Author: chrisadmin

[Hm. Just started to read this and realised that it’s rather rambling and perhaps politically incorrect.  Let it be. Comments and corrections welcomed.]

This was the scene outside the cafés and bars outside my hotel (Hotel Norté y Londres: how could I not stay there?)  It’s a hopeless ‘photo of course and I didn’t ask my neighbours’ permission to take it or use it but they were happy  talking and drinking a little and in the lovely warmth of the late evening that area on the right was very rarely as empty as that with a constant stream of couples, families, friends going by. Most couples held hands and I didn’t really see anyone who looked frankly unhappy.  There’s clearly a wish to be seen by many, many have dressed up to walk out I’m sure, or it looked that way to me.  I’m sure it’s an outsider oversimplifying, and of course I didn’t see the people who choose not to be there, but it felt very relaxed for all the seeing and being seen.  I saw almost no overt comments on each other’s clothes or appearance.

Talking of who wasn’t there: it did feel very much as it were a heterosexual arena.  I’d say I saw a couple of gay guys, actually followed by a third on his own who I’d guess was gay.  My gaydar isn’t that great and I hate the whole idea of having one and have finally really gotten to the point where I can ask completely levelly, “male or female of the species” if someone is talking about a partner and if I feel it’s useful for me to know. Mostly it felt great but it would have felt even better had it felt less as if some of the being seen was about being seen to be part of a heterosexual coupling, reproducing mass of humanity.  Anyone out there Spanish or just familiar with the sort of “café” culture I’m talking about, and I’d say I’ve seen it sometimes in the UK, sometimes (more often) in France, very definitely in Italy and Greece and in Croatia.

I was very happy with a very small tapas and a couple of beers and I’m sure it helped me sleep well though I think I can vouch for the happy noise continuing for some hours into the morning as the man at the hotel desk told me it would.  Waking to particularly loud shouts somehow wasn’t irritating and I could go straight back to sleep.  Hooray!

Made an early start (08.21 says Garmin) and it was a little nippy and I was glad to have two tops on for the first hour or so as the sun started to throb.  However, there was a thin but pretty complete layer of high cirrhus cloud.  I think that was sent by my lovely friends in Barcelona as I’d Emailed them to say that I’d gotten into Spain, which was good, if not Catalunya, but how do you turn the heat down.  Guillem said when it gets too hot for them they just go to the beach and Juan Carlos said it will get cooler in another 300km or more.  I think they were embarrassed and sorted out the high cloud. Whoever did it: more please!

The road was a bit weird at first: I thought I had anohter day of having an old N road very much to myself with a new A road alongside it and it looked that way until this:

Yes. That road really does just stop there, about 150m before the bridge and become, well, nothing.  It was actually easy to hop onto the real road on the left there and plough along the hard shoulder.  I was relieved to see a local cyclist going the other way and concluded that I was legal and the road surface was so much better than sharing the camino with the walkers (it’s a gravel track most of the way, fine on a mountain bike and Toto and I could have done it but it chops at least 15% off speed/efficiency I’d say).  Basically, I stayed on that hard should for 78.11km. Elevation:

I’m intrigued to see, to the extent one can on these plots, that I’m higher than where I started as the last stretch from that lump of green hills the road went straight through felt like it lost all I’d climbed.  Anyway, much more subjectively important, gradient:

Oh yes, that red bit!  The bit where a gentle climb out of a village suddenly got steeper, softened again, and then said in bright red and yellow: “6% for 3km”!  That was tough but I seemed to have so much better legs than yesterday.  The rest was really fine so I did 78km pretty much in one go bar a couple of brief stops to take ‘photos or to open a “gel”: experimenting with what the real cyclists do!

That brought me to Burgos.   For what it’s worth, here’s speed:

There were a couple of lovely fast, yellowish 50+kph downhills but most of the last 20km were  lovely with sun still not burning and the garmin on the handlebars saying “-1%” gradient most of the way.

Heart rate:

Yup, those 3km of 6% and sometimes more did get the heart pumping.

