underlying geology, the local micro-climate may make or break your rural dream homestead. Johannes is very conscious about microclimate for growing plants at the very edge of their ecological tolerance. Man, does he relish late season tomatoes and salad!

But I'm here to recommend Johannes' sub-channel One Year in the Life of a Part Time Hermit where he runs through 2023 with a 45m episode of every month. Usual fly-on-wall view of projects and general chopping wood, heaving rocks and weeding the veg-beds: gorgeous film of weather, sunsets, birbs and butterflies; minimal voice-over; informative on-screen notes [check the bot tight corner of screen for ID]. He had, or had at one point, left three holes [one shown R] in the render of the sunny side of his hermitage - so that the resident common wall lizards Podarcis muralis could bunk down at night. The Cave of St George for the teeny dragon!

But, as he warns in the short intro to the series, the last ten minutes of each video is a thoughtful under-stated ramble on religion, philosophy, history, science and the meaning of life. Here's part of what he has to say in May: So let me make this clear. I'm not a guru. I'm not a spiritual master. I'm not a person to aspire to meet or even talk to. You don't need me. You don't need to discern any secrets in my life or take me as an example. I am fundamentally like you – a man, a fallible man, a human. If you find any of the propositions in these videos helpful; if anything that is said rings true – or at least, if any of the questions do, it is not because I'm a source of wisdom. Jan - Feb - then you're on yer ownio. He's been putting them out at the rate of one episode a week since New Year.

Winds of fortune

Take you 5 mins to read this carefully. Why not have Carl Orff's O Fortuna in the background?
I've written about luck as proactive serendipity before. my mother caught some and so did The Beloved. All those citations affirm that getting lucky is an active process. You can't win the Lotto without buying a ticket, for starters. But you have to work a little harder than push €2 across the counter in the Lotto-shop.  Sort of: you also have to work less hard; to relax and be open to The New. You surely need to get off your sofa and out and about, though. The New is not to be seen on your ceiling at home unless you've had a delivery of mushrooms.

I've long ago given up on TED which I find elitist, self-regarding and complacent . . . and Not New. Nevertheless I found myself watching Tina Seelig talking about the Winds of Luck. Never heard of her!? She won the 2009 Gordon Prize for pioneering, continually developing, and tirelessly disseminating technology entrepreneurship education at Stanford where she teaches creativity. Her metaphor is that you have to haul up some sails to catch the wind; that you have to tinker about trimming the sails to go better forward; and when sailing you can't be super rigid about the destination.

In her TED talk Seelig told the story of getting What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 published. It was a long time a-coming and could have been dropped at any of several stages but for a timely push from La Fortuna and being in the right place to accept the shove. Ya gotta go the journey. Exec summary/review of WIWIKWIWXX here. Looking for a review of that best-seller I found another take on the question in Forbes by Frances Bridges who-she?  Here's another woman's right-place, right-time tale from Seelig's blog.

Seelig advice:
“Planning a career should be like traveling in a foreign country. Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and a place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned. You might end up meeting a fascinating person who shows you places that aren’t in the guidebook, or you might miss your train and end up spending the day exploring a small town you hadn’t planned to visit.”
Blubon's comment: one of the great outcomes of my decade of research into cat population genetics is that it got me to places I would never have normally been: The Azores; Brattleboro, VT; Bilthoven; Cabo Verde. But on a different scale, even when I was at the regular stops on Grand Tour - Paris, Amsterdam, Roma, Lisboa - I wasn't at the Rijksmuseum or Notre Dame, I was fossicking around in the back-alleys of residential neighbourhhods meeting ordinary people. Ordinary, low-key, magic.

"The well-worn path is there for everyone to trample. But the interesting things often occur when you are open to taking an unexpected turn, to trying something different, and when you are willing to question the rules others have made for you. All agreed that it is easy to stay on the prescribed path, but it is often much more interesting to discover the world of surprises lurking just around the corner"
Blubon's comment: on my Camino walking away from Santiago, the most interesting people were those who cross the path at right angles. Or those who were prepared to stop and chat. Getting to Santiago is not the point; it's about shuffling towards the City of God.

Footnote: "Blubon" is a humble hat's off to Mumon (1183-1260) who wrote the commentary on The Gateless Gate a collection of Zen koans which make you not-think:
Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: "The flag is moving."
The other said: "The wind is moving."
The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."
Ah So!

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?

Kasane

Kasane 重ね "heap" is the name of a girl who has a walk-on part in the drama of Matsuo Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North. 奥の細道 Oku no Hosomichi. This is perhaps the best, most evocative and most allusive travel book ever written about Japan. The fact that it was written in about 1692 means that you can pare away the facade (trains, tickets, iPhones, luggage) of travel and concentrate on the timeless truth about going places. If you want a more recent version of travelling through Japanese territory you may, with advantage, check out Peter Fleming's One's Company.

