Yes, it’s only a couple of weeks since my last post here but I have it in my diary to post on the 7th so I will … but I’ll make this short. That header image marks that I am now on day six of reliving my “pélerinage” day by day on the same dates that I was cycling from home to Santiago de Compostella ten years ago. This morning ten years ago I started in Beauvais and finished the day in a horrible camping site a bit beyond Giverny! I am creating pages with the map of the day (where I have the gpx data) and images, you can follow via the Days of the 2016 pelerinage/camino page.
One other web thing: I have, as I should have done two weeks ago, added links to the artists/creators to my last blog post: A trip to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. There’s nice stuff about them and more lovely examples of their work if you follow the links.
Meanwhile the last two weeks have been pretty full on: coming back from Llantwit to Tulse Hill. That brought home that our lovely house here has started to feel like a different part of my life, to serve a very different rôle in my life, since I moved into my palace in the Charente back on 6.v.26. I am embarrassed at what a huge place I now have there and, pretty much until the morning of 6.v.26 it seemed possible that something would scupper the purchase so I haven’t been very public about the new place but I have now taken the password protection off my page about it: 23 Rairie: my new home. That page is still a jumble that was originally just for the family but it may amuse you to look at it and see what a change and a shock it is after my years splitting my life between London and the Alps. The next couple of weeks are pretty full on too with a Carlyle family event this weekend and then visiting Nottingham for five days or so from next Wednesday.
So a lot of this is stirring up memories, reliving the pélerinage very overtly and the other changes and social overlaps much more insidiously. I know that my mind is doing a lot of this memory stuff as a key part of living my daily life really rather differently in my new base and that starting to live that significantly changed life starts in earnest probably from 25.viii.26 which will be my first full day back there. Hm, less than three weeks now. The old cliché about having to remember so as not to repeat feels pertinent just as some of my memory work on the pélerinage tells me how partial and selective my memory can be. Ah well, work in progress. Adelante (forward! or go forward! I believe) as my family’s saying has it.
There, that was short wasn’t it?!