One really weird thing happened on that climb: the words “He who would valiant be, let him come hither” came into my head, complete with (a very poor version of) the notes, and then the whole of the first verse of “Onward pilgrim soldiers”.  Now youngsters reading this who didn’t have “school hymns” probably won’t know this but a bit of sleuthing here on the internet revealed all three verses and the origins in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”.  I had NO conscious thought of the pilgrim bit at the time and no idea where the hymn had come from.

That led into some interesting reflections on what I call “martial christianity” and how much I mistrust all martial religion.

I found a hotel (OK to good), had lunch (ditto and included some black pudding which Juan Carlos recommends as a speciality round here (this is Burgos/Castille).  Then I did some “site/blog” work and went to see the cathedral.  And that’s the architectural equivalent of doing a full 12 round professional boxing match I think.  I’ve never seen anything like it and I think it’s a total mess and much of it horrible but you can’t not admire the aspirations and the hubris.  That will have to wait for another day though as I know I need sleep if I’m to blitz the “high meseta” in the next two days and survive the hills that follow.

On the run in to Santiago now and I think I will make it though it’s by no means a given.  Have had a lot of thoughts about how to continue the life changing thinking and experiencing, the emotional processing and personality review that it’s involved on my returrn and I’m clear now that will take months, several years I think.  I think that’s a common reaction of people who do this or one of the many similar things, including psychotherapy.  In the last ten years I’ve said things like: “You think these 18 months are tough and the gist of it.  Well they are tough but they’re not the gist of  it’s the next 18 months that you do on your own, the next 18 years, that really matter.”  I guess this is very similar.

OK.  Out to sample the café/bar life of evening Burgos.  Apparently it stops about 02.00.  I’ll be long abed by then!

OH, nearly forgot.  Cumulative Garmin trace is 1,999.1km.  As it’s not recorded everything, for various reasons, I’m well over 2000km.  There’s a thought and here are the pictures:

Elevation:

Gradient:

Heart rate:

Doesn’t vary much at this scale eh?  And speed ditto:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feels odd going back to it now as today has been very different.  I was a bit down on pilgrimages by the time I limped into Santo Domingo de la Calzada yesterday and I pretty much slumped off the bike next to this sculpture.

The one in the background is Toto whose gear injury is invisible, the one in the foreground is how I felt: all in pieces.  The sculpture does deliver drinkable water from that spout pointing toward me and I was sick of my diet of drinking yoghourt and fruit juice so ditched some remaining youghourt and verily happily drank some water and told myself just to sit still in the shade (over to the left of Toto those steps were excellent for the purpose).

After 20 minutes I hauled myself up and found a hotel with an absolutely lovely man who busied himself with his 15 to 20 words of English and my similar vocabulary of Spanish making me and Toto at home.  He even helped me up the stairs with some of the baggage.  Boy do these things make a difference when you’re battered.  I had seen a public laundrette and reasoned that as I had given up mid/late afternoon (not sure exactly when it was now), I should at least go and get my washing done as I had only a day or so’s reserve, and told myself to look at the town a bit.

Laundrette even put its own washing powder in automatically: OK, Santo Domingo legacy of thinking about those on the Camino does live on.  While things washed and then dried I admired buildings.

OK, you’re right: it’s not the building there.  Just checking to see if you were really reading and looking at this.  To be fair, I suspect that the building is quite a few hundred years old, yes, it was the bikes I was admiring.  Both worked as far as I could see and I certainly saw a man from the shop to right ride the dragster one on the left.  This is the courtyard of my earlier collapse as you can see.  It was a nunnery and is now an auberge for pilgrims.  Apparently OK but a complete warren inside.  I liked the clean, almost military simplicity of the exterion. Bit reminiscent of the simplicity of the exterior at Irache.

Sculpture minus youngters and minus Toto who was resting in the cool of the hotel garage.  It was still seriously hot though it was now about 18.00.

This is the Calle Major: main street.

And this the story of the building with eaves in decay there.  Hope you can read it.  Hope they restore it carefully.

