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.
Virtual Camino 