Every journey starts with a single step!

We are just not sure where exactly that first step is going to take place. The orginal idea was to walk from birth place to birth place - London to Schweinfurt. That would mean starting in Cable Street in East London and walking nearly two days out of London which is not the most attractive thought. Where we live here in Kent, we are just a hop and a skip away from the North Downs Way which leads us all the way to Dover. Lovely country side from the word go.


I also now have a rough idea of our route when we are on 'Le Continent'

5 A-Z "Heuvels en rivieren"
De Panne - Menen - Ronse - Ronse - Geraardsbergen – Aalst

128-O Vlaanderenroute / Oost
Aalst - Leuven - Zoutleeuw - Tongeren - Maastricht - Aachen (293km)

And last but not least we will join the E8 Long distance path
Aachen – Bonn – Koblenz – Oberwesel – Donnersberg – Worms (option: Speyer – Heidelberg) – Wertheim – Tauberbischofsheim

towards the end of this part of the route we will drop off the E8 and are on the home straight.

I am refusing to think of the pain that we will have to put ourselves through to walk 900 km in two months. I am just thinking about how we will feel when we have achieved it.

Making plans

Where Gary wants to get away from reminiscing and talk about the present – I am at the other end. I always think about the future, all those possibilities out there and come up with a string of ideas the could keep many an entrepreneur busy for years.

Of course I am also thinking in that way about our journey and its possibilities and options. I am already planning a route and am buying maps on eBay. Looking at a world map, London and Grafenrheinfeld (our destination in Germany) are nearly on the same height (does that makes sense geographically?)

I would like Gary to decide on a charity we can raise money for. Our friends, family and benefactors can set us challenges during trip and they will pay up if we achieve or people can just plain pay us anything between a penny or a pound per mile we have walked.

Perhaps we should get some sponsors to add to the money raised?? I am not fussy about logos on my back if that means dosh for a cause we are passionate about.

We have already decided that we are going to be technologically enabled pilgrims. We both love gadgets, so we are talking satellite navigation system, mobile phone, internet access, Ipods and camera with the least amount of chargers possible.

We will not be thwarted

We haven’t set a date for our journey but Doris suggested that next May might a good time of year – not too hot and not too cold. It is about 600 miles, so if we stay fit and average of 20 miles each day, it will take us about 30 days. Unfortunately, staying fit currently seems like a bigger challenge than we might have thought, with problems coming in areas we did not expect.

Since the late Summer Bank Holiday, I have felt generally tired and have had occasional spells of light-headedness. I will not bore you with the description but suffice to say that one or two were sustained and, to me, vary scary. The doctor took some blood tests but could find nothing wrong. His sage advice was that “it will pass”.

Unfortunately, yesterday afternoon, on the same day I got my blood test results, I had another brief spell of light-headedness. That made me doubt the morning’s hope that I am recovering and lead me to ponder whether there is something, less obvious, at play. I am trying to put that to the back of my mind, however, because, in my book, less obvious equals scarier.

Doris has been suffering in a different way. After a few days of discomfort, a pain in her shoulder became agony. Doris is very stoical when it comes to illness and pain, so to hear her frequently crying out in pain meant that it had to be very bad. A visit to a physiotherapist didn’t help and with no imminently available GP appointment, she succumbed to my urging and went to “Accident and Emergency” at the local hospital.

They diagnosed frozen shoulder, a debilitating condition that can, apparently take as much as thirty months to pass! (http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx?articleId=168)

Typically, Doris is refusing to be beaten and exploring ways of dealing with it. Also, I guess, we are both hoping that the initial diagnosis, in a hectic A&E department, turns out to be wrong and it is something less severe. If not, there is a specialist clinic in London that has pioneered a treatment that, while it doesn’t promise to work miracles, does claim that their treatment works within weeks rather than months.

So hopefully we will both be fit enough to do our journey, come May, and I can get on with worrying about more mundane matters such as why my Achilles tendons feel so sore every morning and how they will fair on a 600 mile walk.

The challenge of having generous thoughts

Having ended my previous entry with a generous spirit, I have been meaning to post for while, to own up to the fact that I was not always able to follow through on my generous intention.This has taught me a couple of things.