And these were the walls:

I wonder how many pilgrims’ hands have stroked those pitted surfaces, adding to the erosion and the character?  Several in a few minutes while I watched.  The Calle Major is the main pilgrim street through the town:

I like the juxtaposition of guide mark for the modern pilgrim with the drain cover.  Heraldic assertions are all the rage here.  Interestingly for me, that’s true both on lay buildings but seemingly particularly on religious ones.  These are the arms of the town’s mayor who in 1555 ordered the building of this for the order of Saint Domingo so they could continue the saint’s work of looking after pilgrims.

I can find no right way to introduce the cathedral.  This (terrible ‘photo, the ‘phone doesn’t cope with incident light at all), was what I saw first: lovely “Roman” apsidal chapel.  (I have to adjust to all the signs saying “Roman”, as I did in France: in both countries it refers broadly to what chronologically and architecturally is called “Norman” in the UK.)

Moving round the East end.   My sort of stuff.  There is just room for a car to get through between the East end and the house next door.  No letting it stand hogging spotlight and glory.  But, if you squint up, above those you see the classical gothic of flying buttresses:

And that tower is completely separate from the cathedral: added after two earlier ones had fallen down and built there to avoid the problem with the foundations that they couldn’t fix. This is the full sight pressing myself up against a wall further down the street.

Moving back onto and along Calle Major you get the South transept.

Here’s the full South face (with a bit of the tower).

And here’s Santo Domingo himself, well, modern kitsch which amused me.

And were you to put your head behind him and look back you see the West end:

I don’t know what to make of that.  It’s open to the skies but clearly wasn’t always.  It’s not a narthex and it’s way, way cruder than the nave and transepts but the documents insist, and I’m sure they know, that it’s a hundred years later than them.

Inside is famous for its resident black cockerel and white hen.

It’s invisible there but in the bottom right of that illuminated hen coop, about 25 feet up in the south transcept, the white hen was clearly visible and very much alive.  You can just make her out, occupying about a sixth of the width of the coop there.  There’s a special papal dispensation dating from the sixteenth century that  gives permission for the animals to be kept in the cathedral. I’m not making this up.  Look up “Your son is as dead as the chickens on my plate” for the full background myth.

A restrained alterpiece.  There’s a lot of this (but wait for Burgos!)

Is that Judith?  Oh dear, I was a choirboy once, I should know.  So much grimness, so richly done.

A relic:

But I prefer this:

Still grim …

…

But so much better with the simpler style and without all that gold.  To me there’s something almost perverse, tipping toward the sadistic, in some of these later depictions of the horror stories from the Bible. This again is more to my taste (the inside of the apse you saw the outside of earlier).

And I have no idea what was going on here. It looked like Lego.  It wasn’t open yet.

And here’s a building just opposite that, i.e. just opposite the cloisters attached to the North transept.

Needs some repair work but that’s a lovely wall isn’t it?  Very traditional grocers, just opposite Toto’s garage:

Looking back now, just a day on, it’s as if yesterday afternoon and evening, as I got the washing done, looked at the town, marvelled at the cathedral and speculated again on my taste in ecclesiastical architecture (and all ecclesiastical art really) I moved from a battered wimp to someone who spent much of the evening getting all my GPX/Garmin maps done and, sort of, ready for today.

Yesterday started OK but even then I didn’t seem to have any power in my legs and it became the most  disappointing and the most dispiriting day iin terms of cycling, not the sheer gruelling challenge of the climb day but tough.

This is a lake/reservoir just outside Logroño where I ate some breakfast.  Lovely, brief flash of a kingfisher and mute swans and great crested grebes and fun watching the speed with which the ants took away the crumbs from my patisserie.

A mix of local exercisers and pilgrims.  I don’t think you can see but one of the pilgrims has a parasol and already it was hot.

I think this amazing rock formation is Nájera.

Much of the day was on the “old” N-120 which has been replaced for the infernal combustion engine by the A-12 so I  had hours of well metalled road almost to myself.  I was battered and stopped to admire this stray and derelict petrol station that was clearly left above the tide mark when the A-12 opened.

Oops.  I will leave things there as I must have breakfast and go as the temperature rises so fast.  More this evening if I get internet.  Very best to anyone reading this and apologies for tantalising.  There is more aesthetic, and heartening, architecture to come!

