Confusion and fatigue from sleepy head himself

You learn a lot on something like this.... how kind people can be, how hard it can be on the road, how difficult it is to talk to your walking companion when the weather is bad and you are trudging down a major A road on seriously uneven ground, that the way to avoid the A road into Barkway entails a long few miles hike up a quiet road and an extra couple or so miles on quaintly undulating (hilly, actually) little road, that my new “walkers trousers” chafe in the most unpleasant places after ten or so miles (and I’ve walked in them for over forty miles, and that 14 year old Oban malt whisky is actually rather nice.
You also learn that you can take liberties with sentences and have them rather elongated....
Yes, it has been a fantastic week and sorry we have not been able to write much during that time. We have stayed in a lovely pub (Dappling Duck, Great Massingham) with parishioners in Downham Market (Pam and Mike put us up with only a few hours notice), with friends (Joe and Juliette and family rescued us from a homeless Ely and pampered us in Huntingdon) and relatives (well one, but he is lovely and so is his partner, Linda) who pampered us beautifully in Newmarket ad ferried us back to our starting place today.
This Friday gave us lovely weather and hard walking but led us to Puckeridge where we had nowhere to stay and where the B&B’s and hotels had all dissolved into the ether. St Edmund’s College could not accommodate us but we did not know that until we were half way there so we sought out a hotel that was, like so many extinct things, still marked on our map and we ended up at a petrol station. A man ran it from a little booth in the midst of the petrol pumps and so we chatted to him about possibilities and he gave us a number for a taxi and a directory with some possible places to stay. Which lead us to a lovely lady taxi driver who drove us here and my first taste of Oban Malt, which is now sadly just a lovely memory. The clothes are drying on a noisy radiator which is making the room rather warm and I am thinking that the blister I have had on the side of my heel since half way through Student Cross is more of a nuisance than I had ever thought it would be but I’m damned if I will let it get the better of me.
Which brings me to where I am now.....
It is remarkably peaceful here. The double glazing is cutting out the sound of any traffic, the TV/radio is off and the noisy radiator has suddenly stopped vibrating and rumbling. Alison is drifting off at her note book as the heat reaches tropical island levels (especially with the evaporation from our damp clothes) and I am wondering if I will write the other things I want to write tonight or just leave them for another time.

Today I have been reflecting on how the landscape we have been walking through all week has been so completely changed by human activity over the years.

It has been stripped of forests, drained of water, turned from diverse environments into mono-cultures, built on, stripped of its natural resources, redeveloped to be more bio diverse, turned into playgrounds and worksites, homes and wastelands, shunned and cherished and so much more besides. And we have repeated these things over and over again until we eventually began to walk through this lovely land and remark on how nice it is.

Perhaps we are so pleased with what we have made sometimes that we don’t realise what we are thinking.

I asked someone during Student Cross the following question – “If God made you in God’s image, what do you think are your God like qualities? What defines you as someone who has been made in God’s image?”

He didn’t want to answer me and was wary of the suggestions that I made for him to agree/disagree with.

Do you think that being able to muck around with our environment makes us God like? Does being able to destroy our environment make use more like God? Perhaps it is only when we start to repair the damage that we have done that we start to show our “God-like-qualities”? Hmmmm is this more about a foray into good and evil? Nope – let’s get focused here!.

Of course, everything is relative. One of my less God-like tendencies today is that I am starting to drift off to sleep, but I do encourage mass contemplation on this big question regarding what makes you like God (in often quite small but deeply significant ways as well as in the more exceptional, big things). How will any discovery help shape the way you are living your life? Yes, such a decision could redirect you... or, at least, make a good talking point for you in odd situations.

Or, perhaps I am just rambling. We have walked well over a hundred miles in the last five days and it does seem to be having some sort of effect on me. Sleep is more seductive – my tendency to stay awake half the night seems to be disappearing!

Tomorrow we walk to Barnet where we think we have a hall to sleep in! Let’s do it!!