You can’t always get what you want

Just got back from the recording of the News Quiz at the BBC Radio Theatre – excellent panel and a very amusing evening. Thank goodness that we were both well enough to go! I have not recovered as quickly as Alison from this bug and this has caused me some difficult moments. My stomach has been rumbling like thunder moving over the plains after every (light) meal and we all know that a storm follows thunder! So, when my light lunch today heralded a new, non-celestial chorus I began to wonder if it would be wise for me to leave for the BBC.

At the very least they might have decided that my stomach was too loud for the recording studio equipment!

Happily, the storm passed and I refrained from even a snack until now (10:53pm at time of writing this bit).

I came home imagining a meal of a lovely bag of chips..... perhaps a saveloy as well, as it was too late for a bit of cod, but I decided that this would not be a wise choice for both digestive and pecuniary reasons so I sat in the kitchen wondering what to have.

It was one of those times when the kitchen seemed to have nothing available for me to eat. Admittedly, this is Thursday, and Friday is shopping day, so the cupboards were a bit lighter in available foodstuffs than usual - but that was not the real reason. It was just that when you set your heart on something it can be hard to move yourself towards a lesser alternative. Couple this with it being a bit late in the day and with hunger nagging you in an annoying way and you begin to feel that nothing will do.

Then I looked in the cupboard where we keep our various tinned goods and I saw that we had some tinned tuna and tins of chickpeas and an amusing thought occurred. Fish and chips, fish and chips, fish and chicks! Weak link, I know, but I was clutching at straws.

So I am now eating a salad of tuna and chickpeas with some onions caramelised in olive oil (from yesterday) and some left over salsa with a bit of lemon juice, white wine vinegar, pepper and Tabasco. It is a pleasing mixture.

All that this illustrates is that, as Mick Jagger tells us, you can't always get what you want, but you can get what you need (rough quote).

So, what relevance has this to the walk?

Well, firstly, it is a reference back to this idea of making do as you progress along the road – we are not always able to make do gracefully but whether we do or not, we can make life easier for ourselves if we try to focus on the possible rather than the most desired thing. Of course, even if we fail to do this we will still survive and the next day will be different.

And then there is the ongoing story of our preparations and I have been trying to find a particular type of rucksack, one made by those wonderful people at Osprey, and it seems that every store in the world has run out of the particular version I am looking for and they are not likely to get any more from Osprey for a while!

The Exos 34 is what I can't seem to get but want! It weights under a kilo and for my medium height it can pack up to 34 litres inside, it is the state of the art and when I didn't have the means to buy it I tried one on and it fitted like the proverbial glove. Bah humbug!

Tomorrow I will write to the Osprey people themselves and ask what's going on – perhaps they might even offer me some much needed help when I explain the good use it will be put to and that it will be undergoing a 1600 mile road test, to boot!

Otherwise I will just have to find another light weight sack to meet my needs.

 

 

 

 

 

Letting go

OK, this is the thing, I started off writing a blog last week on what I will miss and not miss when we actually start walking.

The piece was going to say how most things are actually easy to do without for a while and that what you do miss will surely be small compared with the gains. I was then going to talk about the real things that are hard to give up.

Interestingly, I wrote one blog and then had to go somewhere before loading it up onto the site. The next day, I reworked it then other things led me to leave it unpublished. I went back to the subject at the end of the week on my office computer rather than my netbook and re-wrote it with a bit more vigour but other things got in the way and it is still on that computer tapping its electronic fingers with growing impatience while I write this one on my netbook.

Perhaps, you might think, I am either going soft (I don't miss deadlines – ever!) or perhaps the subject was not worth writing about but both ideas would be mistakes. No, the fact is that these delays are perfect illustrations of what is going to be hardest to leave behind and probably my biggest challenge!

What, you might ask, causes these delays and diversions? Family responsibilities, I answer. For example, this weekend saw us helping Rosalind and the girls (daughter and twin granddaughters) at various times. On Sunday and part of Monday that extended to helping Rosalind deal with two 14 month old girls suffering with the norovirus. What little tough cookies they were, too, real stars – they handled it fantastically well! I speak of this with deep experience as Alison, Rosalind and I have all, subsequently, gone through that very personal hell which is the norovirus. Phew, is that some bug! It picks you up, shakes you all about and puts you down pretty fast but it is one seriously unpleasant ride.

So, putting aside further reflections on nasty bugs, what do I conclude?

Well, I feel that can handle a variety of discomforts, especially if I know they are for a limited period; I can handle not having my own space or my own bed, I can deal with the walking, the different places, food, pains and faces, etc all for the same reason (come to think of it, it doesn't sound very bad to me at all) and especially when I can experience them while walking through three great countries (in fact it all sound pretty good, really). But my problem is how do I let go and not worry or feel like I am letting people down? No I am not Mr Indispensible, but I am a father and grandfather and it does feel like I am doing the abandoning.

This trip will see Alison and myself step out of the normal things in our lives and will give us the space and time to reflect, pray, discuss and learn.... so the things I will have to try to let go of are not those comforts, etc, but much of my responsibilities and family cares/life. I know Alison will have to do the same and will also have the burden of being the (absentee) Chief Executive of a charity (Housing Justice) to deal with, too.

Those are going to be the hardest things to let go of.

This is how it is.

Travelling really long distances

Just can’t believe that New Year is now two weeks away….

I have a question for the readers of this Blog (if there are any) but first I just need to share the following with you -

We spent a wonderful week up in the North of Scotland at a place called Nigg with a bunch of really great people. Richard and Sabine, our hosts, run a seriously good B&B there (check out http://www.niggbnb.com/) and our good friend Mike drove some of us up and back down again – was it 1500 miles? Almost as far as Alison and I will be walking!

When we were there we ate/drank/walked/danced and broke bread together, we made a student cross leg out of snow and I will never forget the walk we did leaving a long trail of our footsteps across a beautiful snow covered landscape, stopping occasionally to eat Christmas cake and drink good malt whisky or some other high octane beverages (what was that Polish liqueur called again?) while some of the group tried to make snow angels in the very deep snow.

Thank you Mike (a star for sure) and thank you everyone else for being there and to Richard and Sabine for their fantastic welcome. And thank you Susie’s mum for the stop over on the way up and to our daughter Dominique for the Durham stop over on the way back.

The weather did stop us from getting to the Dornoch New Year’s street party and put paid to the surprise visit we planned for my sister who lives in Lybster (another great B&B www.acarsaidlybster.co.uk) a further 64 miles north of Nigg. Sorry Sheena and Norman!

So enough of the thanks and the ads and all that….

I have to say that we are not just planning to walk all the way to Santiago; we also have to plan a brief interlude during the walk when we will be slipping back to Durham for a day from somewhere in Northern Spain.

I know it sounds weird but it is necessary as our middle daughter graduates from Durham University this year and the graduation ceremony is on the 29th of June. As the proud parents (and as we went to her sister’s graduation, too) we need to be there! So far, I have found an affordable flight from Biarritz to Stanstead and back. Which would mean getting a couple of buses from wherever we are (Pamplona?) to Biarritz, fly to Stanstead, train to Durham, dress smartly for the occasion (clothes stored with Dominique before we start the walk), celebrate, jump on a train and reverse the route back to the place we first though of (Pamplona?).

Of course, I will keep looking, but have you got any other ideas? Have you travelled around there and perhaps know a different route? Perhaps we are too close to it and something extremely obvious has been missed by us…

Ideas in an email please.

See, I told you we would soon be getting you to do some of the work!