{"id":2398,"date":"2016-09-11T08:50:36","date_gmt":"2016-09-11T07:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/?p=2398"},"modified":"2016-09-11T08:50:36","modified_gmt":"2016-09-11T07:50:36","slug":"just-when-theyhe-thought-it-was-all-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/just-when-theyhe-thought-it-was-all-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Just when they\/he thought it was all over …"},"content":{"rendered":"

A good night’s sleep and one more night guaranteed in this room, then I have to move on.\u00a0 It looks as if it’s going to be a beautiful, clear day so no doubt warm to hot and I had a brief pang about not doing Finisterre but it passed very quickly.\u00a0 I could do a short loop to Padr\u00f3n, where the stone boat that brought St. James’s body from the Middle East here, in a day or two according to the legend, beached.\u00a0 That’s only 20km.<\/p>\n

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However, the first act of this new era is to do what I failed to do yesterday: go and see the extraordinary cathedral and hug Saint Francis and then present my Credencial del Pelegrino at the Cathedral, actually, at the pilgrims’ office just behind the Cathedral, I now remember. That enables me, if they deem my voyage sufficient, to get it converted to a certificate.\u00a0 I think there’s important exploration left in these acts so the journey is certainly not over yet and here is my credencial.<\/p>\n

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It’s a concertina of eight pages of A6 size I think (hm, better check that, it’s about 6″ x 4″ in old units working on my old benchmark that my full hand\/fingerspan is 9″).\u00a0 It opens up like this:<\/p>\n

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and you can see you get stamps from places you visit along the way.<\/p>\n

The other side has some great maps (I confess, I hadn’t opened that side ’til now!)<\/p>\n

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The criteria for a “Compostela” include having done the last 100km if walking, or 200km if cycling.\u00a0 I think that’s in that second bullet point below.<\/p>\n

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I wonder if they’ve thought of electric bikes?!\u00a0 Perhaps more seriously, if this is some sort of criterion of effort, I think that walking\/cycling ratio is very easy on cyclists: far easier to cycle 200km than walk 100km.\u00a0 Odd.\u00a0 Anyway, that prompted me to check and I’ve cycled 2,519.5 Garmin recorded kilometres so I guess I pass that criterion.\u00a0 I think they want to hear that there was some “spiritual” side to the journey which takes us back, importantly, to that discussion from earlier blogs and comments.<\/p>\n

And that’s the other side of “it’s not over”.\u00a0 I’ve touched on this before but the cycling has been amazing, gruelling at times, and a vital and central part of this, as have all the sights and experiences, particularly the architecture.\u00a0 However, another side of this has, I will argue if they do want to explore it, undoubtedly been for me “spiritual” and a wonderful time to think and experience things like hymns and songs coming into my mind that weren’t random.\u00a0 I never thought I’d have a conversion experience and I haven’t I remain, as I sometimes used to put it “a confirmed agnostic”.\u00a0 I am musing still on something that struck me a few years back: that if I’ve had a belief system, a religion of sorts, it was a belief in the NHS and a commitment to it, and now I’m sort of lapsed NHS believer.\u00a0 That’s not true, I’m still a believer, I just have a deep disquiet with where the “organised church” of the NHS, actually the “organised church” of absurd faith in “market forces”, is taking it.<\/p>\n

The whole process of digesting 34 days on the road (counting today and omitting the “divertissement” week with J) will take 34 weeks or 34 months, a lot of time certainly.\u00a0 Some of today’s continuing musing will be very much about how best to do that, or how best to let that happen.<\/p>\n

OK.\u00a0 I’m off to find the cathedral and a quiet coffee somewhere (I just don’t do hotel breakfasts!) and see what happens.<\/p>\n

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A good night’s sleep and one more night guaranteed in this room, then I have to move on.\u00a0 It looks as if it’s going to be a beautiful, clear day so no doubt warm to hot and I had a brief pang about not doing Finisterre but it passed very quickly.\u00a0 I could do a … Continue reading Just when they\/he thought it was all over …<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2408,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions\/2408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}