A lot of work with the excellent (and free) GPS tracker and Greenshot programs last night got me lots of maps.  Won’t have time to put them all up in the maps section now so here are summaries and highlights.

First the summary: the trip so far.  The colours just mark separate recordings from my Garmin.  I have yet to work out how to colour the days.

Average speed doesn’t vary much at this scale:

Altitude does a bit:

You can see the long stretch within a few tens of metres of sea level down the French Atlantic coast, the climb over the (lowest bits of) the Pyreenees and the relatively sustained altitude since (hardly going to cause oxygen deprivation though!)

And here is heart rate:

Which doesn’t show anything at this scale.

Here’s the mountain bit showing the altitude change:

And the gradient:

Those blue descents were heaven but those climbs were …  well, pretty much the opposite.  Here’s the heart rate.  Remember that the speed ranged between as low as 6kph on tough parts of the climb where the gradient went into double figures but, if I remember rightly, saw a wonderful 72kph for a short time on one the straighter bits of descent.  That means that the same distance on the map may have taken 11 times longer where I was barely moving compare to where I was flying  I’m impressed that I could sustain a heart rate up in the 140-160 range for as long as it turned out I could.  Can’t really see that on this plot.

So finally, here’s that day in speed:

Fun!

OK.  Another up and down day both topographically and, though less so, psychologically.   It’s been very hot, felt far hotter than the 32°C (about 89°F?) that the Garmin tells me it was at the end and the Navarre countryside is moderately hilly.  However, I’ve treated myself to another hotel night and tonight the IT has just worked so I have ‘photos but I’m tired and want to go out and have a well earned drink and a sandwich so no philosophising again.  (“Phew” is a perfectly legitimate comment: go on, who’ll post it?)

Started in Puenta la Reina, found small supermarket and loaded up with fruit juice and drinking yoghourt.  Here’s that bridge she built again, this time from the other side, from the modern bridge I was on.

Oh, by the way, I may have underestimated that queen, forgot to add this more modern message last night:

I think that was reminding me about what in our family is called “girls go best”.

OK. Then up into the first climb of the day:

Puenta la Reina has disappeared behind and Toto and I were pretty much alone a fair way above.

After a lot of hills, including some exhilarating descents (not the 72kph I hit coming down into Roncevalles the other day though) I pushed on the chainwheel change lever to get a nasty “snap” sound and no change.  OK.  Thank  goodness it’s  leaving me with only the small chain ring, I will adopt J’s approach to cycling from here on: if it’s downhill she freewheels.

Actually, that did seem it might lose me some time so I found a bike shop in Estella (OK, Google maps was great for that) and the lovely man confirmed it was the selector built into the brake pull that had snapped and not the cable and that he couldn’t fix it.  Actually, quite a bit of that was agreed with the help of my daughter on the ‘phone from London which amused the bike shop no end. Onward to Logroño thought I and onward we went.

Actually, up we went again and the road went right and the true Camino path went left and was unmetalled and nasty and steep but it went to the famous Irache monastery with the red wine fountain for pilgrims: I had to do that.  I did but had no puff for any amicable “Buen Camino” as I went past a walker.  Here’s the fountain, red wine on the left, water on the right.

And that’s the lady I had passed rather rudey.  From Toronto and very forgiving about my faux pas but very wary of the wine which was actually fine, I didn’t risk more than two tiny swigs though. The water was also lovely.

However, I decided to rubberneck a bit and was immediately rewarded as a black redstart showed me where to park my bike.  (On the right in case you’re wondering.)

The monastery is superb, famous for its cloisters but the main church is wonderful.

And that’s just gotten us in the west door.

The crossing and … the cloisters …

Then it was back onto the old main road: great road surface much of the time and twenty minutes between cars and longer between cyclists (I think seven in the whole day).  However, it’s a savage looking landscape.

And oh boy the road does go up and down.

But Toto’s remaining 11 gears, and my legs, just, got us to Logrño.  Here’s how it welcomes you, way out  the boondocks.

