Boot News (spoiler alert: it's not good)

Happy Feet

So, yesterday I went for a short walk with a friend; three miles or so. We walked at a very leisurely pace and then went for a coffee. My brand new boots have been giving me an increasing amount of pain in my right ankle - that bony bit that sticks out. Ever the optimist (?) I was quite convinced that sooner or later we'd reach that blessed moment when the boots were 'broken in'. It hasn't happened. As my friend and I were sitting with our coffees my ankle became more and more painful and when I got up to walk again I was hobbling horribly. Something was getting broken but it wasn't my boots.

Limping home I felt fairly despondent. If I carried on wearing these boots there was a good chance that I'd properly hurt my ankle and then instead of spending February striding manfully across Ireland and Scotland (no sniggering at the back please), I'd spend the month on the sofa watching daytime TV.

That was when I had my epiphany. My old boots felt fine to walk in and I wouldn't like to guess how many miles I've done in them over the past sixteen years or more. They're a second skin. The only slight problem with them was that they were rather more porous than you'd like walking boots to be, but surely that wasn't an insurmountable flaw?

Waterproof socks!!! Ordered them yesterday. They're arriving today. I feel like singing. What could go wrong?

Over the next few days I'm going to post a few reflections on the themes I want to explore on this journey I'm going to make, inspired by the life of St Columba: exile, penitence and pilgrimage. I could write them in a detached way and pretend that they're just elements of Columba's life that seem interesting. That would be dishonest. They're themes I want to reflect on and pray about because I feel that they can give me some helpful frameworks to look at what my life has been like over the past few years, what I have learnt and how I can grow. Some of what I write is likely to be quite personal. If that's something you'd feel uncomfortable with then it might be best to skip them and wait until the pilgrimage starts two weeks today; then all the blogs will be about the beautiful landscape, the horrible weather, which bits of me are hurting, and just how much I enjoyed my evening in whatever pub I happened to be staying in the night before.

Two weeks today!