memoirs

1.)

Over ten years ago (2012) something fairly logical collapsed into a crumpled mess and was disordered beyond mere brown paper and vinegar to reassemble. As it lay in that whirlpool plunge pool jacuzzi it starred up into the crystal ether, with those distant points of light glaring back and suddenly the gravity was so smothering, saping the slight bit of reason that was being torn off layer by layer and thrown against the fleeting clouds, sprinting against the vaster emptiness, with those urgent focal points of distant blinking seeming to ask the question: Why?

And the answer was it didn't know. Why... The question was good but it wasn't something ever really considered before in the neverending, ceaseless struggle, it was winding up, tighter and tighter, as an over wound mechanism squeezing the final fragments of sanity out of the coil, like the final blood pouring from the cut neck of the slaughtered swine into the bucket of coagulating sterility of the floating pig it had become...

***

It's time I looked at what I've become from where I was? Such a long time ago and so foreign from the me now. None of the atoms in my body were present back then so I shouldn't be surprised that nothing from then makes any sense to me now? But knowing what I am seeking now, and now knowing that it is all I ever really wanted in reality (a feeling of wholeness) how did I go through 40 plus years without me coming apart earlier?

Perhaps those layers were just getting fewer and fewer, and less and less substantial - flimsy and easily torn; old and wearing thin on the underside as well as on the visible side; ready to split and allow everything held in pour out like a ruptured dam against a torrent of storm waters...

***

I am thinking about the things which have saved my life because it wasn't looking that way in that maelstrom back then, but I am still here at 52. And I've got to start composing the story of how el Camino stopped me running under the first moving object or disappearing out of the first high rise parking lot into open space, plunging head first into oblivion.

Suddenly a way led me forward, like a plodding donkey, out of the dense fog simply because there is another way to being tied up and only going around in circles; a road to nowhere. And now I know I do have the faintest idea that I am on the correct path even though I am still mostly blinded by the mists lurking and covering up the reasons why (except in moments of absolute clarity which occur momentarily coming out of the mists?)

***

Now I almost always wake up around five in the morning. It used to be six. When I was much younger it was at the crack of dawn: my mother tells me. Then in childhood, adolescence, puberty and young adulthood it was when the alarm clock buzzed.

What put me on this path might just be age? Or it might be the way I've cut back how long I stay up at night - turning away from 'Our' digital selves? But I feel it has something to do with the repeated arising on el Camino at pre-dawn - ten years etc of being woken by those around me who have an alarm set for a time before the sun rises, so as to be on the way around then.

Indeed now I love to be a-walking prior to that Beings appearance, as it pours joy into an empty vessel over the lip of the horizon. Packing away the few things which really matter, getting a morning cup of Joe and walking into a Camino yawn and stretch. Tying up laces, putting layers either on or off. Strapping the backpack. Stepping into a whole new day of Camino experiences.

Up on the allotment yesterday morning Jack, one of the two guys who back onto my allotment and share the one down the path slightly, said it's six weeks before anything should be in the ground. They've a lot of knowledge between them. Richard's father was a farmer (it's in his genes) and Jack is a groundsman at Wetherby horseracing course, but a carpenter in his previous role.

In six weeks it's Easter weekend. Six weeks gives winter the option of leaving the room, but six weeks also puts a huge elephant, standing with small lampshade on its head, occasionally letting out trumpeting noises which fool no one with their suggestive intents? What am I going to do for six weeks... Literally 42 days... Oh no not that number! 42 has been the number on the door of our family home since it was bought back in 1989, and where mother remains and considers having a porch built.

Last week I returned to England on Ash Wednesday. Tomorrow I see it is exactly 42 days. Easter Sunday. The resurrection. The return of the dead to life. Rebirth and renewal: Spring springs. There is more daylight than nighttime.

Palm Sunday last year I was in 'Paddy's Wigwam' in Liverpool where I was given a palm cross, which I still see in the pot lined up with various utensils - knives, whisks, wooden spoons, skewers and the palm cross and It's just as important.

As I look at it, and it reminds me of the two journeys I took in the UK back then, I am happy for its presence. Chester to Corwen along the Dee Valley Way in early May and then a long weekend of fun and frivolity, but also discovery, early April in Liverpool 2023 - up to the mammoth tobacco factory and back.

Not pilgrimages - but with things holy about them as I set out to find sources of pure water.

Like the one trickling in the cemetery of the Anglican Cathedral designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. But when I asked whether there was a well under the cathedral at Chester I was told there wasn't one (and I was surprised)... Where I discovered that the water treatment plant sits near the river and the Romans had had an aquaduct running from there to the centre of the castrum so they didn't need any water source in their centre (and I was satisfied)... And in Liverpool I drank plenty of the other kind of holy water... Ha ha.