Lots of the small graffiti are from walkers to other walkers they’ve met before wishing them good luck.  I suspect that the shade in these underpasses helps encourage what is clearly a local tradition.

The first very nice cycle shop man looked at the bike and made all sorts of noises and, no doubt, very articulate Spanish comments on the seriousness of the broken gear changer and the extreme low probability of ever finding such a part (damn Campagnolo) without cycling to Italy.  At least, I think that’s what he was  saying.  To be fair, he pointed me to another bike shop, OK, it was the other side of town but I had to go that way really and they were … closed so:

I’m sure I’d be thrown off the Vuelta a España for such flagrant doping but the coffee and beer did wonders and actually the cycle shop was only 50m away and opening in 15 minutes.

So here we are:

Evidence of man without bike.

Bike in the bike hospital. If you look closely, you can see that the left brake lever is black and the right is the original aluminium one.  Amazingly, the lovely man in this shop had a nearly new second hand lever and his young technician fitted it while I found a place for the night and this:

We started with women leading by example and ended on the same note. Good night. Bonne nuit. Buenas noches!  613km to Santiago according to Google maps.

I slept like a log and woke just before the alarm went off, something I seem to be doing a lot, regardless of how well I slept.  I’m sure it wouldn’t work for me to rely on that as my alarm though.

OK.  Aiming for 64k to Viana or a bit more to Logroño so should be off soon but had a few minutes as supermarket here in Puenta la Reina (bridge of the queen) doesn’t open ’til 09.00 and I know I need lots off fluids aboard for today as it has a lot of up and down and will be exposed and hot.  Amazingly, wifi and internet both working so here I am.  The bridge was built by a canny medieval queen according to something I read.  I doubt if she did it alone myself as it’s wonderful:

Hooray, all that hard work last night was worth it: ‘photos up!  Here’s another to show how hard she worked:

and I call this “self-portrait with beautiful bridge”:

OK.  More of this later. Truly beautiful town with two fascinating churches but I must go and get breakfast and get onward.  Very best to anyone reading this rather erratic and tantalising blog: I do appreciate it that people are.  Do post comments, if you do, WordPress has a not very obvious button that allows you to sign up to receive Emails when more posts go up … how could you not take up that offer?!  (Don’t worry, I’m the only one who can see your Email address.)

I’m mostly pretty lucky with sleep. In the early camping nights on this journey I was waking up a lot though then I was getting pretty well straight back to sleep. I think that sleep pattern was down to unaccustomed noise, to temperature change meaning I might need to move from just the sleeping bag liner to the bag as well, even one or two nights, to a tee shirt as well.  Quite often it has rained in the night after a cloudless day and before another day with no clouds at all, that seemed to be a weather pattern that was consistent.  Then the unaccustomed noise of the rain and the temperature change that went with it would wake me. This is different. I’m in a cheap but excellent hotel. A “Hostal” I think.  Oops, I really need to work on my Spanish, particularly categories of accommodation, though my “Un café cortado, per favor” is working well. That may have contributed as I’ve had very little coffee in three weeks and three coffees in six hours here today. No, it’s not the caffeine, the timing is all wrong, l woke at 02.15 having slept OK ’til then and my usual tricks, including reading rubbish detective stories, haven’t dented the problem so I’m wide awake and not feeling tired at all though the climb today was way away the hardest cycling I’ve done.

I suspect that the changes of country and language, and above all that last blog post I did, have stirred a bit of a beast that’s been lurking in wait until now.

One important part of that is about giving up doing formal psychotherapy, about giving up all clinical work, but the beast that came up in that post was all about sadness, and some bitterness, about how I feel the NHS changed. It’s not really in danger of becoming a McDonald’s of health, but something in the generally pretty stupid focus on “satisfaction”, PREMS and PROMS (Patient Rated Experience Measures and likewise, Outcome Measures) is so crude and depersonalising, and methdologically corrupt, that I think it does risk NHS care, perhaps particularly NHS Mental Health care, becoming like Jayne’s experience in that McDonald’s.  (Oh, you can’t get a direct URL to a reply to a post, surely that’s a mistake on WordPress’s part.  Her experience is in her reply to I had to go to McDonalds! — the continuing challenges of IT.)

