A month from today, perhaps.

A month from today I begin a pilgrimage.

That’s not quite right.

A month from today I begin three pilgrimages.

On Easter Monday I drive up to Scotland with my wife, Susie, and our children, James and Barnaby. The next day I begin a ‘little pilgrimage’, as I carry some of my Mum’s ashes from her birthplace in Bishopbriggs, to Carrick Castle, where she used to enjoy childhood holidays: just a few years ago we had enjoyed a big family celebration of her seventieth birthday there. Last October, Mum died.

After a bit of travel jiggery-pokery, on the Saturday of that week we’ll materialise on Lindisfarne and then the four of us will walk six miles to Fenwick. This will be the start of my ‘big pilgrimage’; a walk between those two great holy islands of Lindisfarne and Iona.

And the third pilgrimage is perhaps the biggest of all. Later in the summer we’ll be leaving Edmonton and the four of us will be travelling to Berkhamsted, where I’ll take up the position of Rector of St Peter’s. That will be several journeys in one. I’ve been living in North London for twenty years. Susie has lived here for almost her whole life. The boys have never lived anywhere else. It will be an exciting new beginning for us; but like most new beginnings, there will be some painful farewells to navigate first.

I have no doubt that somehow those three pilgrimages might be interwoven. Hopefully four weeks of walking will help me to figure out how.

That’s not quite right.

Hopefully four weeks of walking will help me to begin to see the weave.

At dinner last night Susie started talking about the coronavirus. At first I thought that this was  just a general chat, but then I realized that in fact we were talking about my pilgrimage, and whether it would be possible for me to go at all.

In an instant I felt slightly aggrieved: I had to make this journey, there would be no other time, what risk could there be in me walking across remote parts of Scotland?

A heartbeat later I felt ashamed of my instinctive self-centredness.