Last year’s plain candles, revealed a week at a time, on one side; this year’s added, week by week, on the other side. The sunrise was a bonus.
Like the sun in the morning sky,
(COMMON WORSHIP Morning Prayer, Advent: antiphon to Benedictus)
the Saviour of the world will dawn;
like rain upon the meadows,
the Christ will come down upon us.
This year marks the completion of 3 trails:
A year ago, I realized that I had walked most of the Thames path in bits and pieces, and decided to make sure I had covered both sides of the river within London. My Residents’ Association was offering a month’s free ride on the Thames Clipper to help with the stretches near Putney, which is where I saw the kingfisher posing for the camera.
Then a winter break was cancelled, and I decided to walk from Goring to Oxford with two overnight stops, in Dorchester and Abingdon. Another cancelled holiday, at the end of April, took me from Oxford to the source via Newbridge, Lechlade and Cricklade. It was a dry spring, so there was no water at the source.
This walk also started in 2021, and was done in three sections, all with Ramblers Holidays. I started with the middle section, staying in Montgomery, as the dates were the most convenient. Then, this year, I walked the northern section in July, picking up a shell on Prestatyn Beach, and the southern in October. The end of the trail overlooks the Severn Estuary, but at low tide the water was too far to throw the shell, so I left it on the memorial block where we had the group photo.
The culmination of a project which started in 2019, when I discovered that Friends of Southwark Cathedral were planning to walk from Southwark to Canterbury in the May Bank Holiday Week of 2020. I joined the planning group on the last few recces. Alas, Covid-19 restrictions meant that the walk was impossible in 2020, so we postponed it to 2021.
However, in August 2020, restrictions were lifted and the government encouraged us to “Eat Out to Help Out” so I decided to walk the route in a very hot week, mostly by myself but in company with Dan on one stage, and Lucy and Dan on the final one. I enjoyed it so much that I backpacked from Winchester to Box Hill at the end of the month and completed the stretch from Box Hill to Otford where the two routes meet in three daywalks.
Covid returned, and in spring 2021 the walk had to be postponed again, but this time with a difference: instead of walking every day for a week, the Friends would tackle one stage on the third Saturday of every month from January to September 2022. Apart from the penultimate stage which had to be rearranged for September 10 because of a rail strike, it was third time lucky, and we were welcomed to tea with Friends of Canterbury Cathedral, followed by Choral Evensong and pizza. I missed the second stage, being stuck in overnight in Bournemouth by Storm Eunice, but walked it backwards to compensate.
I decided to offer the same walks, with slight variations, to South Bank Ramblers. We were also affected by strikes, but completed the route in November.
Friends of Southwark Cathedral continue the pilgrimage tradition with monthly walks: Southwark to St Albans in 5 easy stages from January to May.
My own plans for 2023 are five days solo on the Wysis Way (Wye to Isis) joining Offa’s Dyke to the Thames Path as soon as we return to British Summer Time at the end of March, and as much as I can manage of the Camino Del Norte from the French/Spanish Atlantic border (Hendaye/Irun) in the direction of Santiago de Compostella in September/October.
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“Why are so many people flying to Bulgaria?” a fellow-pilgrim asked me as we waited to board the plane. “I know why we are going, but why are they?”
I didn’t know why we were going, but I hoped that, sooner or later, someone would tell us. No-one ever did.
Perhaps it was because a previous pilgrimage, with the same group leader and the same tour company, had enjoyed a visit to Romania, and Bulgaria is just next door.
I thought it might be envisaged as the first stage to establishing a link with Christians there, to mutual benefit.
At our opening Eucharist, Andrew chose a gospel reading where Jesus invited his disciples to come away and rest after their missionary activity. Could we, in a busy programme, find space for relaxation and reflection?
I am still searching for that time of reflection. Perhaps this blog will help me.
Goodbye to my old blog, and welcome back to the one I first thought of. In 2016 I abandoned my first attempt, “Emerita”, in wordpress.com, and developed barmoss.com using the more versatile wordpress.org, with my own choice of URL which was less pretentious and easier to remember. Now barmoss.com has become too full of menus and submenus, and my hosting company wants too much money. So, once this is up and running, I shall kill it off. Even if there were a way to transfer the laboriously typed content over to the new site, I want to start with a clean slate.
My virtual journey, Around the World in 80 Books, has crossed the Dardanelles to Istanbul. Heading for the Danube, then mostly north-west back to England.
At the midpoint of my virtual journey I am a long way from home. Here’s the extract from my trail on goodreads.com. You can follow my journey through the Americas here.
40: ANTARCTICA: Antarctica
**** Pete Wilkinson, From Deptford to Antarctica: The Long Way Home. What an appropriate title for my half-way point in this journey ATW! Deptford is just upstream from Greenwich, where I live, and the author was born in the same year as me, 1946. After dipping in an out of a number of jobs, he discovered a passion for the environment, which led him first to Friends of the Earth, and then to Greenpeace. The core of this book is taken from the logs of the five Greenpeace missions to Antarctica which he led, and the last one, two years later, where he helped to demolish the over-wintering base.
His voyages began and ended in New Zealand, and I was tempted to pop over there and tick off OCEANIA. But I have two more regions of America to “visit”, so it’s back to Tierra del Fuego, hoping I can be dropped off in the Chilean part.
In my virtual journey “Around the World in 80 Books”, I am leaving South Africa and crossing to Brazil. You can see the African part of the journey here.
I have now “visited” 25 countries, and have copied the record onto pages in the Books section of this site. So far there are two pages, England to Malta (complete) and Africa (in progress).
emeritablog: life after work