River, estuary and now the sea. There was something about today that felt like a turning point. Overnight rain cleared, leaving the day rinsed clean. The Warren had never looked so empty of visitors and I kept having to remind myself that this really was June. So this was the moment to strike out along the most deserted section of the Camino

Something about the quality of the light, the sand and the buffeting wind felt positively European. We ran about giddily with outstretched arms, failing to take off. Actual seabirds seemed to have returned to a more natural set of behaviours. With no pasties or chips to steal, they lined the groynes like notes on a stave, facing seaward in search of a more natural lunch.

Elke remarked on the shadows made by parallel grooves in the sand behind small, perfect shells. She said they looked like a smudged charcoal drawing. I was fascinated by the long coils of elegant seaweed draped over the shore line. There were no feet to disturb them except our own.

As we walked back there were more surreal remnants of the resort. One or two kiosks were operating but most were boarded over, including the rides on the little funfair.

But it had been an invigorating walk and lovely to have such a beautiful stretch of coastline more or less to ourselves. We agreed that we did feel lighter, more optimistic, in spite of the many challenges that doubtless lay ahead. A corner had been turned.

I am stuck in Pola de Allende, waiting for the weather to clear. It is quite cold at the moment and misty with intervals of heavy rain. People have warned me that the next section of the Camino is the most difficult. There are long stretches of the route which do not pass through many places which are inhabited, except by maybe a solitary hill farmer. No cafes are open. Nowhere to buy coffee. I will have to prepare all my meals myself. But then, I am getting used to that.

Stretches of the road can be misleading and it is easy to get lost, especially in bad weather, so I am taking time to rest up a little, slow stitching. Usually I make practical objects from scraps of up-cycled woollen blanket, which I embroider using yarn from abandoned tapestry kits and the like. I find these in thrift stores. Or should I say, used to find. None-essential shops are supposed to be opening next week, and although I dearly miss rummaging through secondhand book stores, it will be a while before I feel like such an activity would be a risk worth taking. Whoever could have guessed just a few months ago that such a benign activity would feel so threatening?

So I have decided to make myself an amulet, a little jester figure. It is the first thing I have made which combines clay and wool. Tomorrow I will paint his face, make a hat and a little pair of leather boots, make his wrists and hands (which will be tricky) and decorate his clothes with bright stitches. The function of the jester was to speak truth to power. I think he might come in handy.

The essential joy in a game of Follow my Leader is the temporary abandonment of all responsibility for one’s own life. This can happen at any age, in my experience, from childhood games in the school playground to campus games in Schools of Theatre and Performance. The core ingredient is one of trust, between the leader and the led, so we know that each convoluted journey will be worthwhile in the long run. That we won’t be merely led astray.

Today’s journey to Campiello will not allow us to linger along the way. There will be some challenging steep up and downhill sections. I will cycle part way and walk some of the rest. But I will avoid my local estuary route to do this today because lately it has turned into the kind of Follow my Leader game that I am keen to avoid.

Partly this is to do with the state of the tide which has deposited a lot of seaweed high up against the bank. So although there is a wide expanse of mud and water, only a narrow strip of exposed gravel is comfortable to walk on without slipping. People with their dogs and children, couples on their own, file along this pathway. It is not clear who exactly is leading these groups. There are very few places to pass and maintain social distance.

A rope swing dangles enticingly from an oak on part of the route. This is a good element to add to the game – adults and children take it in turns to swing out over the mud. But the wisdom of joining in is questionable, as the tree itself is also swinging out precariously from the bank, and, judging from its horrified expression, believes this game to be poorly judged.

Part of my current dilemma is having zero faith in my political leaders, some of whom do not lead by example and who appear to be no longer guided by the science, in all but lip service. At daily briefings, chief scientific advisors are now often most conspicuous by their absence. I know that statistics around testing were misrepresented. I know that, in spite of their promises, the track and trace system will not be fully functional before September. Part of me fears that the elderly, the frail, people of colour, the socially disadvantaged are being sacrificed on the altar of capitalism, are collateral damage on the march towards ‘kick starting the economy’, whatever that means.

So I guess I am going to have to take responsibility for my own life and make my own decisions about the route I want to take, until, hopefully, we all make it to the other side.

Didn’t make it as far as Tineo yesterday, so spent the night under virtual stars, in a virtual ditch near Santa Eulalia. That was the silver lining, because if I had pressed on to my original planned destination I would not have made the small detour and discovered this remarkable church with its late Roman wall paintings of flowers and birds. Luckily too, being Saturday, it was open.

Wild camping must be good for insomnia. I slept well and when I began to cycle my knee held out for the full distance. From the saddle I could meditate on the growing garden. The courgettes have produced their first tiny fruits, the tomatoes have begun to flower and the kale is growing so fast I can almost see it happening. It is also a moment when resident wildlife assume that my veg plot is their personal gourmet bistro.

Like many people during lockdown I have been more aware of the birds that visit my garden, and very grateful for the bird feeder outside my kitchen window that was a birthday present earlier in the year. But the birds are not interested in these caterpillars, even when, helpfully, I collect them up and put them on the bird-table. Maybe they just don’t taste very nice. Even though they are essentially ravioli stuffed with puréed kale.

Had to abandon this morning’s cycling session half way through. A twinge below my right knee, at the site of a real world cycling injury last year, was a signal that I might have been pedalling too far. I thought that if I switched to walking the virtual Camino as much as possible, instead of cycling, the pain in my leg would then subside. So I decided to check out a gentle circuit of a moorland village that involved crossing three bridges.

