I'm not supposed to be here.

I’m not supposed to be here.

Yesterday I was supposed to begin a three month period of study leave. I’d been planning it for a year or so. At the heart of the Sabbatical I was going to make a three week pilgrimage from Lindisfarne to Iona – the Pilgrim’s Cairn 2010 revisited, revised and reversed. GPS routes had been plotted, accommodation booked, and I’d treated myself to a new waterproof camera, just in case.

An extra week’s walk was added to the pilgrimage after my Mum died last October. On Easter Monday I’d drive to Scotland with my wife Susie, and my sons James (8) and Barnaby (6); on Easter Tuesday we’d start a three day walk, carrying some of Mum’s ashes from Bishopbriggs, where she was born, to Carrick Castle, where she used to enjoy holidays as a child, and where we’d had a big family celebration of her seventieth birthday a few years ago. The week would end with the four of us travelling to Lindisfarne, and walking the first day of my pilgrimage as a family. When the walking was over and I was back in London I’d spend time writing up the pilgrimage, doing more Dad-ing, and maybe find a short photography course or something.

Those were the plans.

But then something called coronavirus started inching its way into our consciousness, headline by headline, country by country, stalking closer, relentless, unstoppable. When it arrived in our lives it felt both predictable and shocking.

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be four hundred miles away. I’m supposed to be taking Mum back home.

Set against the losses that so many people are experiencing at this time, in so many different ways, my deprivation is infinitesimally small and inconsequential, but it’s a loss still.

The Sabbatical aborted, I was left with this blog of a non-pilgrimage. What was I going to do about This Pilgrim’s Cairn?

Well, I’m going to write something and see what happens. I keep trying to work out some sort of clever link between walking across the Scottish countryside, and all these days when I go no further than the end of my North London back garden; the clever link has escaped me.

That said, there are perhaps some parallels between this lockdown life and a time of pilgrimage. We are all on a journey at this time, a journey across unfamiliar landscapes. We are on all on a journey which is going to change us, change us in ways we can guess at, and change us in ways which we cannot begin to imagine. And we’re on a journey which is making us ask deep questions about what we really value, what gives life its ordinary vibrancy and commonplace wonder, and how we could live differently in the time to come, ‘after it’s all over’. That’s not too different from making a pilgrimage.

Running in Pymmes Park yesterday morning, I found myself wondering when I’d next shake hands with someone. Then I began to wonder if shaking hands will end up like smoking; there will be a few diehards who stick at it, but for most people it becomes a slightly embarrassing memory from a distant and very different past.