I just have a few minutes before lights go out so here is something for the blog....... Argh!!!

Here I am sitting in Spain

I have a few things for this blog but I will add them on to the end of this.

Today we got up and Alison was beginning to have a migraine so we took things a bit easy. We were slow in getting ourselves ready and it was closer to 8 than 7 when we left the refuge. We walked from Viana to Logrono and stopped for a coffee before heading through to a Pharmacy to buy ibuprofen (the smallest they had was 600mg tablets!) and then found a supermarket on the outskirts of town just by the camino. There we bought some essentials and lunch (some ham, a large tomato and bread).

We stopped at Navarette for lunch and then a beer at a bar and arrived in Ventosa quite late for us at about 4pm. The albergue (I should start calling them that, now) is a lovely Spanish house that has been beautifully restored with a nice garden and good washing facilities, excellent kitchen etc. Phew, it feels like unbridled luxury after the last couple of days ... and it has wifi so I will be posting this.

The past couple of days have seen us in pretty wonderful but odd places.

2 nights ago we were in Villamayor de Monjardin which is a wonderful little village half way up a small mountain with a beautiful little Romanesque church where we shared prayers with the woman who ran the parish Albergue there and where we spent time wondering over a fantastic crucifix from the 12th Century which is truly a masterpiece. Carved in wood then covered in silver it is exquisite and took our breath away.

Montjardin was the simplest of places and we all slept in one large room on a platform with a variety of different types of mattresses for us to choose from. But it had a shower, the place was cold but clean and the welcome was genuine.

In Viana the Albergue was also next to the church but this was a much grander church with a massive baroque altar piece that dominated to huge church. The Albergue had two rooms with mattresses on the floor and we shared in the preparation of the evening meal then went to Mass next door while the Hostalieres cooked the food which we then shared on our return. Mass was lovely with a priest who took obvious pleasure in having pilgrims as guests and he blessed us individually at the end of the service. He also spoke to each of us and had obviously worked at being able to converse with pilgrims from a number of different countries. He also took the time to share the sign of peace with everyone in the church....

After a lovely meal we went to bed very tired.

The thing about yesterday was that it was the coldest and wettest day we have had in Spain and the paths were also the worst we have experienced here. Usually the paths are pretty good and a number of them have been paved or surfaced in some way but yesterday the claggy mud clung to our boots and formed slippery tracks down steep narrow paths and through puddle ridden lanes between sodden nut and fruit trees. The Albergue had radiators but the Hospitalieres did not know how to put the heating on and seemed convinced that it was probably best not to try and find out how to make it work. So we arrived wet and left wet the next day (today) which was the only drawback to the place, really.

In both places, as with every place we have gone through and stayed at so far, the people have been wonderful, full of their own great stories about their travels and keen to find out about yours. I am gathering a long and varied set of stories and am nurturing them as I walk along. We have been meeting some of the same people in each place we stay at and encountering others as we go from village to village so now we have a little travelling community that we are part of. A sort of tiny moving village or a caravan of pilgrims sharing nights and swapping lives in different places each night.

No doubt the rooms with mattresses are the closest we will get to both the experience of homeless people and also the nearest thing we will find to the sort of experience medieval pilgrims will have had. The inns of the time often just had a series of straw mattresses or just straw on the floor to sleep on. Some people might have found places with smaller rooms and others will have slept on the benches in the tavern near where the fire was kept alight all night. As we walk we discover different levels of comfort, individual experiences of communal and private hospitality and meals either shared at a long table or in a small bar or restaurant where other pilgrims are also eating the pilgrim menu. On the road, although we may only pass some and be passed by others, there is a gentle camaraderie that can be expressed in conversation or in a simple “Buen camino!”. Many people (as was the case in France, too) wish us this or give us some other greeting which is telling us that they recognise us as pilgrims and wish us a good journey. It lightens the load and adds power to your step, it really does.

So, today we were a little under the weather and, although we covered around the 30km again it took a while and we were not sure if we were going to do it at first. My feet seemed to be determined not to settle into the boots today and Alison was feeling pretty rough. The camera had been put in the little bag we use for ‘phones, passports, etc when we have stopped for the night and I had packed the thing away in the bottom of my sack without realising it was there. So, because we had other things to deal with I left it where it was.

As a result we missed taking pictures of Viana. I had not taken any on the wy in because it was too wet and the camera was having tantrums (shorting out and telling me the batteries were dead, etc) so we have none of the aubergue which is on the top couple of floors of a tsall building next to the crumbling facade of the church. I missed photographing the two storks nesting on a high wall above the roofs of the town and the beautiful plaza with its colonnaded sides and the various modern and ancient statues within the centre of the town. I also missed the way out through the medieval streets with their overhanging balconies and eccentrically edged walls. The banks of vineyards and huddles of olive and nut trees we passed as we climbed out and over the side of the valley heading towards the higher mountain valleys filled with clouds and rain. The entrance to the next town, Logrono began with a walk by the raging river whose weir had disappeared under the torrent of brown water tumbling from under its tall stone bridge. The islands below the weir were also swamped with the powerful torrent and, as we crossed over the bridge we watched logs being swept through its arches and dragged under the brown water by large whirlpools. The sound of the river tumbling down through the valley was impressive.

Logrono is somewhere we will revisit. Its medieval streets and fine buildings are also filled with lovely shops, bars and restaurants and the place had a great atmosphere. As we left the town we walked along a series of little parks out around a large lake and then over the terraced hillside filled with vineyards and small orchards up past fields of poppies that would have made an impressionist painter salivate and up to enjoy our lunch in a little hilltop village before stopping to have a beer with a young German girl we have walked the last few days with (Hello Vera!) and a couple of young Norwegian guys walking with a young German who were sitting enjoying a beer and Vera’s company. They are all in the albergue here tonight adding their energy to the place.

