Why Santiago? If it was a great cycle journey we were after, why not and End to End (Lands End to John O’Groats) or L’Etape du Tour (preceding the route of the Tour de France). If it was a religious journey, why not Iona or Canterbury or Rome?

The simple reason is that Santiago was the place gave birth to the idea of going in the first place. If Gus hadn’t mentioned it that night at the pub, if he had been at home marking that night or if the Arsenal match I was listening to on the radio had gone to extra time or some conversation-worthy event had taken place that day, we might never have talked about Santiago at all.

The other reasons for going to Santiago emerged after we had decided to go. They kept emerging; long thin threads that connected us to the place, each of them unremarkable, some of them almost insubstantial but all of them together twisted into a rope that could draw us there.

To begin with, Santiago and St Andrews had been mediaeval Europe’s two most important places of pilgrimage outside Rome because they were the only ones to boast relics of the apostles. There must have been people from St Andrews who went to Santiago and vice-versa. Added to that, Gus had been a student at Santiago University; I had been a student at St Andrews and we both treasured those experiences. Gus is a Spanish speaker; I speak French, Ken is a Fifer so, apart from Flanders, we had the route covered linguistically.

The notion of connections was quickly seized upon. We wanted to weave a story that combined St Andrews and Santiago with a few threads of ourselves sewn in.

For Gus and I this is not just about a sense of place; it's personal. For we are embroiled in the curious affair of the Ceres doppleganger:

Iain the builder is loading his van outside the contractor’s yard in Ceres. He does this most mornings at more or less the same time; just before 8am. Looking up, he sees a cyclist winding up to cruising speed on the St Andrews Road.

“Morning Gus!” he cries with a hearty wave. The cyclist looks up at him and back at the horizon. Iain, seeing the spectacles and the dark hair and the odd bits of fluorescent clothing, takes that as a silent nod of greeting and returns to his task. “Strange guy,” thinks Iain. “Sometimes he says good morning and sometimes not.”

Ten minutes later, his van is fully laden, doors closed and he is ready for the off.

“Morning Iain!” He turns to see the cyclist bearing down upon him again on the road out to St Andrews, the glasses, the dark hair the odd bits of fluorescent clothing. How does he do that? How does he get to appear from the same direction twice? And why? Confused, he nods, raises half a hand and the cyclist is past.

“Odd chap”, thinks Gus, as he pedals past the 30 miles per hour signs. “Sometimes he speaks and other times he doesn’t. Perhaps he is moody. He should take up cycling. What a beautiful morning! It’s erotic!”

Half an hour later, Gus and I meet at the door of the showers: he still in his odd bits of fluorescent clothing, mine in my bag.

"Nice tail wind this morning!"
"Yes, but it'll be tough going back!"

Shortly after I first met Gus, we had a conversation in the Ceres Inn about frameless glasses; the ones where the legs and bridge are attached to the lenses by discreet gold screws. We both had them and our problem was that we both kept breaking them. Whether or not this conversation contributed to my resolve, I am not sure, but a few weeks later I gave up on the fragile vanity of my minimal specs and bought another pair, with metal frames and small oval lenses.

“I’ve got new glasses! I think these ones will be better.” There was a pause. Gus and I stared at each other, as if in a mirror.
“I’ve got new glasses, too.” I said. They were identical.

My sister gave me a present of a waxed outdoor coat. The first time I wore it to the Ceres Inn, Gus appeared wearing an identical one.

On one of our recent daunders, Ken took us to an ancient monument. I did not pay attention to what it was we were going to see and when we arrived at the little stone house, beautifully preserved, I followed Gus through the small wooden door to the inside of it.

“Oh dear!” I said nervously as I scanned the hundreds of pigeon holes for signs of occupation. “It’s a doocot. I’m not good at birds. If there had been a single one in here, I would be out of here, on my bike and away faster than you could imagine.”

“Do you have a bird phobia, too?” enquired Gus. “I do. I call it being ornithophobic. I’m terrified of them.”

I have a haircut, he has a haircut. I miss my plane to Edinburgh one day: he misses his to London the next.

“Are you brothers?” asked the Warden of the Hostel on Islay. It is hard to say no.

Born in opposite hemispheres, we are often mistaken one for the other and we seem to tread curiously parallel paths. Travelling together from St Andrews to Santiago we might have a chance to explore this.

Over our Wednesday pints, we considered why it was that we were doing the trip and what we might gain from it, apart from thighs like chickens. Experienced pilgrims stress that it is a mistake to set out with fixed objectives in mind. Better, it seems, to set out with an open mind and accept, with gratitude, what you are offered along the way.

