What You're Thinking.

I know what you're thinking. The fortnight of walking in Cornwall is over, the month of walking in Scotland is yet to begin, so for these two weeks he's going to be lying in bed until mid-morning, and then lolling about on the sofa in his pyjamas watching 'Cash in the Attic' and other treasures of daytime tv.

Oh ye of little faith.

I’m going to try to keep a bit of discipline to the shape of my days by following a moderately monastic pattern – prayer, labour and study. The prayer will be shaped by the Cuddesdon Office Book and the rosary, both of which sustained me in Cornwall. The labour? Well, you just have to look at the garden, and there’s a bedroom that needs redecorating. The study, consists of a pile of books on Scottish history in the first millennium, folk tales from the Highlands, and Alexander Carmichael’s ‘Carmina Gadelica’, more of which anon.

Having said all that, yesterday was taken up with an assault on the pile of dirty washing which had begun to crawl out of my rucksack, a trip in to town to make my Confession, and then 'Avatar' at the cinema with Susie in the evening; so here's hoping I'm more faithful to my 'monastic pattern' today.

The Bends.

Cornwall came up trumps and gave me everything I was hoping for – a wide selection of weathers, a broad selection of terrains, and a fine selection of real ales. Unfortunately I did manage to pick up a nasty large blister on my right heel, but I guess if I keep you informed about every blister I pick up over the next couple of months, this blog could become extraordinarily repetitive, so we’ll just stick a Compeed on it and limp away from the subject.

Susie came to meet me at Paddington Station on Saturday afternoon, and brought me home to a gin and tonic and the most wonderful homemade lasagne; this greatly helped to ease my return to the busy city, and prevent a bad case of the spiritual ‘bends’.

Never mind seeking to emulate the Celtic Saints during this Sabbatical, I could do worse than just trying to become a little bit more like my wife (except when it comes to hats).

Weather Whoopee.

Well, on Tuesday I got what I wanted. Weather.
The weatherman on the Today programme that morning forecast that a warm front was going to collide with a cold front, more or less on top of St Agnes. He was wrong. I was there. What happened was that a wet front hooked up with a windy front, and together they started making weather whoopee. With the rain coming at me more or less horizontally, I enjoyed an eighteen mile round trip to Porth-somewhere or other. Everywhere here is Porth-something, and the rain made it hard to read the 'Welcome to... Please drive carefully' sign outside the village.
Thanks to the rain, I also made a great discovery. If you put your gaiters (yes, them again) on the right way round, and hook them over your laces, then your feet will stay nice and dry, even in the foulest weather. If you're not bright enough to figure that out for yourself, and put them on back to front, then instead they channel the water more or less straight into your footware, and you will be unhappy. We won't talk about gaiters anymore.
Today and tomorrow I'm walking with my full pack, so it's slightly slower going than before, but not as slow as it was when Susie was here at the weekend. She has developed a deeply odd obsession with the memorial dedications on benches, and there are a lot of benches in Cornwall. Of course, before too long this led to her reflecting on her other favourite obsession - my mortality. She wanted to know where I'd like a bench placed in memory of me, as and when, of course... any suggestions?
And lastly, my big toenails are preparing to say farewell to my big toes, again. When I first walked the West Highland Way, I managed to bash my big toes up quite a bit on the leg from Balmaha to The Drovers Inn, and the toenails have never quite recovered from the shock of being so violently uprooted: every now and then they start to change a rather pleasant plum colour, before going on to toenail glory - it doesn't feel very pleasant though. There's a lot of 'up and downage' on the coastal path, and with each step down, as my foot moves forward marginally in my boot, my bruised toes complain.
Better let them start complaining again - fifteen miles today, twenty miles tomorrow, and back to London on Saturday, but I won't be walking that bit.

www.dec.org.uk

Clunking Lumps.

January 11th - internet cafe, Perranporth:

Apologies to those of you who have been checking this blog on an hourly basis, eagerly expecting words of wisdom. My hope had been that I’d be able to post on this site every couple of days, but unfortunately it turns out that my laptop is unwilling to connect to the internet. As a result, I’m afraid these posts are going to come out in clunking great lumps, rather like my sentences.
On the bright side, it did take two visits to the Driftwood Spars, and several pints of their own brew, to establish that my efforts were futile.

PS How do you load CD software on to one of those little netbooks with no CD drive? If we can figure that out, then maybe I need to pop down to Comet when I get home.

St Agnes, Cornwall.