First, and practically, blogging may work best when it is contemporaneous rather than reflective. This may be the value of the medium: the ability to capture emotions as they happen, in relatively small sized bites. So things that I thought were interesting at the time look less so at this distance. Of course, it could be simply be that distance brings perspective and the thoughts were not all that interesting in the first place. Nevertheless, I will try to be more contemporary with future entries. If they turn out to be drivel, I can always delete them.

The second thing that I learned was that keeping ungenerous thoughts at bay is easier in theory than in practice. This is something that troubles me. It doesn’t trouble me in that it keeps me awake at night but I am a bit frustrated by it. I am not very proud of the fact that I can be quick to criticise and judge people.

Most of the time, I restrain myself from saying something ungenerous. Most of the time. But now and again, I hear the words just after they have left my lips, regretting it instantly. So, since the blog is devoted to my nascent spirituality, a big question for me here is: how do I stop thinking ungenerous thoughts? Because I would like to. Honest!

But before you go getting, the wrong idea, the visit from emissaries was fine and, for the most part, enjoyable. It was just that, at times, I wished there was a volume control. I think I behaved generously – most of the time.

Actually, we ended up with even more house guests, to add to the emissaries. My uncle died after a long illness and my cousin came down from Scotland for his funeral. We put up her eleven year old son or a few days, while my cousin sorted things out. She then, I am delighted to say, came to stay for a few days after the funeral. It was great to see her, despite the sad circumstances. She is a very special person and I love her dearly. She and her son only overlapped with our emissaries for a few days but then my Mum came to stay for the weekend, overlapping with my cousin and her son.

Then, on the Monday, everyone was gone. Everyone except Doris, of course - my wonderful much-loved and adored free spirit. How did I ever manage to get her to marry me? I am so very lucky.

Another voice

I finally managed to join this blog!!
We were in Germany when Gary started speaking about his pilgrimage for the first time and it immediately caught my imagination. I have been attracted to the idea of covering very long distances by foot for some time and joined the Long Distance Walking Association beginning of the year. So far it has only been an attractive idea. Our combined experience of longer walks consists of a walking holiday in Spain and a couple of ad-hoc walks in the local area.
If we want to be successful we need to put some training in as the distance we want to cover in a month is: 565 miles / 910 km (YIKES!!!!!)

My training plan is to cover the distance by Christmas this year on my treadmill and join some organised long distance walks from the end of the year onwards.

..........................900km to go


Doris

Emissaries

I mentioned that there were two things that occurred in the last two days. The second of these was the imminent arrival of Doris’s sister, husband and their too small children, to stay with us for ten days.

They are really lovely people who are always generous with their time and friendship when we visit them. Our house is, however, relatively small and, not having children, we are used to having it to ourselves. I think I find these visits a bit more of a strain than Doris, as I am an only child, whereas Doris has two sisters and two brothers.

The children are delightful but the fact is that I am not used to being around children – except when I was one! I just don’t know how to engage and participate in the games. I am not embarrassed or stuffy about it but, for me, it is a bit like looking at a car engine that isn’t working. I would like it to work but simply don’t know what to do to make it happen. I have tried, with a little success, but it is tough, especially as my German is lousy. Doris is, of course, brilliant with them.

So although I am genuinely happy to see them, but as their visit comes hard on the heels of four-day visit to Germany, I have to be honest and say that I would have preferred some time to ourselves. Ten days feels like a long time. And then this morning, I managed to reframe it and am greatly looking forward to their stay with us.

Before I go on, let me say that despite talking about spirituality in my first post, I am not a very touchy-feeling person. My Myers Briggs personality type profile (http://keirsey.com/personality/nt.html) describes me as “a Rational”. I am one of those myopic people who value truth above feelings. It is not a trait I admire in myself or others. Clearly, people are more important that an ephemeral notion of truth which, in any event, is in the eye of the beholder anyway.

Self-knowledge is great thing and I have worked hard to compensate. I still find myself, however, in situations saying, “no that is wrong” or more usually, “that film/book/programme is rubbish” without thinking about the effect of my words on the person I am speaking to – even if they are the most important person in my nlife. In short, I can seem to be a real non-caring areshole.

Disclaimer out of the way, I can now recount my reframing. What, I asked myself, if I regarded the visitors as emissaries from the place that is the destination of my pilgrimage? Should I not put aside my selfish discomfort to the welcome these….er Kings of the East? Should I not, getting biblical, wash their feet? With apologies to Satish, that one will have to be metaphorical for me.