In Bashō's day, of course, the vast majority of people never travelled more than a few km from their rice-paddies.  In Ireland as well: it wasn't that Japanese peasants were notable home-bodies; and no, I realise that there are few rice-paddies in Ireland. Louis Agassiz famously gave up the jangle of travel to focus on the microcosmos of his back-yard. He was a Swiss-American biologist and correspondent of Charles Darwin’s.  At the end of his life he was director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. When the Faculty reassembled one fall, a colleague met Agassiz in the mail-room and asked if he had had a good summer. “Wonderful”, replied the great man, “I worked my way half-way across my back yard”.  For him clearly work – tracking beetles through the grass – and pleasure were one-and-the-same.

But travel does broaden the mind . . . if you let it.  If you spend the whole time eating chips and yakking on your mobile phone just like you do at home, then you won't get anything from the trip. You can, after all, buy a postcard of the Госуда́рственный Эрмита́ж or the art-work within without ever having to go to Petrograd.

Bashō was born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644. He was a poet to his marrow and is known as the first master of haiku: the hip 5-7-5 syllable verse form that is much imitated by Westerners.  Indeed he is the author of the most translated haiku of them all:

古池や furu ike ya

蛙飛こむ kawazu tobikomu
水のおと mizu no oto

An ancient pond / a frog jumps in / ploosh!  Or as BP Nichol rendered it with a minimal spareness:

Ah So!

He changed his name to Bashō  because some of his disciples set him up in the unfashionable part of the city of Edo (now Tokyo) with his own hut in which to think deep thoughts and a banana tree Musa basjoo to inspire them. As it says on the tin (basjoo) the name of this inedible relative of our bananas and plantains in Japanese is Bashō.  He loved his tree and left detailed instructions about how to care for it when he was away.

On 16th May 1689 he left his sparse but comfortable billet and set off for The Interior or The Deep North: a region in the North of Honshū perceived by the sophisticates from Edo as being Bandit Country.  He was accompanied part of the way by a young chap called Kawai Sora, whose diary is less poetic and vague than Bashō's masterpiece and so we are able to trace their journey with some accuracy from village to mountain to shrine. You can do a Footsteps of The Master holiday with all your accommodation pre-booked and an informative guide to make sure you don't miss anything significant. Which probably means that you miss any chance of finding something significant in yourself or about the country you traverse.  I've paid my dues to St Peregrine the Traveller, and I came back a different, much thinner, man.  The Camino de Santiago has its own antient text called the Codex Calixtinus, now believed to have been compiled in the C12th by a Frenchman called Aymeric Picaud although possibly commissioned  by Pope (1119-1124) Callixtinus II.  The most interesting bit for modern trekkers is Liber V Iter pro peregrinis ad Compostellam. The guide for pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella. It is full of sensible advice about where not to stop, what food to avoid and where the best relics are. Almost all the places mentioned are recognisable, often with the same name, 800 years later

The Narrow Road to the Deep North takes the form of prose notes of events and encounters on the journey, peppered with enigmatic verses.  The poetry makes a little more sense with the notes to put things into context. As an example of how freely you can translate to squeeze meaning from Japanese, check out 9 versions of the first section.  At one stage, Bashō sees a horse grazing idly beside the path and asks the farmer if he can borrow it for a while. The farmer takes pity on the weary and disorientated traveller and tells him that the horse knows the way across the blasted heath to the next town and will come back of its own accord when Bashō is finished with it. As the poet leaves, a couple of small children run after the horse and one of them confides that her name is Kasane (meaning layer, pile or heap) which Bashō says sounds pretty but is a funny name for a girl. It reminds him, however, of Dianthus superbus var. longicalycinus (R) the Fringed Pink, and so his muse (or maybe his companion Soba's) comes up with

かさねとは   Kasane to wa

八重撫子の   yae-nadeshiko no

名成べし   na naru beshi

Double layer to your name

pretty as a 

double-flowered pink.

There's something beautiful and sad in this preservation of the memory of a long-dead girl. But Bashō's anecdote captures the ideal of those pretty, sassy, vivacious young girls that we've all of us known. Excuse me while I shed a hiraeth tear <sniff> for the pair of small-small daughters who were once the sunshine of our home . . . and grew up into such fine young women:

our pint of Guinness:

the older African dark

her sister's blonde head

42 days on the trot

The Appalachian Trail AT starts in northern Georgia and wends along the spine of the mountains that separated colonial America from the Wilderness until it finishes in the middle of Maine on Mt Katahdin. It is about 2,200miles/3500km long and travels through 14 states but it's not the distance it's the climb that sorts those who can from those who sofa: 515,000 feet or 160km! of altitude change.  You have to climb the equivalent of 18 Mt Everests . . . from sea-level not from the foothills in Nepal. It's not quite the same - no altitude sickness because the highest point on the trail is only a tad over 2,000m high: not much higher than Denver.  All this means that the AT is like the Camino de Santiago, of which I did a stretch, but on steroids.  It serves much the same purpose for many of its inhabitants - getting lost to find yourself; shedding some kilos and some quotidian anxiety; filling your boots with blood; seeing a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.  It attracts all sorts but particularly gap-year youngsters and change of life [empty-nest; cancer survivor; divorced; widowed; replaced by a chip] people 30ish years older.