5th January:
Everything works. Today I took a ten mile walk to Perranporth and back and everything worked. My waterproofs kept me dry in a couple of downpours, including a brief snow flurry. My thermal base layer was, if anything, a little too effective. My GPS knew where I was and where I had to go, and was reasonably good at guessing how long it would take me. My waterproof camera survived a modest soaking.
The only problem I had was with my gaiters. I’ve never worn gaiters before, nor been entirely clear about what they actually do. Although gaiters don’t look like complicated things, watching me trying to put mine on would have been like watching a monkey in boxing gloves trying to peel a banana - in fact make that a drunk monkey in boxing gloves trying to peel a banana that had been smothered in lard. At one point I nearly phoned the Archdeacon for advice, but decided that his hilarity was more than I could bear.
My pride took a further dent about a mile out of St Agnes, on the coastal path, when I slipped on some ice and fell flat on my back. It wouldn’t have been too bad, but there was a dog walker about fifty yards away, coming towards me; although I scrambled to my feet pretty niftily, and strode on purposively, he neglected to do the ‘British thing’ and instead felt moved to make mention of my misfortune. It was a cruel blow coming so close on the heels of the gaiter fiasco.
It grieves me to report that in St Agnes, if you want to get wi fi access you have to go to a pub. Not only that, but they expect you to make purchases while you’re there. So later this evening, with solemn step, I’ll drag myself down to the hostelry, just so that I can put these witterings on-line.
For now, it’s bath time with Athanasius’s ‘The Life of Antony’ – ironic really, as I don’t suppose Antony of Egypt, or any of the other Desert Fathers, were great fans of bath time.

Trying to get to Paddington.

4th January:
Leaving took longer than it should have done. I managed to keep finding ‘one more thing’ I needed to do, one more e-mail to send, one more bit of paper to put in a folder, one more phone call to make. Over the past few months I’d tried to make sure that I was ‘preparing the parish’ for my sabbatical, and kind of assumed that planning for my pilgrimage was all the preparation I needed; so, it surprised me to catch myself delaying my own departure. It felt odd on Sunday morning too, to realise that I probably wouldn’t be presiding at the Eucharist until Holy Week. I didn’t anticipate finding it difficult to go away, which is probably why it’s such a good idea to go away from time to time.
The rucksack is going to be an issue. I packed it pretty much as I plan to pack it for Scotland. It’s heavy. And bulky. Heavier and bulkier than I think I can manage for over 300 miles. Dad is driving back-up for the first half of the walk, and I know he would be happy to take my rucksack in the car, but for me that would mean demotion from the Championship to League One of the walking world.
It’s sad, it’s silly, but I do have a league structure for walkers. In the Premiership are those walkers who hike and camp – they walk long distances, carrying huge packs with sleeping bags, tents, food, stoves, everything. That’s not me – when it comes to camping, I’m more Alan Carr than Bear Grylls. In the Championship, my favoured league, are those walkers who are going from B&B to B&B, but at least they’re carrying all their stuff with them. League One – walking with your sandwiches, while a taxi takes your bags between overnight stops. It’s a stupid way of looking at the world, but I’m a man, so that’s only to be expected.

Resentment and Despair

I was in the first year of my curacy at St Mary’s, Hendon. My training Vicar announced that after Easter we were going away for a long weekend with some of his friends. I felt a sharp sense of resentment at this unexpected piece of news; for parish clergy, Sundays ‘off’ are rare treasures to be spent with care, and here was the Vicar snatching one away from me. Thankfully my feeling of resentment was short-lived. Sadly its short life was swallowed up by a deep sense of despair.

Apparently our long weekend was to be spent somewhere in Yorkshire, doing something called the Lyke Wake Walk. The Vicar assured me that this would be fun, it would be something I would enjoy. I was fairly clear in my own mind that a forty mile walk across the North York Moors would be neither fun nor enjoyable, but the ease with which I capitulate to authority figures is pathetic.

As it turned out I did find completing the walk tremendously satisfying, so much so that I came to look forward to our post-Easter hikes. Walking was changing me. A couple of years ago the Vicar and I did the West Highland Way. The following year I walked it again, with my Uncle Jimmy. Then we walked the Kintyre Way.

Increasingly though I wanted to walk my ‘own’ walk, and that’s part of the reason for my pilgrimage from Iona to Lindisfarne - to find my own way.

The Vicar is an Archdeacon now. That’s the honour the Church of England bestows upon those of its clerics blessed with the ability to persuade the rest of us to do things we really don’t want to.