A sign at the start of the walk seemed to answer some of yesterday’s questions. The adjacent pub was closed for normal business but on its notice board I read that it was now supplying the village with bread, serving the community as a micro bakery. Bread ordered the day before would be freshly baked for collection the next day, and as I read this, the bells in the church opposite rang out to mark the hour.

Downhill from the pub, the road eventually became a track to the river where there was a choice of crossings – a wooden footbridge or a long line of stepping stones. It would have been simpler and safer to use the bridge but the stepping stones across the gently flowing amber water were irresistible. I was feeling very tired from a sleepless night and my knee was still sore but I knew I had to cross by the stones. They were not in fact as slippery as they first appeared. I did not lose my balance. The crossing was much easier, one step at a time, than I had originally thought it might be.

There were two more bridges to cross in order to complete the circuit of the village. One was an eighteenth century flood defence, elevating the road from the moor, and the other was older and stately.

The final stretch took us up a steep footpath to the churchyard in the centre of the village. The church was shut apologetically but there was a collection of groceries outside main door waiting to be delivered to the local food-bank.

We did not see anyone else out walking. It was utterly peaceful. I may not have travelled far today on my virtual camino, but it was good to take things slowly, a step at a time.

This was a strange day on my virtual camino and I’m still not sure how to process it. Firstly, after months of cooking every main meal from scratch for three adults I decided to order up a lockdown take away from our favourite vegetarian brunch cafe that we were no longer able to patronise in the usual way. It was to be a real treat, a mega bean and mushroom burger with slaw, skin on fries and chilli on the side.

The idea was to go for a walk on the moor before dropping down to a town in the valley at our appointed pick up slot. My companions had fixated on the burger idea without really buying in to the pre takeaway walk. One of them had forgotten to wear proper footwear and had slipped on a pair of old flip-flops that were actually mine and did not properly fit her. The other companion was convinced that we had to head back to the car and drive to our burger collection point after about 10 minutes of walking. I knew we would be very early if we did this, but no-one was listening to me. We ended up sitting for over twenty minutes in a car park, waiting for our food to be ready for us, like we had not eaten properly for a week. In fact I had cooked a hearty vegetable, lentil and butterbean soup for lunch which we had eaten with bread and cheese about four hours previously. Food. It has become extremely important recently. Fortunately I had cycled so much earlier in the day that I did not need extra moorland miles to reach my Camino destination.

It was windy and quite cold up on the top, but warm and sunny in the valley. As we drove into the town centre, I saw a group of people not all of whom were bothering to distance themselves socially. A woman stood in the centre holding a banner which read This is not a Moment This is a Movement.

I realised that it was a gathering of people in support of the Black Lives Matter marches that are taking place in many cities. Naturally it was not possible to travel to an urban centre and join in a march with a larger group of people. This was just a small town in the West Country, so although it was a modest turn out, I guess it was to their credit that they had managed to organise anything at all. Everyone appeared to be well fed and healthy. Everyone was white. Some had chosen to wear black clothes. There were no police in sight.

Leaving my companions to their car park vigil, I slipped out to see what was going on at closer quarters. Some were taking it in turns to make what they described as pledges which seemed to be promises to behave differently or to do something constructive to eradicate institutionalised racism. Others made more general, emotional speeches about injustice. There were sporadic bursts of applause. I struggled to get my head around the disconnect between the environment of the wide empty moorland I had just left and the sunny domestication all around me. It was not that I disagreed with anything they were saying. I agreed with everything that I heard being spoken. It was just so odd to hear it all being enacted in that place, on that day, in that context and I am not sure why. I was not sure who they thought they might be talking to who did not already agree with them.

How did they hope that what I was witnessing in that moment could be extended to become a movement? I could not imagine how anyone there might have experienced racial discrimination personally. So, for a moment, it felt like it sometimes feels when the media talk about the dreadful impact of the virus, like it is being played out elsewhere, with other people who are strangers to me and so only indirectly relevant to my life. Believing in the coronavirus, if you live in Devon, is an act of faith. You know it is out there, like everyday racism, but you have to take other peoples’ word for it, because you live in a completely disconnected, little white world.

But in the teeth of this pandemic there are terrible collisions between the narratives around susceptibility to covid, ethnicity and social deprivation. It is therefore darkly, poetically and desperately tragic that George Floyd’s death by asphyxiation should mirror the way a coronavirus victim typically dies. This idea is now hooked up in our collective imaginations and it is terrifying. So maybe I should not be unsettled by the small town protest. Everyone, including me, in that gathering is culpable, everyone is susceptible and we do need to say it out loud.

If it was not for Elke I would have missed the horse in a zebra coat, peacefully grazing at the top of a field. But it was me who spotted the train in a tree. It was a small toy carriage, placed into a fold near the base of the trunk. It is just visible, as a splash of bright green, if you expand the photograph. We guessed it had been deliberately placed there to add interest to a child’s daily walk, or perhaps was a clue in a scavenger hunt. Whatever the reason for placing it there, it obviously needed to be left alone.

Through a combination of pedalling for two 20 minute sessions, added to the distance we covered during this walk, I managed to travel the 17km to Casazorrina. For lunch we had a picnic on a bench in the middle of a field overlooking wooded hilltops. I had bought falafel wraps in a supermarket and it felt really odd to be so wary of the packaging and its potential for carrying the virus, in such a rural idyll, completely devoid of other people. I sanitised my hands, unwrapped the food, sanitised my hands again, ate the food. What a palaver.

It is going to take a long time to get to San Salvador. I am aiming for another 13km tomorrow, which includes the few kilometres we need to walk to get to Salas. After wandering around the town for a bit, we will tackle the uphill section to La Espina where there will be somewhere to buy coffee and a peaceful hostel called the El Texu. Sometimes guitar playing monks call by. We may be lucky.