A rebel without a clue.

What is up ahead in 2023? Which pitfalls, snares and traps will pop out of the long grass to trip me up: there is never a time when obstructions, mines, floods and tempests don't occupy the same pathway of freedom from fear, want and guilt? *** January is here; a storm is blowing outside bringing wet weather, and I've reopened A Course in Miracles after having 2022 away from its 'easy' lessons... In May it will be the 10th anniversary of my discovery that there was another way. Apart from ACIM, the Camino became the main focus of my life - keeping me alive, as it has, these last ten years. In a blink of an eye I've turned 50! The midlife crisis that appeared in my life at the beginning of 2013, with its existential grist, has worn into my surfaces physical and mental, for fully 10 years, so that I feel I have become an entirely separate individual from the one in the past... Not everyone would probably agree, but I do feel absolutely different to the person who felt...

The final day prior to Christmas Day and I am alongside Archie on the sofa. He slept soundly once we returned from Leeds around 5pm. We caught the bus around 1pm towards Oakwood, got off the stop prior to the junction and popped into Salt and The Melbourne, but, because Preston was closed until 3, I didn't know what to do really? Come back to Wetherby, stick about in Oakwood or catch a bus outside Preston down to Boar Lane and come back to Wetherby from there? We chose to go into Leeds, which was excellent except for two individuals who were definitely looking for conflict. The first person, in Whitelocks, I left to his politicising of music and took Archie to Friends of Ham, Bundobust and Tapped before coming back from outside on the X99. One man in Friends of Ham took a real dislike to Archie being there and literally balled at me and him to get away from him: the whole bar literally turned on him and defended Archie and me... We won't be venturing there again anyway... He...

The things which don't exist until I step out of the flat's nighttime sleep into awakenedness: the long return to another reality. The neverending real blandness of the yo-yo ping-pong of getting my shit together for the trip to 42 Braine Road to take Lola for a couple of walks. *** Wednesday morning. Archie decided to sleep on his bed beside the unlit fire in the front room so I slept until 7 without any real distractions. We both needed a little extra sleep because on Monday evening his guts were churning and he was shaking his ears a little at the base of the bed. There was some tapping in the night, which I realised was rain on the velux windows at the back of the house, when I initially thought it was Archie coming up to the top floor. Yesterday I managed an hour at the allotment, the first visit since the icy frozen the week previous and my final walk in Spain of 2022 the ten days prior. Christmas gathers it's force with the hyper annoying ornamentation and awful over...

As I sit waiting in Gate B20 waiting for a call for the return to Manchester I am reflecting back on the 7 days of the Camino de Madrid and whether it did what I need from the Camino Experience and I think it did? Really I wanted to reach Valladolid on foot if I could in time, but the pressure on my foot seemed to be saying enough, as it came and went during most of the monotony that the Meseta was offering... I know the Meseta (the south area from the Camino del Sureste) is genuinely barren without the distraction of woods, rivers or hills of the likes leading up to the Sistema Central... so can cope with it. But the ongoing issue with my left foot is becoming more than an irritation. As I am on the usual NHS waiting list for a clinical assessment of the problem I guess next year I will restrict the distances I cover per day? 

Back the way I came from Saturday - renfe Avant high speed train linking Valladolid, Segovia and Madrid Chamartín in one hour. Wearing a mask is still obligatory on public transport it seems? As my flight back to Manchester is scheduled for 8:15am I feel it would be best to stay close to the airport, not in central Madrid so I don't have to get up at stupid o'clock (5am) the airport is close to Barajas - the first bus in the morning is around 6 and drops at terminal one around 6:15 which should be sufficient so after we arrive in Chamartín I am heading directly to Barajas on metro 8. I left my walking boots to dry for two days, since I arrived in The Book Factory Hostel, but they are still pretty damp from all those puddles along the Camino tracks through the pine plantations between Coca and Alcazarén. Last night the room I was in stayed pretty quiet - the two other occupants weren't long after me climbing into their beds. Two other individuals I guess upgraded as they qui...

In me is one more day? Should do because 7 days isn't so bad with the physical challenges since the mountains (weather and body)? Booked two nights in Valladolid anyway to be a tourist in the rain... Slept pretty well after the fridge stopped leaking water: I turned it off due to the continual vibrations but it decided to defrost... The room was a little damp but not particularly cold. Now I am across the park having a cortido after tostados con tomate pondering my day forward as rain is forecast in the very region I am walking through and on the seventh day I am quite tired, surely the seventh day was a restday? *** On the final leg of today's suggest Etapa and completely bored of pine forests/plantations: this area reminds me of Les Landes in Gascony, but perhaps not quite as relentlessly uninspiring? Left foot is playing up once more, but so nearly at the end of the walk so I'll manage - 5 hours straight, almost, with one village since Coca, which I tried to hitch all al...

The path is the destination? No matter how much I look forward to the end of these physical difficulties I am sure that it is just 'the moment' which exists and I am just in this moment at the crossroads? It's like the Power of Now... Today I left the Albergue at 8 walked for around half an hour before I missed my turn so had to walk straight over planted, ploughed and fallow to join the Camino for an hour: but does it really matter where I am going or where I came from when I am just here without any conception my reality? It just rained torrentially all morning. It is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception this Thursday, thank you Spain, but my maths suggests that Jesus must've been born in August or he was literally like a sack of wind ready to blow in less than three weeks ... Logic says that the Roman feast/Christmas is just a superposition, but in a quantum universe no one knows where any two pintxos transects so perhaps this son of God is outside of physics and p...