I worry that I contributed to that.

I stopped there last night and read a Kindle book about one man’s camino on his bike (  ) and did sleep eventually.  Today has been very mixed in many ways and sleep deprivation must have been a factor and it’s now late and I need to sleep so I’ll post this with a lot of links and formatting missing, and fix that another time  However, I think I must return to that worry as it touches so many things I thought I would think about much more while I pushed pedals than I have so far. I’m sure I’ve been avoiding it.

OK, if you’re sitting comfortably then I’ll begin at the beginning.

I calculate my starting date in the NHS as the start of my clinical medical student three years at University College Hospital, so Autumn 1978.  Two things hit me immediately, or probably more accurately, I held onto two of the thousands of things that hit me then, as I think the experiences hit any new clinical medical student like grape shot. One thing was the remarkably uncensored and trusting way that patients would share their life stories with us. The other was that the NHS seemed to be almost data phobic: it had incredible amounts of data, a tiny fraction of it went into computers, much, much less than 1% of what it had, and what did get computerised was mostly blood test results and some case registers. Next to nothing useful seemed to be made of that data.

Though I had no sense of it then, nor for quite a while, those things drove my working life from there. The stories, in a meandering way, I am sure made me a psychotherapist and I’ll come back to that and the other roots of my falling into psychotherapy another time.  My belief that we could do much better with routine data led to much of my research career, and my most successful programme of work – co-inventing and then co-driving the CORE project (www.coresystemtrust.org.uk).  “CORE”  here stands for “Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation”,  a key part of what I was clear the NHS then was largely ignoring.

I’ve talked (“blogged”?) about CORE here a bit before (Copyright and sharing) and there is much in that work that is good but I do worry that CORE helped promote stupid change measurement and contributed, though never our intention, to a NHS managerial and political systems, even increasingly its clinical systems, that lose sight of the people, staff as well as patients, and their unique lives, stories and needs and wishes, replacing that complexity with largely meaningless numbers. I don’t believe the situation is hopeless, but I gave up trying to fight from the inside what I saw as misguided, some of it likely to produce poor results and waste money.  That’s only one part of why I had to retire, but it was a huge part of the decision, and part of what I am trying to think usefully about on this trip. As I say, I think it has its insomniac and nightmare aspects and I think they bit me last night.  OK, let’s see if getting that out, against all manner of continuing IT challenges, makes for an easier night.

A few years back, in another country, in another part of that country (I hope some of you are seeing that first ever Star Wars opening) I told myself that I couldn’t grumble about NHS politics and processes if I hadn’t tried to do it. I put some research time aside for a few years and held the dizzying title of “Clinical Director” of the smallest Directorate of a very big NHS Trust.  I think I held the post for 30 months and we achieved some good things. Within much less than 30 months of giving that up I think most of those good things had been reversed and most of the poor things I thought I had failed to alter continued (and many still do from what I hear). One senior manager who resisted much I tried to do rose like Icarus but went when a long standing and frankly blatant nepotism he operated emerged,  or perhaps it suited someone sufficiently more secure than even him to,  at last,  melt his wax. The Chief Executive who oversaw things went when the overuse of staff postings of positive reports on services on NHS feedback systems emerged.  He did better than his substantive precursor who went,  ostensibly,  for abusing hospitality funds.  I think he heads up a private health care service now.

No, you are wrong,  after torturing me up the “relentless” climb to the Puerto de Ibañeta the bike isn’t called “Chief Executive.” nor “General Manager”, just “Toto” as that meant,  long after this had been true, I could slump off it and say “We’re not in France any more Toto”. In minutes the clouds lifted and Toto and I shot down into Roncevalles,  and  beyond, like a dodgy rocket.

Now when I was trying to be a competent Clinical Director,  which had some similarities with the climbing on an overgeared bike, I worked with a wonderful managerial team. The most senior had already left the NHS in frustration with some things but came back for a bit and,  with our two other great managers,  we did our best.  She,  she knows who she is,  gave me a lot of lifts around that distant galaxy to varyingly excellent or frankly repellent meetings and I learned that when she got a new car (second hand I’m sure actually), she would take some days to divine the car’s name. One rather swish mini was Ethan. (Predictive text made that “Ethanol” – not so!)

