Confession: I haven’t a clue where I am, virtual camino wise. I have completely lost track. Today I received a message from my daughter to say that she had just completed a mammoth bike ride and was now only 4kms away from the finish line ! I am very impressed and tempted to say that I am not far behind, but to be honest I am not sure that is true. So I am going to say that I am in Lugo. That is probably an underestimate rather than an exaggeration and it is an interesting city to hang about in. There are places that serve free tapas with wine, delicious bakeries and good coffee. So Lugo it is.

On the way here I became a bit distracted by another writing project. I have been writing episodes of an experimental novel and circulating sections from it to friends who have been reading and kindly providing feedback. I am very nearly at the end of the narrative. In fact I think I will cross the finishing lines of both projects more or less simultaneously. Because I make things as well as write, I am constructing a series of 3D illustrations for the novel, including models of the main characters. Today I realised that l also needed some hag stones, which feature in the final section, so off I went to the nearest pebble beach.

It was a warm, still, humid kind of day. A few swimmers braved the calm water. A few people sat about at beach cafe tables eating crab sandwiches. There was no sign of the stone shifters who had carefully arranged the pebbles into a long design the length of the beach. But a couple of pirates seemed to be selling the day’s catch from their boats. I walked across the shoreline hopefully. Amongst the countless millions of stones there must, I thought be at least a couple with holes through the middle.

Geologists claim that it is a mistake to wander along, head down, searching for the particular rock you are interested in. What you have to do is sit down in one place and sift through the stones beside you for at least ten minutes. I found, using a combination of these two strategies, only one pierced stone. But what I did discover was that virtually every pebble on that beach was beautiful, even when dry. It was hard to limit myself to a couple of handfuls. I will have to go back and search again for hag stones, but I am very pleased with everything that I did not expect to find

It only took a few days without any access to the internet to make me feel completely disorientated, in terms of the virtual Camino specifically, and, less specifically, disorientated in terms of my real world daily routine. I was now cut off from physically distant friends and relations but also less able to keep in touch with local support, online shopping, Netflix, the Daily Briefing. One thing I really noticed as I swapped Newsnight on iPlayer and BBC podcasts before I went to sleep, for picking up an actual book and reading it, was just how tired I was. I was absolutely exhausted. Not sure how or why lockdown, complete and partial, has this effect, but access to the internet had disguised it. It was possible, addictively possible, to browse news items, statistics and data for hours without realising this. Reading books however. That takes proper energy.

Here is one that I am enjoying at the moment

It is interesting to consider collections in museum archives as extensions of the personalities of the archivists. Not sure why I had not stopped to think about this before because the stuff we keep in our homes has that obvious link.

Yesterday I completed a section of the Camino in the company of fellow pilgrims. In other words with a group of female friends who were raising funds for our local hospice by taking part in the annual Sleepwalk. In normal times a massive group of women, dressed in their night attire, walk together. Yesterday we had to limit our group size to six and choose our own socially distanced route. The energy exchange was also noticeably different in the real world, compared to virtually cycling, for example, on an exercise bike. I hardly noticed the miles pass by as we chatted and shared information about what we could see along the way.

Perhaps the word I am searching for to describe the positive energy from such a gathering is fellowship. Chaucer knew about this. Nothing too intense. Nothing too demanding. Just a gentle exchange of energy in the real world. A bit like reading a good book, while sleepwalking. Ok maybe that is a metaphor which does not really work. But what definitely did work was the power of our little gathering to reaffirm an appreciation of our locality, of the beauty on our doorsteps and the views in the distance where there are other trails to follow. To be reminded that in spite of everything, there are still things to enjoy and things to look forward to.

When our blue planet slips finally altogether out of view through the cabin window, and you know it will be at least three years before you might return and see it again, what you have to do is tell yourself that you are no longer an earthling, you are a Martian. Sound words of advice from Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweikart. If you are unable to do this, then you will never be an astronaut. What you have to do is fall out of love with your old life and fall in love with your new one.

It is this attitude of mind, counsels Rusty, that will get us through the pandemic because the old normal is not going to return, not next week, not next month, not next year. We had all better learn how to fall in love with our new normal because it might be three years before a vaccine is generally available. It might be never.

So as part of this readjustment I am spending time as I travel along my virtual camino reminding myself about what I do NOT miss about the way I used to live my life. Here is a preliminary list:

• Sitting in traffic and all the attendant behaviours associated with traffic – the tailgaters, the under-takers, the drivers that join carriageways from slip-roads at 100mph relying on only their lack of imagination to justify their actions, the unpredictability of swerving vehicles who fail to indicate ever
• The special kind of hell that is the motorway service station or airport lounge
• Hours spent waiting for trains that fail to arrive, that are delayed, that are dirty, that are populated by people with whom I would not normally want to spend any amount of time
• Being ignored at a bar while other customers get served before me, paying for over-priced drinks and struggling to find anywhere comfortable to consume them while other people’s coats protect limited seating, before finding it impossible to hear or be heard above the hubbub
• queuing to use a public lavatory
• Having to confront my less than satisfactory reflection in a clothes store changing room or hairdresser’s mirror
• looking at my watch before the interval in a dreary piece of live theatre
• Overly long and loud cinematic experiences
• Mediocre guitar/mandolin/drum solos and vocal performances
• Waiting to be seated, waiting to be served, waiting for disappointingly average food to arrive, paying the eye watering bill
• Trawling through high street emporia in a state of high anxiety failing to find the perfect gift
• Work place bitchiness, banter and tittle tattle
• Being button holed at parties by people who love only the sound of their own voice and do not share my values or politics
• Dog owners in public places who expect the entire world to love their pets as much as they do and then justify investigating muzzles in your crotch as ‘just being friendly’
• The choreography of seat bagging in coffee houses and bistros where entire tables become somebody’s home office
• Bad baristas
• Wading through acres of plastic tat in garden centres before locating the limited plant selection
• National collections in museums and art galleries that can only be glimpsed over other people’s shoulders for seconds before being pressured to move on
• Being told off for touching artworks or for standing too close
• The general exhaustion of consuming culture in city breaks
• Having to listen to guides in rooms in National Trust properties out of a misplaced desire to alleviate the inherent boredom of the duty they have voluntarily signed up for
• Feigning an interest in the interiors of houses owned by a white privileged elite, on the back of slavery or plundering the third world
• The five second serotonin rush of an impulse buy followed by weeks of regret
• The accumulation of clutter created by the acquisition of ‘bargains’, artificially reduced from a misleading original price
• Gallery openings where the artwork is secondary to ‘networking’
• The pointless faff that accompanies most formal occasions

.. I could go on. But I will spare you more of what has obviously descended into rant. I have moved scores of times in my life, from one home to another, from one part of the world to another, from one job to another and I think Rusty’s advice has a lot to commend it. After a short period of mourning, fall out of love with your old life and learn to love your new one. I also think I would make an excellent astronaut, if I was not so easily motion sick, claustrophobic and afraid of flying.

This virtual camino is a secular journey, mapping daily exercise during a pandemic against an ancient pilgrim route in Northern Spain. Originally I intended to travel virtually with distant family members I had not seen for many weeks or months and I now share my posts on this site with my oldest daughter. She lives hundreds of miles away in Edinburgh while I live West Country, at the opposite end of the country. I am not really sure when we will be able to see each other again as neither of our households are close enough to be ‘bubbled’, nor are we living alone. My own social bubble now includes my 86 year old father who lives independently, under two hours away from me. It was good to be able to see him the other day, give him a hug and share a cup of tea inside the house as it rained torrentially outside. Driving up and back again felt bit like travelling inside a fountain.

As lockdown restrictions ease, a friend contacted me with information about sites that we could possibly walk to together. She knew that the Camino was not a spiritual journey as such but sent me a map of every holy well in the county

Turns out that we are spoilt for choice. Holy wells and fountains are pretty much everywhere. She was particularly keen to walk to a chapel on a hill called St Petrox or sometimes, St Elfrida. It is slap bang in the middle of Torquay, a place I have not visited since before lockdown, as it was one of the first covid hotspots in the UK, back in March.

Fortunately though for Torbay, this initial outbreak was associated with GPs, returning from an Italian skiing holiday, and their surgery, adjacent to a care home which they visited frequently. So early on, contact tracing was thorough and PPE not scarce. The local hospital’s emergency crew swung into action, equipped local care workers from the start and gave them appropriate training. They were told to imagine that the virus on their hands would be sticky, like Nutella or honey, and to bear this in mind when washing and using sanitiser. There are over 90 care homes in Torbay, yet mercifully so far, though high for Devon, the death rate has been remarkably light in a national context. If only the entire country could have been dealt with so effectively.

The destination I am heading for today, along the virtual camino, is A Fonsagrada. It also has a holy fountain, surrounded by myth and legend, partly because local people are puzzled by why it should flow so vigorously, so high up in the mountains. Like many holy wells it is also famed for its healing waters. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, and carefully sanitised.

It has taken two days to reach Berducedo, ducking out to cycle between heavy downpours. In between I have been listening to podcasts, including one that featured Afua Hirch. Listening to her bright, energetic and insightful commentary made me try to articulate inwardly how I felt about my own Britishness, my own identity, and as I did so I became increasingly aware of the failure of the language I had at my disposal to do this coherently. On this Camino, I have discovered that I no longer have the vocabulary to use to express something that had formally felt so fundamental that I had not really bothered to think much about it. So not only could I not say what I meant, but I could no longer know what I thought, and this surprised me.

The little jester I had begun to work on a couple of days previously now assumed a particular kind of importance. How was it possible now to speak truth to power? What was the appropriate language in which to do this? It is not OK to use humour to disguise racist behaviours and assumptions. Old TV shows just yesterday have been reassessed and entire series or individual episodes of some have been pulled from Netflix. But trying to find what is OK , to know, for example, how and when to use humour, is fraught with difficulty. And how shall we speak about the past? How do we stop falling into a kind of collective amnesia? Is the only legitimate form of satire one that is directed squarely at ourselves, and not say, at our prime minister or the president of America?

The figure of the jester, alone in the spotlight, is mulling this over, trying to work it out. It is inadvisable to proceed on a long journey in a newly reconfigured world without at least a phrasebook.