***

The Camino is always there. It's always waiting for my body and mind to fit into the space which it moves to accommodate like a pleasing fluid, and has the potential to liberate and sooth the chained and callused self, with a valuable balm before I come away from it's warm embrace and return to the grind. 

***

In too much rain do earth worms drown?

***

Returning from Sevilla on Wednesday morning has given me four days to re-adjust to the Yorkshire grind.

As I walk down to the Caffé Nero on the corner of Albion Street and Boar Lane - the one I've regularly frequented since I lived on Whitehall Waterfront when I was the in-house chef/dog's body/fool at Millies health food store (a place not dealing in hearts but a feeling of being used as the owner stood waiting for his breakfast sandwich with his gut sprawling over the tightness of the leather strap around his arse and under the belly) -  I am seeing the impact of a Saturday (when I avoided Leeds like the plague is in town climbing off the 13A opposite my block of flats on North Street at 4pm) on the pedestrianised areas.

The piles of refuse. The full bins. The corrupted potholes, which are spreading like those ones which were counted in Blackburn Lancashire, joining to make a gravel pit at the bottom of Leeds before it falls away on Briggate to the Aire; running dirty rivlets taking the hungry ghosts with it.

Now I wait for the X99, the first for a journey to the edge of West Yorkshire: Wetherby - good old Sheep Farm in our common Norse tongue.

***

2.)

Considering the number of times since 2012 when I've stepped on cars, buses, trams, trains, ferries and planes - but no bicycles - going somewhere other than the yo-yo-ing of heading to Wetherby to support my mother, walk and/or dog sit Lola, Ruby, Archie, Huxley, Lola, Snoop, Snoops, Juno, Zeus, Izzy, Charlotte or some of the others whose names elude me(dwindling braincells), met friends (dwindling quantities), drink craft beer, drink crap beer, drink average wine, read books so numerous (and mostly unmemorable as I've often forgotten which I have or haven't read when I turn the page on unexpectedly read and uninspiring sentences), eat takeaway fish and chips, too spicy curries, bland Chinese food, enjoy The Oven Door's pizza slices (a slice of pizza which has remained the same taste with a subtly intriguing combination of 'orange' milk marketing board cheese, tomato, home baked ham and a scatter of oregano), and wonder what the hell I am doing back here after my Exodus in May 2005 to Whitehall Waterfront in Leeds, then to a further removal to Alfriston, Blaxhall, Coniston, Rotherhithe, Sherwood Forest, Rotherhithe, Wilderhope Manor from April 2007 until May 2009 with the YHA and then other various times away as I snowballed into a sort of chef from someone with an interest in catering which finally led me into the land of wine around the time I was slowly drowning in that vatt up in the Howardian Hills. And then the final nail in the coffin of anything reasonable as I lay awake at night in May 2013 and couldn't connect with the unreality of a terrible few months working at an appallingly planned sushi fast food chain in the newly built Trinity Centre, Leeds and was staring into oblivion - there were no stars to console me then: Yo Sushi!

And all I wanted to do was run and hide from something, anything, everything and crawl into a ball of nothingness as existence suddenly had no underlying meaning - not even a wafer. So I climbed on the bus out of here and arrived some time later, and much more confused at the Accueil Saint Jacques in Le-Puy-en-Velay, around very nearly midnight on Tuesday 21st May 2013, where I was shown to a cubicle with a comfortable bed, a comfortable pillow and a silent but friendly amis(friend) Saint Jacques(Santiago/Saint James/Sankt Jakob - an individual with more identities than Barry Humphries) And the rest is history... Well not quite history. More like presence. More like a thing unwinding from either what goes before or what comes after to what it really is. A moment of accord. A second to pause. A time-out from the voices.

***

I've come for an hour out of time. But, like Coleridge a 'postman' came along to disrupt my concentration, I am not on opiates so can re-enter the realm of el Camino any time I chose?

***

Things pop out. That's just it. And then they click back into another place, when another shape is ready to accommodate them, further on in space and time.

They lift me up and rest me on another level; a level up effect caused by this space opening to engulf me and project me further upon the road.

And then nothing is the same ever again and nothing really matters behind this point.

But then it becomes an addiction better than any 'meat injection' in Trainspotting parlance as I want the feeling.

And like a drug the knowledge of this thing remains which must be sought over and over again.

Considering it objectively it might be seen as a dangerous thing, I suppose? 