And now, after having a lovely meal in a little restaurant in the village Alison has gone to bed and I am just finishing off this little note before sending it out and going to bed as well (Lights out at 10pm folks!!!).

I am still processing this whole thing, still meeting people and enjoying the journey with Alison. So much to write about, so much to do, so much still to look forward to - can there be a better description of happiness?

Now for a quick set of notes and a little rant – sorry for any repetition, it is just I will not have time to edit this before I have to send it out.

Snoring and the art of letting go – plus a rant 14/06/2010

Monday and it is Puente la Reina at the municipal refuge. Last 2 nights (Saturday and Sunday) were spent in a little hotel in Pamplona and before that we were in a little private refuge where the people in our room should have entered themselves as the Camino Snoring team in the next Olympics. In fact, I think that I spent part of the night convinced that I had worked out a way of harnessing the enormous power contained within these snores to help solve the world’s energy crisis. One of these days, instead of an alien race using us as power cells (as in the Matrix) we will just put little contraptions on snorers’ heads at night and the energy they release will keep our light’s burning and our industries working.

Ideas like this are why we are walking to Santiago....

One of the things we end up discovering is that we are able to accept the least and not expect anything more. This may seem like a good thing if you are not doing it yourself. From our point of view it means that the effects of any hardships we face are reduced considerably as we do not expect anything more and accept what we are allowed for that day.

Ah, true humility, I hear you say. Ah, you are finding harmony and acceptance, you are living life more simply – if only we could all do that!

Well, think of the story of the snoring I have just given in a relatively light fashion. Now consider this.

We stayed 2 nights in Pamplona in a small hotel (a lovely room on the fourth (top) floor with 3 other rooms on the same level). The first night there was loud music in the large plaza a short distance away which stopped about 10pm and we didn’t mind. It felt like we were in a city! Then, our last night was marked by a musical interlude. A short time after settling down for the night (we were getting up at 6 and leaving by 7 at the latest) someone started to play short interludes of music. God knows what they were doing but it was short, loud phrases of music. Much of it was the same phrase repeated. Sometimes it progressed but mostly it just repeated and repeated with small variations of length. It was like someone or a small group, endlessly rehearsing the same intro.

It kept me awake for a while but I managed to settle down and I kept succeeding in ignoring it for a while then it would become more intrusive until it woke me up again. Alison closed the windows hoping it was from outside but it was from within the hotel (probably on the same floor as us).

Eventually, I asked Alison what the time was (thinking it was around midnight by then). It was 3am!!! I got up and went to the door, opened it and shouted “SSHHOOOSHH!”. It paused then continued. I went to the loo then flushed it and headed for the door again, intent on wandering down the corridor in the nude, banging on the door and telling them to stop. But the noise ended as I opened the door so I went back to bed.

The point is not that I have become more tolerant. We were paying good money to enjoy a restful time in a nice place and this was not acceptable. I should have stopped it shortly after it started. NOT at 3 am. I have learned to accept the minimum standard and to expect it even when I am paying for something better.

Translate this into real terms.

A homeless person is quickly stripped of the normal set of expectations, values and so on and becomes someone whose standards have been lowered to an unacceptable level but they are not aware of it and when people give them rubbish two things happen; the homeless person accepts it gratefully and uncritically and the person offering it interprets this as an acceptable level to serve/treat the homeless person. So suddenly you don’t need to treat these people the same way as you would other people, you don’t need to apply the same standards, they don’t want decent things, they don’t like or understand them, they can’t appreciate them, etc. It’s trap that is very dangerous for both sides.

Of course, this also applies in our society to people of different classes – our society is designed so the people at the top think that they somehow deserve/have earned their place and that the people at the bottom are happy there, don’t know/want any better, wouldn’t know what to do with something better, etc., So you can design an economy and a social system that takes advantage of this view and it allows you to maintain status at one level at the price of denying it to other levels of society and you have a situation where the people at the top feel justified and vindicated by the “proof” of their situations and other peoples’ as if it was all natural and based on some sort of measure of merit.
Just think... from being kept up at night by snoring people, to being kept up by some weird music to a criticism of the socio economic (class) situation in the UK. What a surprise. I actually have a lot more on this elsewhere.... but I won’t bore you any more......

One final point which relates to this. I heard that the new minister in charge of destroying our higher education system has said that students are a burden on the tax payer........

A BURDEN ON THE TAX PAYER????

Our education system is an investment that society makes in the future of the country and we should be investing very heavily indeed if we want to be even a half decent, half successful country in the future. To not invest would be a massively stupid mistake. Investing in this way is the wisest way to spend our taxes, Idiot!

Of course, what he is planning is a two or three tier higher education system where the rich and a small hand full of lucky people enjoy decent higher education and the rest will do 2 year (mainly “vocational”) degrees without holidays in a cut down university (Tesco Uni Plc) near their home. This was Thatcher’s dream in the early 80’s along with charging fees (what ever happened to that idea?)!

Anyway, what is a burden on the tax payer is not just spending our taxes paying moronic politicians like him. There are PUBLIC SCHOOLS, for example ETON that enjoy charitable status. We, the tax payers, subsidise PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!! They are a burden on the tax payer. If we want to cut back on spending on education shouldn’t they be first on the list?

And of course, many private health organisations also enjoy charity status. If you want to cut back on health spending let’s stop using tax payers money to subsidise private health care.

I could go on but perhaps you can all add something to the list and perhaps someone can start a FACEBOOK page on this.

My standards are too low now for anyone to listen to what I have to say anymore.

Sorry about the rant.......