Pilgrimage is first and foremost, a journey. So, for example, if we get as far as Auxerre by bicycle, we can remark that we have completed one third of our distance. Pilgrimage is about a sense of place and connection of places, but also, because many have gone before, a connection across time. So, when we get to Auxerre, I will be able to remark that its 5th century bishop Germanus visited the shrine of St Alban, my spiritual home, in the year 429. Pilgrimage is also an act of penitence. So again, when we reach Auxerre, I might be moved to regret the unkindness I visited on one of its pious citizens 20 years ago. Pilgrims are strangers in the lands they travel through, so we will be unknown, unrecognized and able to relax (unless, of course, I am spotted by the aforementioned aggrieved citoyenne d'Auxerre!). Pilgrims do not always know what it is that they seek. It might be as much an inner journey as a physical one. It was Thomas Hornbein who said when climbing Everest that “at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something that I had left behind.”

We would be making connections, weaving lives together, ours and those who went that way before us. And we would be cycling 1500 miles.

As a teenager, I was familiar with the spirit and trappings of pilgrimage: I went to the football. I would dress up carefully in my sacred scarf and precious tin badges. I would leave the house alone, catch the train and then the underground and, all along the route, the number of fellow pilgrims would swell until I arrived at the stadium where everyone was a worshipper, thronged together. I learned to travel simply; no bags, no coats. The terraces were no place for the encumbered fan amid the push and the jostle and, if you were lucky enough, the boiling chaos that was the aftermath of a goal being scored.

I had relics of my pilgrimages; programmes, badges bought at such and such a game, a rosette. I even had grass clippings from Wembley stadium pressed between the pages of my school dictionary. This was a rather prim relic, given that bolder pilgrims than myself had gone home to Scotland the previous year with the goalposts and most of the turf.

The first time I went to the football, I felt the common sensation of surprise at how small a hallowed place can be compared to its familiar media image. The pitch was a defined slab of vivid green; the stands rigid and functional; only the goals seemed vast, compared to those I had defended as a child. I stood still and speechless, staring at it, my senses alive, my heart racing. A quarter of a century later, I stood at Hampden Park in Glasgow watching my 8 year old son lost in precisely the same reverie. His small body was quite still, I could only see the back of his head and his little pink ears, but I knew that his eyes were wide and his heart was racing. Let no-one say that football is only a game. You would be as well trying to argue that the cathedral at Santiago is just a building.

I remember the fervour of it all, the anticipation, the warm familiarity of the terraces. I recall how we told each other stories of the games we had been to, showed off our relics; planned trips to away games. It was an urgent and idolatrous passion but the feeling of journeying to the match was always an enlivening one.

My first experience of religious pilgrimage was in 1980. I had just left school and I had no idea what to do next. However, being a suggestible young man and quite fond of novelty, I yielded to the advice of the Rector of our local church that I should visit the Taize community. A young parishioner had spent a month there one summer and spoke highly of the experience. It seemed like a worthwhile adventure to which I readily submitted.

I contacted the Community, who suggested to me that I might join their "pilgrimage of trust on earth" which was holding a European Meeting in Rome. They gave me the contact details of a local organiser and I booked my place. I had absolutely no idea of what to expect.

We set off on Boxing Day via London to Paris, where we caught a train to Rome. All along the numbers of pilgrims grew. When we got to Rome there were 35, 000 of us and beds for less than that. We spent the first night on the floor of a school before being billeted in an unheated convent. On New Year’s Eve, we gathered at St Peter’s. The Pope was there. Afterwards, there was a great celebration in the streets of Rome. After a short night, we were back on the train to Paris and on our way home. I remember that there was a great openness in the people we met, born of common purpose and I remember how we sloped off one day to do some sightseeing.

I first visited France in 1967. I was four. My parents had been persuaded by friends to borrow their orange and blue canvas frame tent and all manner of other equipment and drive to France. We didn’t just hop across the channel; for some reason, we drove for two days to get to a site on the Atlantic Coast, among the forests and sand dunes of Les Landes. I remember the smell of the pine trees; the vastness of the sand, the taste of yoghurt (a quite alien substance in those days) and the thick glass bottles of pshitt lemonade, which seemed to amuse my parents greatly every time they ordered one for each of us. I also remember the music that played at the campsite bar, a warbly French chanteuse on what must have been almost continuous repeat. Years later, I discovered that we had bought the record as a souvenir and I still have it. “L’amour s’en va et sans cesse nous courons apres” by Francoise Hardy. It is truly doleful.

It was on that trip that I first encountered the 2CV, whose singular appearance and battleship grey complexion intrigued me. My parents bought me a toy one. Twenty years later, I was to get the real thing.