***

Thousands of years ago I felt another calm which was beyond words to describe, where I forgot to remember all the things of pain in me. There on Shad Thames, where I stood stock still, I had forgotten my name, my history and anything else I'd projected on the world which was being directed by this thing which seldom stops.

It was quite startling, pretty scary in fact, as I lost a sense of who I was right there and then, but - thankfully - it came back in a flood after a few intervals - just as I was on the verge of tears and wondering if this was early onset Alzheimer's, but somehow not really caring because in a way I was interested in this Nothingness which was also more 'me' than all the fuss and voices going on inside.

***

A favourite concept of mine is serendipity. Coming out of Bar3 on Friday NI Kenny was coming in so I got carried back inside to discuss my 'advert' for compañero de camino on FB; which has attracted attention and inquiries both positive and negative: an American thought I was wanting to 'daddy' someone when all I wanted to do was help; oh well.

It's a small town. So people do come and go at similar times. It's not really so strange, but it's a nice feeling. The other morning I walked out of Caffé Nero on The Market Place and bumped into an old school friend: Chris Cox, a highly skilled Chiropodist, who invited me for an examination of my feet because I struggle with ongoing pain of some fracture I caused walking into Köln from Altenburg Döm. Which occurred while walking through mainly suburban landscape trying to find a place to sleep on Boxing Day 2013. But only after several very interesting days on a Jakobsweg, which I had chosen to walk after a very little research into el Camino in Germany, running between Beyenberg (near Wuppertal with its river straddling mono rail) and the ancient and amazing Aachen, before the route heads into Belgium.

But the destination I wound up in, after having a scan etc in a krankenhaus in Düren the day after the most brutal sharp pain in my left foot heading to an A&O hostel, was a bed provided by the director of an old folks home, where I shared an evening meal with the clients and slept before I headed off the next day to a Aachen cathedral on the train and back to the monastery in Kornelimünster for another nights recovery and where I discovered Eiffeler Landbier.

Serendipity happens regularly on el Camino and it is bursting out of the seams: the guy who helped me in Düren was randomly walking into the same church, reconstructed after WW2, who noticed I was a pilgrim, saw me hobbling and had strings he could pull all over the town: the old folks home sent me to the krankenhaus in an outpatient ambulance...

***

3.)

A story starts where? In the middle, the beginning or the end. In the midst of the present, then reflecting and throwing forward.

That krankenhaus. Waiting in A&E. Another time I was sat in Urgencies Rambouillet with an infected finger trying to consume the rest of my body as it pulsated. Both times I flashed my reciprocating health card and carried onwards. Life doesn't wait in its being...

***

4.)

I think I flew to Paris Charles de Gaulle and I guess I caught a train from Gare de Lyon but I have absolutely no memory. Although I do recall crossing the bridge from Lyon going to Saint Étienne over le Grand Rhône. And arriving in Saint Étienne. And passing some time trying to adjust to the beautiful French language which I had last heard back in Brittany when I worked for French Life International.

Which was a cowboy outfit if there ever one - doing montage with individual spoons and items from the stores in a huge barn, where three Citroën DS sat waiting silently (one used in the yard for chickens to roost in), deep in Breizh - as the camping season built up.

Where I  briefly ran their concession in the La Forêt-Fouesnant campsite, with another courier and two God awful kids' couriers who wouldn't lift a finger to clean anything in the hurry (they'd have worked better in a curry as the Pakistani Dalek would have desired it) I'd been put under by The Management, until I realised I was working for around £1.80 an hour when I accounted for all the hours (stretching into months without days off) as I was forced to hammer those pegs/stakes into rocky, uneven land (French Life International had the cheapest plots of the three concessions on the campsite) all over southern Brittany during a heatwave.

Being paid a pittance and having a retainer kept for the end of the season feeling I was chattled with a chain and iron collar, or led by a carrot, as I wore my fingers raw, cleaning the permanently stained, or busting my shoulders slamming that sledge hammer, thousands of times, into incorruptible earth!