On the Camino Frances , the pilgrim motorway, in Spain there is one section across the corn-fields of Castile where it is >!shock!< 12km between cafes. You don't come across an ominous sign like [R] which says that you're on your own resources for 160km and where the bail-out escape routes are probably more arduous than continuing forward. Nevertheless every year a number of people aspire to be thru-hikers and complete the whole trail in a single season, usually starting at break-of-Spring in Georgia and following the seasons North. You are advised to allocate between 5 and 7 months to the task. By contrast, six weeks will see you from the French border to Santiago. Three quarters of those who start off the AT full of heroic intentions fall by the wayside.

There's an interesting thing happening on the AT even as we blog.  Scott Jurek, the ultramarathoneer, is running the trail hoping to beat the scarcely credible record of 46.5 days set by Jennifer Pharr in 2011.  He was out of camera but definitely present when I was writing about the free-runners of the Tarahumara in N Mexico.  He's run in the footsteps of Φειδιππίδη Pheidippides from Athens to Sparta in the now annual Spartathlon: that's a non-stop run of 250km which Jurek has won three times on the trot '06, '07. '08 finishing in about 23 hours. He's now 41 and reckons that this is his last chance at a really long endurance challenge. He started from Georgia on 26 May 2015 but early on he banjaxed his knee coming downhill too heavy and tore a quad (the muscles on the front of your thigh) trying to compensate.  Solution? Walk . . . a mere 50+ km for a couple of days . . . and then pick up pace again.  He's been catching up his gruelling self-imposed schedule since and as he leaves New Hampshire to enter the final state he is on time. It requires an average of 80km 50miles each and every day. You can catch him being interviewed on the hoof round about day 33.  And if you wake up in the middle of the night screaming "Where's Scott?" then you can find updates here on Runner's World.  He should be arriving on 7th July 2015, this coming Tuesday.  If any bears wanted to eat him, they've missed their chance.

As an old pilgrimage hand, I have been known to get snitty about people treating the Camino as a race, even a race against time.  If you're always looking at your watch, you're not watching the world. But I think that, like the Tarahumara, Scott Jurek was born to run and it's almost as if he can do no other. I'm not the one to wish holding him back.

If you want a slower paced long-form read about another sort of Appalachian Trail adventure, check out Jim Hammes aka Bismarck.

My stuff and clutter

I was out in the back-shed looking for more flour (it's where we keep the shot-gun and baked beans in anticipation of Armageddon), and noticed that we have 100 used egg-boxes (I counted, must _ have _ data), and I'm sure we have at least 100 empty jam-jars waiting for the raspberry harvest..  That's any aspirations I might have towards 100thingchallenge blown!  So I don't really have a stable platform from which to be barracking people who have tried to get closer to a simpler lifestyle even if their 100thing list reads like the contents of a Louis Vuitton over-night bag. 

There have, however, been two periods in my life when I lived with much less than 100 things.

 In 1989, I retired from working-in-science-for-money and took a 700km stroll along the Atlantic coast of Portugal.  15 years later, in 2004, I retired again, took up almost where I left off and walked from the Rio Minho to Santiago de Compostella, turned sharp right and headed for France.  That was about 800km.  Clearly the key idea here is retire early and retire often.

Inventory July August September 2004 

1 hat -- 1 pr boots -- 1 35lt rucksack --1 pr flipflops --1 300g towel --1 pr trousers --1 pr shorts --2 pr underpants --1 T shirt --3 pr socks --2 shirts --1 waterproof coat -- 1 sleeping bag --1 tin whistle --1 pencil -- 1 journal --1 spoon --1 knife --3 pens --1 glasses --1 shades --1 Spanish dictionary --1 Portuguese ditto --1 tin mug --1 sliver of soap --2 packs Compeed plasters --50ml alcohol --Sunblock --1 toothbrush --1 toothpaste --1 razor --1 alarm clock --1 hussif (needle&thread, 6 safety-pins, 5m of parachute-cord) -- 1 12g mini-torch -- passport -- driving licence -- wallet.

Compeed plasters are meant to prevent the development of blisters, but I never used mine after I was told that they were as likely to lift the whole area off as stick it down.  I lanced my blisters with a needle and swabbed 'em in alcohol, me hearties.  My 50ml bottle of alcohol leaked over my journal early on (dang-and-blast!) and I never re-filled it.  I threw away the razor and grew a beard.  I stopped using sun-block and rolled down my sleeves in the middle of the day.  I didn't have a cell-phone and I left my camera at home thinking it was better to live the experience rather than record it.

