My Funny Valentine.

Day 11: Bishopbriggs to Bothwell.

Distance: 18.5 miles (193.6 total).

Duration: 7 hrs 43 mins.

Lowest Temp: 4ºc.

Weather: Like my socks, mostly damp with wet patches.

Highest Alt: 260 ft

Yesterday's rest day with my Lovely Aunt and Elderly Uncle was very welcome indeed. Going to bed on Friday night, knowing that I could sleep in and there were no long miles ahead of me the next day was great. Susie and I had a quiet lazy day together, marred only by events at The Millennium Stadium.

The Archdeacon went off with my Elderly Uncle to see Motherwell play Hamilton. They were accompanied by my friend the Hooligan Pensioner, who brightened up everybody's day by trying to smuggle some whisky into the stadium and being collared by the polis (a Gaelic word for 'member of the constabulary').

Today we walked straight into Glasgow, picking up the Clyde at Glasgow Green and then more or less following it all the way out to Bothwell. Around Glasgow Green the Clyde is beautiful, and enjoyed by lots of walkers, cyclists, rowers, and joggers. As we walked along though, I found myself feeling quite shocked at the amount of litter everywhere. This isn't to suggest that Glasgow is more litter-strewn than any other major city, just that I've been in such gorgeous unspoiled countryside up to now, that the sight of so much debris was quite depressing. It feels hard to believe that the bare black trees lining the river, shrouded in the shreds of a million corner shop carrier bags, could ever bear anything as fresh and lovely as a leaf.

I wanted to go back to Iona, to Mull, to Loch Melfort or to Conic Hill. I wanted to get out of the city and the great wake of filth we trail behind us wherever we congregate together in great masses. But as a London priest, it's a city that I’m privileged to serve in, and it’s in cities that most people have to live, which for all their joys and glories, also have their noise, and their dirt, and their anonymity, and their loneliness, and moments of violence and acres of poverty. If the best I can come up with at the end of this sabbatical is 'it's nice in the countryside', then this will have been three utterly wasted months. As my friend, The Provost, put it: 'The question you have to be working out is, how do you take Iona back to Edmonton.'

It's a question which the wonderful Donald Meek also poses in his excellent book 'The Quest for Celtic Christianity': 'Modern 'Celtic Christianity', in fact, appears to be directed towards the religiously inclined and 'concerned' middle classes who have money to buy books and participate in 'retreats', and the time and the resources to go on pilgrimages and 'drop out' of the contemporary rat-race. It does not seem to have much to say to the practical challenges of planting churches in present-day housing estates, or to confronting contemporary drug culture and larger moral issues.'

Anyway, Susie's still with me, it's Valentine's Day, and there are probably other things I should be doing.

PS Thank you so much to all of you who joined in my pilgrimage this weekend. I’ve loved reading your posts, and am truly grateful for your company, your wisdom and your humour. Together we make this pilgrim’s cairn.