That was early to late spring of 2000 and Breizh first brief experience of France and steak haché and then I quit on a bank holiday weekend - I think the Whitsuntide week. But it's a distant memory. I do recalling enjoying one day in Quimper when I decided I'd had enough of working every day for little or no respect. I'd turned off the work mobile phone - when these were pretty rare and sat in the spring sunshine around the cathedral thinking that France was pretty cool. But then the unbelievable journey back to Leeds from Quimper... Hilarious and made me into the person I am now for sure? The one with neither hair nor scruples. Don't travel without a clue where you are going on a universal bank holiday, during a strike on the French railways and with hardly any money before the invention of the smart phone (iPhone 2007?) ... I was very naive in 2000, walking bewildered into a queue at Montparnasse, asking where the hell Gate de Nord is, as the 'busy' I had kind of expected was quadrupled with the strike; I didn't think Paris was so big! But survived a crazy 2 days until I stepped off the taxi at my mum's, with pennies left and slept for ever. Although I had quit French Life International on payday that pittance wasn't sufficient; but then again I did head to Paris on a TGV having no idea what was around the corner?

Forward in time to Saint Étienne I caught the only and final regional train to Le-Puy-en-Velay, as the long day from Leeds was vanishing into the darkness, which rattled away into 'a' future and 'an' unknown.

***

5.)

How did I discover that place to sleep, how did my feet, without getting lost from some hasty instructions at the bottom of town walk, without losing myself in the maze of medieval streets below the cathedral, wind up with that cylindrical pillow keeping me safe and sound in that cubicle up that spiral staircase? I will never know the answer, but I feel another life was just waiting for me to wake up in to it?

In the morning of the first day I attended a 'pilgrim's mass' took my wafer and wondered what I had just done. It was nice to be blessed by the priest and my 'fellow' pilgrims from all over the world.

Now every time I get in those buses, cars, trains, trams, or on ferries and planes,  I am carrying the Credencíal (pilgrim passport) which I bought for 5€ in the Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Puy shop. Sure, it is a bit tattered and torn now (11 years since) but contains all the tampon or sellos which are collected along that first stop start pilgrimage. Indeed I had all my pilgrim passports in the same plastic document wallet, they gave me in Le-Puy-en-Velay, until it got damp and I replaced it with a fresh and sealable one once again.

After I had attended the pilgrim mass I left the church in the bright sunshine and felt I had come out from behind a very dark cloud. The restful sleep and mass put me a million miles from where I been just the day before... And into an entirely separate existence which was quite beyond me to understand even in a fraction; but I was pleased!

***

6.)

On the back of the bus, between Bayonne and Saint Jean, on the 3rd October 2023, I was wedged between two US university kids and one Canadian university kid. It was the first time I stated I wanted to offer advice out loud; I'd come to Saint Jean from Pamplona in February 2017(walking the other route passed Col de Roncevaux) with the intention of offering my Native English advice to someone, but looking back I was still pretty naive and arrogant about myself and El Camino; and I wanted to fill in the blanks of the sellos of the Credencíal I'd picked up back in Le-Puy-en-Velay.

Although I had also come to walk the entirety of the path the 'correct' way as far as Burgos (where the wheels had come off my first Camino Frances experience in June 2013, between Pamplona and Belorado when the youthful crowds became too much(like every single bed being filled in Albergue Jesus y Maria Pamplona) and I escaped to Ferrol and walked the Camino Ingles almost alone) because I had two weeks and enough funds to put myself in that 'busy' lane within a flight to Manchester from Santander. Which was why I had come to this 'Holyland' this time. Putting all my abhorrance of crowds to one side. They didn't seem to want advice, but they were young and full of the youthful quality of full knowledge of everything, because they read it in a book. The conversation with me drained away after a little while so I returned to looking at the wonderful scenery, as we approached the Pyrenees, and he (Canadian) started chatting them (American) up which, was very taxing as I half heard his boarish boyish bragging. There and then I decided I didn't like his smug self righteousness and made sure I was always ahead of him, after leaving Saint Jean, and didn't see him ever again, except maybe once as I passed the youthful pilgrims disrobing for a dip in the river running through Zubiri and he was disappearing around the bend (although I still hope he got to Santiago and learned to say less about himself)!

***

7.)

Now I know that you leave first thing in the morning - around 7:30am or 8am - from albergue you've been sleeping in, as they close and bolt the doors - and then you carry on to the next destination. Walk, eat, sleep and repeat ...

In 2013 I didn't leave on the Chemin Saint Jacques that morning but clung to Le Puy, very unsure of myself, seeking solace in wine (usually a Marsanne used in an AOC) and saucisse avec lentilles Puy AOP below the cathedral in the various locale around Place du Plot.

Then I checked in to a private gîtes d'etape for the extra evening. I had been shoo-ed out of the door of the Relais du Pélerin Saint-Jacques early and had to get to grips with the town - which is the only fair thing to do when being somewhere for the first time and completely a fish out of water?