Camping in France was a bold adventure for our family and one that was never repeated. My father (a man of ingrained habits) had the footwells of the car stacked with tins of mince, potatoes and peas, insisted on bacon and eggs for breakfast and probably struggled to enjoy anything about the trip. My mother fried the bacon and eggs in the intense heat, cooked all the mince, evicted lizards from the tent, carried the washing up through the forest to the stand pipe, anointed our insect bites and came home exhausted. Every year thereafter, we took our holidays in Dumfries and Galloway in a wooden hut on the shores of the Solway Firth. We ate out in hotels that served meat and vegetables. There were no 2CV’s and no lizards; the worst that happened to us was an infestation of earwigs one year.

On the way home from these austere Scottish holidays, my father would insist on filling the footwells of the car with boxes of butchered local meat which my mother, after a 6 hour drive down the motorway, would spend half the night weighing and packing into the deep freeze. Other people brought ornaments home from their holidays; painted pottery, hand-crafted statuettes, curious hats; we brought a year’s supply of mince.

On one notorious occasion, after a dawn raid on the local butcher, my mother and I were driving through rural Dumfriesshire when the truck in front struck a pheasant. My mother, a farmer’s daughter, swiftly brought the car to a halt, leapt out, collected the still-warm bird and cast it over the back seat on top of all the boxes of mince.

For the next six hours, I sat frozen in terror, convinced that the bird was only stunned and would at any minute wake up and flap angrily over the back of my neck and into my face. On that long trip down the M6, my ornithophobia was cemented in for ever.

I didn’t visit France again for 11 years. Then, my younger sister was given a penfriend in Paris and a series of exchanges were set up. Isabelle came to London and then the poor soul was subjected to one of our traditional summer holidays in a hut somewhere in Galloway. However, for some reason I will never quite understand, it was my elder sister and I that were the ones that got to visit her family. So, one Easter holidays, we were dispatched by train and ferry to Paris, where we were met and meticulously entertained by the self-consciously Parisian Famille C_____. They had an apartment metres from the Eiffel Tower, two children with little backpacks and short white socks, and they had a little white poodle called Onyx. They took us to the Follies Bergere and they sent us out with precise instructions to all the approved sites of Paris. Suddenly it seemed that the school textbooks had sprung to life. It was wonderful.

As I got to know them better, our hosts revealed to me that they were not really Parisians at all; they were country folk from the deep south with relatives in the Basque Country. They longed for their grandes vacances near Biarritz where they could run free and be themselves. Nevertheless, because they were not Parisians, they were incredibly attentive to playing the role with absolute correctness and they were very good at it. Everything was correcte; I had the authentic bourgeois French experience.

The same could not be said, however, for Onyx. He was the least civilised creature I have ever encountered. In particular, he was utterly unable to bear the sexual mores expected of a Parisian poodle. Like most Parisians, he was perpetually on the lookout for a romantic liaison. However, his tragic lack of success or even opportunity had turned him into an onanist desperado. Condemned to end his days in the dogless Bastille of famille C_____'s apartment, he spent his days humping everything; table legs, chair legs, my legs and, most unpleasantly of all, a special soft toy whose long floppy ear he regularly shagged senseless. The poor creature clearly didn’t even know or care how to use a sex toy correctly.

I struck up a close friendship with the pere de famille, Jean. He was a man who loved to discuss and I was a boy whose spoken French was so limited and whose desire to please people so unlimited that I enthusiastically agreed with every opinion he put before me, whether I understood it or not. This delighted him to the point where it became a ritual that every evening after dinner, he and I would descend the little iron elevator, and take to the streets of Paris to make sense of life itself while Onyx pissed and shat his way around the Champ de Mars, pausing only to stick his snout up the rear of any passing creature he could reach from the end of his taut leather lead.

I went back to Paris many times and stayed with the family. They taught me French and we enjoyed each other’s company. As my language skills improved, my conversations with Jean became less one sided and more stimulating. We shared a sense of humour and a love of football and I was quite in awe of the strength of his enthusiasm for everything.

I got to know them well enough to use Paris as the launch pad for my tour of Europe in 1981. I had left school, spent the winter working as a petrol pump attendant and got bored. My sister advised me to take all my money and a rucksack and go traveling. So I took her rucksack and set off. For six months I wandered through Europe, returning frequently to Paris, which I came to know better than I knew London.

After that, when I went to University, no summer vacation was complete if most of it wasn’t spent in France. It is a country of such variety, such charm and such style, and all of it in such contrast to the British Isles, that it demands to be explored and loved.

In 1983, I got the chance to go and live in France for a year: it was one of the richest and most formative years of my life.

So one of the great attractions for me of this pilgrimage is the chance to spend three weeks crossing France at cycling speed: fast enough to enjoy a constant change of scenery; slow enough to take it all in.

Continue the story

Back to Homepage

Back to the Pilgrims' Miscellany