DAY 272 - CREIL TO ESTREES ST DENIS: 19.3 MILES (38,600 STEPS)

Thursday 19 January, 2012

19.3 miles (Total: 2619.1 miles) – 38,600 steps (Total: 5,906,401 steps)

There hadn’t been much let up in the wind or the rain overnight so it was going to be a ‘hood up, head down, iPod in’ kind of day. To my amazement, Rob and Steve got up at 7am to join me for breakfast, albeit with the plan to return to bed afterwards, but it was an impressive act of solidarity. One of the challenges I face on the walk is making good decisions and I struggle with this primarily because I am, for the large part, on my own and tired. It was wonderful to have Rob and Steve to offer advice on a number of key questions I had been wrestling with concerning the route.

Chief amongst these was whether to walk to Brussels and The Hague, which I had been putting off. I was inclined to go but it would mean doing three 130 miles weeks at a time when my body was beginning to show signs of serious wear and tear. One of the unintended by-products of a religious upbringing, which has many, many benefits, is that you prepare to live a life of guilt: guilt about not attending meetings, not achieving what you should have done etc. You end up doing things not because you want to, but because of fear of the reaction you would get if you don’t do them. It is as if God is sitting in heaven with a big stick waiting to say ‘gotcha’ the minute you step out of line. This has its benefits on a walk in which whenever I might be tempted to accept a lift in a rain storm, or hop on a passing bus, I simply picture the Almighty echoing the words of my Sunday School Superintendent, “Be Sure your sins will find you out”. So I carry on with my burden like the Spanish Jesuit priest, Father Gabriel in The Mission.

Having friends who you trust and who can puncture the illusions of the mind, and know how to do it, is one of the greatest privileges we can know; so Rob and Steve pick me up at Estrees took me to a Macdonalds for a chat. Whilst I am tucking into my McNuggets and fries, washed down with Diet Coke, they share their thoughts with me. This started with the fact that I had walked 2619 miles and that was quite a big enough achievement if I stopped now. There would be no prizes for ticking the ‘3000 miles +’ box because no one was watching anyway. If they were interested, then the only thing of interest is ‘Did he walk from Olympia, Greece to London?’ and ‘Did anything come of it?’ The answer to the former would be ‘yes’ if I went direct to Calais, and the latter would be ‘yes, possibly’ by virtue of having the meetings with political leaders in Brussels and The Hague because you were walking from Greece to London to promote the truce, not because you arrived in their offices soaked to the skin with mud on your boots. Oh and as for God, his opinion of you would have been just the same if you had stayed at home and watched the telly, because his love was never based on the condition of your activity but was instead offered unconditionally on the basis of your humanity. Point taken. Faithful are the wounds of a friend: now run along and get me a Daim McFlurry and don’t forget its chocolate not caramel sauce this time.