Later I returned to Le Puy in the spring of 2018 when I'd walked the Chemin from Geneva via Yenne and stayed in the Relais for a second time. My next visit will hopefully be this year (May 2024) and I will stay in the Relais and connect with pélerin once more: no more Peregrinos this year as there are many many many other paths to get peripatetic et pommes frites!

But the weather in May 2013 was pretty atrocious on the Aubrac plateau with snow falling constantly. Up there battling the elements there were a couple of occasions when I thought I was a goner as I was constantly cold and wet in the wrong attire and losing my grip on reality; with knees swollen like watermelons!

One morning the rain, sleet and snow lashed against me moving from my left to straight head on and, finally finishing me off, traveling to my right, until I was, literally, soaked(almost frozen), with a pitiful willy shrinkage(it had almost vanished) and a certain rage against 'God', or whatever had brought me to such a condition of absolute defencelessness! And I eventually stumbled into a warm and inviting bistro in Nasbinals - blown in on the gale - where the other patrons looked at me with a something like compassion in their eyes? Perhaps they knew the fragility of my mind as I attempted to dry myself near the fire, taking off the majority of the soaked outerwear and heading to the toilet to put a slightly less damp outfit on.

After I had wolfed down the local bœuf and aligot I carried on, damp but restored to sanity for the rest of the afternoon amid more snow flurries until I reached the small village of Aubrac on the edge of the plateau, couldn't pay for the nights accommodation, as it was cash only (but was allowed entry as long as I paid up ahead at the Office de Tourism) and then found everything in my bursting backpack soaked.

As I drapped everything around me (and the one other pélerin in the same dormitory in the Gîte d’étape communal La Tour des Anglais) before falling into a dazed sleep hoping that the end of the wintery spell was coming on the morrow.

In the morning I walked off the plateau into more of the deluge, following a group of ponchoed walker, who reminded me of bats, clustered together much drier than I, into Saint-Chély-d'Aubrac where I decided I couldn't walk wet and cold anymore so hitched down the valley with a baggage carrier, trying to out run the weather, but trudged wet and disgruntled to Espalion from Saint-Côme-d'Olt.

***

8.)

I ride the wave of enthusiasm then I get dumped on the beach of meh and I come undone. And it's not good enough. Because it's not eternal. Nothing does last forever. Everything withers and dies. But I know there is another way. If I just left my belongings on the beach and returned to the ocean of possibility...

But why don't I? I have never lacked courage. But there is something about having my own 'council' flat (something elusive at best) that anything too dramatic and where would I go? Mother's in not an option. There is homelessness.

Whenever I am on my own on the Camino I am never lonely, but whenever I am surrounded by people, on the bus or on a pub I am so lonely. And I think it's something which I have to switch off with another 'vice' ... Not self destruction. Joy.

But to know that el Camino exists for me; that treasure, is a God send.

In 2013 it was hidden completely. I was very lost and needed something to keep my head above water(literally) - I was thinking a lot about my existence and the futility of it. I was considering ending the pain the obvious way, but I was 'saved' just in time.

The world is truly wonderful. The human world, and also the actual world, can be daunting when faced with the meaninglessness of it after the statement 'God is dead!' And the death of God makes me wonder what is the point to anything - unless in nihilism I destroy myself? But there is something good in it? Isn't there...

And there it is: the path out of pain and into joy and peace and it's called love. On the route from Geneva to Le-Puy-en-Velay, which I walked in 2019, there was a valley where the combined buzz of insects was almost deafening and wonderful. The wildflowers in the meadow bobbing beneath the weight... Wonderful. Ecstatic. Blissful. The sound which is hidden in our noisy world. This was lovely in all it's brush strokes.

***

9.)

An organiser of the Ultreïa Mancunia reminded me I am meant to be organising a walk on the border of East Lancashire and West Yorkshire - where the foes meet to lay down arms for a moment or two - and I'd forgotten. Something of the previous two days and the lingering taste of the change in flavour of my relationship with my mother is making me too depressed to consider anything quite so pleasing... Which is quite bad and adds to my feeling of inadequacy and guilt whenever I miss the mark; and I miss the target regularly!

Back into the fray

***

10.)

My first feeling of the absolute meaningless of my existence was as a consequence of watching some appalling drama called Diana(staring Jenny Seagrove and a young Patsy Kensit). Episode one 12th of January 1984. I was still 11 and I woke up sobbing. And I never stopped sobbing. People at school that Friday thought there had been a death in the family. Well there was a kind of death - mine! I knew I'd never know the 'love' depicted in the series. I felt futile. I have felt futile ever since... In my heart I still sob. I look at couples with longing to understand what it is between them. It 11am and it's time to continue walking...