I've rarely felt more alive than at those times. On the second 2004 leg, I shed 12 of my then 85kg in six weeks.  Which was great because dicen que, for a sustained and sustainable trek, your rucksack should not weigh more than 10% of your body-weight.

When I was about half-way between Santiago and France, I met a young Dutchman; he was dressed in lycra and had only a small bum-bag containing a purse, a shower-proof poncho and a spare pair of knickers. Apart from that he was toting a kilo of muesli, a bottle of water and a cow's pelvis, which he'd picked up the a Pyrenean  meadow and brought along for the ride. Now that's travelling light!

Honey I'm un homme

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

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

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

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

We slept [more or less this route in reverse]

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

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

Ewe woo

John Connell [prev] is getting traction as spokesman for the Irish countryside, although the competition Manchán Magan [prev] has landed his own TV series. And don't dismiss Kerri ní Dochartaigh [prev] just because of the missing Y-chromosome. It is certainly possible to speak {to | of | for | from} The Land as a wordsmith [Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud; Yeats having nine bean rows]. And shite happens in the countryside that is nothing to do with farm yard manure. But of the three living spokesppl cited above, only Connell has had his hand regularly up a sheep's vagina and we should therefore listen to him on that facet of rural life.

We were up in Dublin recently and Dau.I the Librarian pushed John Connell's 2024 Twelve Sheep life lessons from a lambing season at me because a) I'd read a couple of his earlier books b) I count a similar number of sheep every day c) we'd both trudged to Santiago at some time in the past. The conceit here is that young(ish) John buys 12 hoggets [equivalent to a heifer; a female sheep up until her first lamb delivery] from his farmer father, and tracks them through twelve chapters sort of based on the agricultural year. Or at least on the 5 months of sheep gestation. 

Early on, Connell floats the idea that the has-to-be-twelve chapters could be based on, or informed by: the zodiac [one of which is ♈︎Aries?] or the Labors of Hercules [mucking out the Augean stables?] or the Lives of the Apostles [good shepherds all?]. But (correct me if I've missed a trick) he lacks the discipline to chunk his anecdotes by these constraints. Joyce's Ulysses is a classic because he did follow through: holding the Odyssey up to mirror one inconsequential day in the life of Dublin.  

Whatever the initial aspiration of structure, the book gets flubby soon enough with too many rambling thoughts unrelated to caring for sheep and delivering lambs. The Sheep Game it is not. In current public discourse, there is a lot of Nobel Hubris about and not only among winners of The Prize. N.H. occurs when, because you've got the gong, people will listen to what you have to say about any damn bee you might have a-buzzzing in your bonnet. Connell has an ingrained expertise in scratching a living from The Land - and nobody claims farming is either lucrative or easy. But when it comes to philosophy (how we can live our best lives) he is no wiser or more competent than you or me. Been to Santiago [✓] doesn't count: I know . . . that I don't know.

There could be another story in there: a bildungsroman about the growth and development of the lambs Connell Jnr as he battles mental health and the patriarch[y] to discover his true self but that theme is very much noises off. And may have been resolved in Connell's earlier books.

A lot of the usual suspects get a mention because something they've said has been written in Connell's writer's notebook . . . and that'll do to pad out this book. Because despite 176 dead-tree pages and £12.99 rrp the generous margins, nice colophons [as above L] and 1.5pt spacing, makes Twelve Sheep only 36,000 words long. 

Influencers in Connell's journey include: John Clare; Rachel Carson; Henry Thoreau; Henri Nouwen; John O'Donohue; Hermann Hesse; Heinrich Harrer; Martin Heidegger; Erich Hartmann; the Dahlia Lama; the Buddha; Narcisse Blood; John McGahern; Thomas Merton; Father Sean, Bruce Chatwin; Erling Kagge; Thích Nhất Hạnh; Fran Contreras; Paolo Coelho; Saint Francis;  Fergus Kelly; E.M. Forster; David Malouf; Carlo Rovelli; Michael Kelly; Rover Thomas; Raven; Maria Gonzales; Wendell Berry; Nicholas Shakespeare; John Bergman; Karen Emslie; Robert Hughes; Don Watson; Adrian Stimson; Bruce Pascoe; Chief Joseph; Alex Haley; August Schenck; Padriag Colum; Pauline Matarasso; Yukio Mishima; Sam Shepard. They are all given parity of esteem word-count with an unnamed Longford neighbour who claims to cure strawberry orf [contagious pustular dermatitis; a bit like a viral impetigo] by muttering prayers down the phone. Life lessons for the reader? I don't think so.