A rebel without a clue.

I want to be alone. And I need to be alone Be absent from these ones The sounds of spring Remind me like the chimes That there is more to solitude. Listen to those songsters  Warbling their hearts most high I am not alone, we're one. I belong here hearing you. *** Several days later I got alone... From Queralbs to Núria I saw not one soul. And I tested my foot. The wound hasn't absolutely vanished, but it's very nearly healed up. 10 miles up to 2000 metres. It took me two hours after I stopped for a entrepane around nine. Some of the path was straight up the gorge and ravines, or across a boulder strewn landscape, where my foot falls were considered methodically; I wanted no repeat of Vinça where I learnt a lesson plunging down a torrent's pathway, between large boulders,:and battered and bruised (probably broken) but alive and laughing my head off. It's Wednesday, but feels like Monday. Yesterday was a Sunday... Calm and alcohol free. The same can not be said of th...

It will be three weeks this Thursday (20th February) since I was under the scalpel (or laser) of Adam Budgen at the Nuffield Hospital to remove what's been stopping my previous life (other than alcoholism) since COVID: a Morton's Neuroma. It's gone. I can't feel it anymore. The area around the operation is tender, etc., but I can't feel the alien body I could previously (at least since I struggled to Segovia in December 2022 having to walk through excruciating pain for 10 kilometres before any 'civilisation' was reached). Nothing nearly so obviously painful was stopping me walking over twenty kilometres in the morning and ten in the afternoon since I got used to blisters, knee swellings, leg pain or shoulder soreness (back in 2013) which really was helping me see clearly and happily within this structure I fail otherwise to inhabit. I've just realised I can see through the gap between to the two toes where the operation has been. All the swelling has gon...

Wednesday 22nd January. Oh to smell the sweet perfume of a rockrose in the mountains of the Algarve, high about the Hubbub of the resorts and human concern. I woke up on Tuesday morning ashamed for drinking into a stupor and it stops... My blood pressure is high. The penny has dropped - I have stage 2 high blood pressure (145/100 this morning). I don't want to die young - which 53 surely is in the 21st century? And I want to leave one nice In Memoriam: this was my life's mission and I can't fail? Can I? Oh the pity. This morning it's 140/100. It seems I've stage 2 high blood pressure. And I thought different and approached Leeds differently yesterday. And today I am going to eat those things which are supposed to reduce the rate. Apart from my alcohol intake, and the bad diet habit I usually stumble upon there, I am pretty healthy for my age; excluding the foot injury and the eyes aging badly... Yesterday I enjoyed a while on the allotment turning over the soil, add...

Are we joined, you and I? When I sit squished up, alongside thee, It seems we are: Dog and boy Man and mutt. A symbiosis between homo and canid, A combination of smells, swells and warmth, which is rarely malignant. What a lucky man I've been, knowing  She's going to rest assured and easy, These last many years, as we both Age gracefully and greying towards separation; where the winds blow us  Disparate, sometimes warm and often Cold, back to the single I; alas! No more the we. She of a gray face, And I an ashen shadow, But always brighter  Than a swarm of photons, Alighting a while, Out of their cosmic array...

Day two away in the North East. I forgot that the reason I pay my money to the inn keeper is to recover - £50 - to return to sanity for the next day. OK in Europe I can stay somewhere for much less than that, and indeed almost nothing with monks, nuns and priests, but I am sat pondering the day ahead in a hotel The Dunes  on South Parade, Whitley Bay, and recovered from the appallingly bad ex-YHA in Newcastle (Kabannas). Back to Newcastle for Thursday night and visited two bars. One in Gateshead near the High Level Bridge (Station East) and one below the Tyne Bridge (Crown Posada) and had an average Spanish tapas 'meal' before retiring to Sleeperz. I'd definitely visit Newcastle again. It's 15 years since Glenn and I got wasted there and 30 since I ran away from the end of my third year at the University of Northumbria - at the end of a really crappy year. Fortunately, the weather was good for those three days and I feel quite enlightened, enthusiastic, inspired. But no...

7am day two of 2025. Another day in Wetherby. Three days and two nights - including two days dog sitting Lola, but back to Leeds this evening and then what? Please I can't keep yo-yoing like I have for the past ten years. It's not enough. Wetherby is so minor and conservative in the scheme of things. It's a place creatures older than dinosaurs go to die. 6:15am day three of 2025. The Krackon awakes next door... I mean her not him: her voice carries like Adrian's never has! Lola is by my side. I stayed overnight as mum wants to go to Harrogate this morning to return a pair of pointless shoes and they're they're not winklepickers... Two days of walking as far as I felt capable around Wetherby. Two hours each time. The wet weather has gone and now we're in the grip of winter. I want to get away... No Lola by my side as she recovers the operation. *** Went to Hebden Bridge this weekend and walked to Hardcastle Crags on Saturday. On Sunday I had an adventure in t...

Off to see Lola, that lovely girl. She so wanted to go further than 15 minutes yesterday, but mum threatened that she'd never forgive me if I made Lola suffer - Lola was looking at me with that knowing look when she wants to take me through The Horsefair Centre... And she did. Only 20 minutes, but she wanted to hop much more... But I forced her back to 42 once more, then I hooked up with Andy and Ian; and I pondered my absence from the allotment... Andy indicated he was going to reroof the shed... Have I lost interest or is the pain in the foot too much for me to overcome? *** Seems I've lost the ability to convey my feelings in this journal? Something is playing havoc with my mind... Alcohol and doubt. Mainly doubt. Uncertainty is creeping where once I was without fear. Yesterday I ate wrong and drank wrong and felt claustrophobic amongst the masses as I brought out the lanyard I wear when feeling overwhelmed by people people people.... *** Camino Saturday. Breakfast and a cof...