Like a lot of reframing - mine at least – it sounded, at first, a bit ridiculous. But playing with the idea and pretending that it were true did change my attitude. What a strange thing is the human brain that it falls so easily for such trickery. But to my delight, it worked! I am now genuinely sorry that I will be away tomorrow night and will restrict my trip away next week to one rather than the usual two nights, so that I don’t miss out on seeing them.

How nice it is to have visitors – we should do it more often!

Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip

I am surprised to find myself back here already. We have not yet fixed a date for our journey but it is likely to be in the Spring of 2007, after my birthday in March, when the weather in Europe is likely to be kinder to our journey.

It is, therefore, very early to be starting this blog. I guess that it has something to do with making a public commitment to do the journey, together with the gift of some unexpected free time. So, having started, I expected that there would be some very long gaps between posts. I still think that this is still likely to be the case, unless I cannot restrain myself from commenting on the dire state of world affairs. Two things, however, occurred in the last two days, relating to our journey, about which I feel compelled to post.

Work is a little quiet at the moment because of holidays, sickness and a head butt outside a pub. This gave me the time yesterday to begin the blog. It also allowed me to leave work a little earlier than is my usual habit. In the spirit of our journey, I decided to walk to London Bridge station, rather than get a tube part of the way, as I usually do.

Half way there, I called Doris on my mobile to tell her that I would be home early. As I made to cross the road, gleefully leaving a message on our voicemail saying that I would be home early and I had started training, my ankle turned as I stepped off of the curb and my other calf muscle snapped like an overstretched elastic band. My two beat yelps and subsequent anguish were caught in full colour. I hobbled the rest of the to London Bridge and Doris kindly collected me at our local station.

Never can there have been a less auspicious start to a journey not even yet started.


PS I should have mentioned before that this is a joint blog of me and Doris

Rational cynic gets spiritual - shock horror!

It started in Germany and it will end in Germany. Maybe.

Together with my wife, I am going to walk from my birthplace, in the East End of London, to her birthplace in the north west of Bavaria. It will be my pilgrimage.

Now I know that this may not sound like a very religious pilgrimage but I am a secular kind of guy and it will be a spiritual journey for reasons I hope to explain. But first, let me tell you how it came about.

Earlier this year, my wife, who will henceforth be referred to as Doris, was listening to the radio while doing creative things in her studio. As I wandered through, I was stopped in my tracks by a mellifluous voice. It turned out to be Satish Kumar (http://www.resurgence.org/satish/index.htm).

Something about what he said made me realise that spirituality need not be equated with religion, or new age fads, as I had always done. And it made me realise that I had never given any real attention to the spiritual aspect of my life. This was quite a revelation to a secular person like me, raised at the altar of science and fact. One who always skipped the spirituality section of those life planning sessions that one is forced to endure on “executive” training programmes.

Although I only caught the end of the interview with Satish, there was enough to make me to want know more. So I bought his autobiography, No Destination, which I am in the process of reading. It is a beautiful book by a remarkable man. It is the sort of book that I enjoy reading now and again to get an injection of, dare I say, spiritual beauty.

Last week, visiting Doris’s family in Germany, I was reading the book. Satish explained that in Indian culture, it was a tradition to complete a pilgrimage before the end, I think, of one’s fiftieth year. He went on to describe his own pilgrimage, at that age, from Devon to Iona, visiting the holy places of Britain - an Indian former Jain monk on a spiritual journey around other people’s religious sites!

What really struck me about Satish’s description of that journey was that the much spirituality came not from the religious sites, often no more than museums, but from the people he met and the nature around him. (At this point, I have to hurriedly add that this is my own interpretation of what he wrote, filtered through my own lense. If I have misrepresented him, I offer him my profound apologies.)

Reading this, with my fiftieth birthday approaching next March, my subconscious began to contemplate the idea of a pilgrimage. By the time that I told Doris about it, I knew that it was something I wanted to do. Doris being Doris, the most open-minded free spirit I have ever met, was completely supportive. The only question was where to? And indeed, where from?

To cut a long story short, as my mum would say, but never does, we decided to walk from where I was born to where Doris was born – some six hundred miles. No cars, no buses, no planes – just a boat across the channel.

So yes, it may be a relatively secular pilgrimage but I know it will be good for my spirit. And it is after all, a journey to the birthplace of my Goddess.