Anyway, one very small bit of this story is about the need for human systems,  whether they are food sales with WiFi give away, or health care,  to encourage some idiosyncrasies,  some real, unique personalities in all that work in them and use them. That’s no magic cure for anything, no recipe, perhaps that’s the point, it’s just a basic quality in rich human systems I think we’re eroding at our peril.

Enough. No-one I’ve alluded to in this post is or was basically malignant, but boy we have systems that don’t really bring out the best in people and perhaps encourage us to do very poor things. I’m very lucky to have been able to take some time to ponder things and oh boy,  did Toto and I do OK in tough climbs today!

Is that a fair term to apply?   I don’t know but I think I am a bit clearer. This is my last day in France and I’m in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port: St. John, actually two of them to be safe,  with a foot in the pass.  All about strategic location and some formidable fortifications. This morning was the lowest of the adventure so far, I didn’t want to leave France where I can sometimes understand much of what’s being said and can sometimes make myself understood whereas my Spanish is essentially zero. I knew the day was the first real hills and feared my legs and overgeared bike,  in both senses “overgeared”, might not make the 55km.  I think I also knew that this is a turning point in terms of “pilgrimage”: I could get a “credential” which is a stamp book which you can get stamped at places along the way and geographically this definitely marks a change. The town is quaint but full of rather kitsch tourist shops for “pilgrims” and it’s full of people in hiking gear with wooden staffs and scallop shells.

With a bit of embarrassment I finally fixed my own scallop shell which J had obtained for me in a lovely restaurant during the divertissement week. I had put it on a few days back but it was banging on the front light. I think it and the light are both OK now so I guess that was a bit of a public statement that I am (sort of) “on pilgrimage” or “on the Camino”.

It was a hard 57km with a long 7% gradient that was a shock: the first significant climbing since the North Downs really. It was also the first pretty totally overcast day with even a little rain but then that was perfect,  that climbing in 22 degrees was one think,  had it been 38 it would have been a nightmare.

I have even paid three euros for a credential!

So why am I doing this?

Well one thing that’s been going through my head in the last week is that I know that there’s something wrong with my life and that that needs fixing if I can find a way to do that. Part of that is the huge alienation I’ve been feeling from the NHS in the last few years and I’m fixing that by quitting, more on that in another post. However,  it’s more than just that, it’s a more general disquiet about much more in my, in “our”, i.e. all of our (“Western”) way of life,  a sort of superficiality in connectedness. Being alone for long hours just turning the pedals is on odd way to change that but there are waves,  nods and quick “merci” and “bonjour” as you pass others, particularly but not only fellow cyclists,  that seem less shallow than some much more sustained conversations “back home”.

Today I tried to sort out some of my continuing IT nightmares and the Office de Tourism lady,  the young man and woman in the tiny IT shop,  and Nadia from Montreal in the pilgrim shop,  and her next door neighbour (Maxime?) were all lovely and there was a simplicity in asking people across languages (English,  French, Quebecois French I guess, two who also spoke Basque/Euskera and one who started my Spanish lessons). The two in the IT shop tested things carefully and we fought the laptop to speak to the French keyboard I had bought earlier,  and confirmed what I suspected, that that keyboard,  not just the one on the laptop,  was malfunctioning but that the keyboard controller probably isn’t. They had no solutions but they thought I might find a smaller external keyboard en route,  perhaps in Roncevalles.  They didn’t want money for 20 minutes good humoured work

So here I am picking this out on the tablet in a snack bar with cheap lovely food (magical cheese, ham, saucissons and red wine,  all local) where he has robust Internet/WiFi and I have recognised one simple thing: that I want to come back connecting better, differently. I think I understand a bit more about that, and about how the quality of connectedness I had in clinical work was good, and how much I will miss that, but that will have to wait for another post, or perhaps comments from others as I can’t type like this any more. Oh boy, I do miss a proper keyboard!