summer

Camino VI: The Ventriloquist

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue de Ruesta. 16.20.

Picture this, if you can. Call upon all of your senses.

First, sound. Wind, cool and dry, blowing in the branches of the pine trees above, their branches coated in trailing clumps of lichen. A blackcap singing an enchanting solo in the forest, and an endless percussion of cicadas, assailing the ear with their rasping ostinato from every side. You can’t see them. But they’re there. Hundreds of them.

Next, smell. The fresh scent of pine bark, mingling with the dusty trace of crumbling masonry. The occasional coolness of water blowing in off the lake. Mingling with taste, a hint of fried fish from the bar, which closed up shop half an hour ago.

Touch, then. The feel of carved wood, nearly two centuries old. The trace of numbers in stone, chiselled in many hundreds of years before even that. The uneven cobbles of a road long since neglected, and the powdery feel of the houses that line it, within which a thousand plants have weaved a citadel of their own.

Finally, sight. Picture an entire village abandoned a hundred years ago. See the stone balconies, carved with Roman triumph, presiding over an empty world. A church, with fragments of brilliant blue still visible in the decaying fresco above the spot where the slate once stood, stripped bare and opened to the heavens. A lonely watchtower, manned now by thirsty crows, their beaks agape in the heat of the afternoon.

This is my stop for tonight: the abandoned village of Ruesta, one of the last stops before leaving Aragón.

I left on time this morning, shortly before six, sent on my way by Lulu and Nicole with a packed sandwich, an orange and a boiled egg. It felt like being sent off to school. Some hospitaleros really do push the boat out to make you feel at home during your brief stay!

I missed the sign in the darkness and so headed north for a kilometre before joining the road and returning to my westward trajectory. It added about fifteen minutes to my time, but it did give me an unrestricted view of the morning.

Camino sunrises are something of a tradition on the way to Santiago, but I am going to miss these Aragonese mornings. There’s something about the mountains that makes them that much more mystical. Maybe it’s the way the light turns each row of hills a different shade of blue, always fading toward the base.

I spent a considerable part of the morning chasing quails. They’re almost impossible to see with the naked eye, standing at around 16cm tall (that’s just over half a ruler) and seldom taking flight when alarmed, preferring to sit tight and rely on their cryptic camouflage to avoid detection. They were all over the place, though – I must have counted at least forty individuals calling from different spots along the Camino in the hour or two after sunrise. They can throw their voices around 150 metres, which can make them very hard to locate, especially when there are four or five in the same field calling at once. I flushed one completely by accident at the side of the road and it took off into one of the vast wheat fields on sharp, whirring wings.

England must have sounded like this, a long time ago. There are places you can go in the UK and hear quails, which do migrate that far (some make it all the way to Scotland), but not on the same scale as you can here in Spain.

Along with the quails, I saw a grey partridge – a rarity in Spain, confined to the north – and goodness knows how many corn buntings, but I think it’s the foxes that stood out the most. There must be plenty in the area, as I saw three within a rather short space of time, including one sprinting across a field near Martés.

A major feature of today’s walk were the badlands de yeso: strange, wrinkled mounds of gypsum, a distinctive feature of Aragón, Navarra and Almería. This is the kind of terrain that contains fossils like the shell I found yesterday: a prehistoric stockpile of marine life, buried deep beneath the soft grey hills. They’re really quite striking, and since there are no Caminos that pass through the Bardenas Reales to the southwest (one of the strangest lunar landscapes you can find in Europe), the Camino Aragonés does at least provide an introduction.

I stopped for water shortly after a brief exploration of Artieda and its gypsum hills (to the great confusion of a local who thought I’d lost the Camino). Here, at my feet of all places, I found one of the ventriloquists: not a quail, but a cicada. They usually conceal themselves high up in the trees, where their voices carry and their mottled bodies blend perfectly into the bark. This one was clearly an amateur, however, as the motion of its churring was trembling the blade of grass in its legs, making it stand out like a sore thumb.

Not to be outdone, my final hour was a butterfly parade, with a scarce swallowtail taking centre stage. I have fond memories of this little creature as it’s one of the ten animals I recorded on my first trip to Spain as an eleven-year-old. Contrary to the famous adage popularised by Muhammad Ali, most butterflies don’t “float”, having a rather manic and jerky flight. Swallowtails, however, are on the larger side, and they do float, or at least seem to, fanning their wings out midflight to glide on the air. They’re skittish, like most butterflies, so it’s hard to get close, but their size, acrobatics and striking colours make them a delight to watch.

Which brings me to Ruesta. There’s really all sorts on the Camino, and Ruesta is very much one of the sorts. Abandoned in 1959 after a lengthy decline – largely because of the construction of the nearby Yesa reservoir, which flooded most of the agricultural land the village depended on – the village has largely fallen into a slow state of disrepair.

Ruesta’s church had some spectacular frescos, which were carefully transferred to Jaca’s Diocesan museum to prevent them from being lost forever. I imagine the place might once have looked not too dissimilar to Artieda, a hilltop town not too far from here. From some angles, you can still just about imagine life as usual: children running down the street to school, the bakery in full swing, old locals gathered at a street corner to gossip…

Ruesta has two functioning buildings: a casa de cultura (of all things) and an albergue, complete with a lively bar/restaurante. The secret to Ruesta’s survival is its acquisition by the CGT, the Confederación General del Trabajo, one of Spain’s larger trade unions. There are plenty of clues for those who don’t recognise the red-and-black flag: the raised fist, the quotes and dates graffitied across the walls and the plethora of signage in Catalan, Galician and Basque (the CGT, being anarcho-syndicalist in its outlook, has strong ties to the local separatist movements).

To their credit, they’ve done a wonderful job. The regional government won’t step in to rebuild Ruesta, as it’s just one of over two hundred abandoned towns in Aragón, so the syndicate has stepped in. They’ve carved out a fully-functioning community in the heart of the old village and are carefully coexisting with the place, without feeling the need to develop or bulldoze what doesn’t serve. The result is a very unique staging post of the Camino de Santiago. There’s not many places along the profitable pilgrim road that have been allowed to fall apart, and yet at the same time been so carefully curated.

I wonder how the future will see us? The creatures of the past left their traces in the rocks by chance. We’ve been deliberately stamping our seal on the earth for thousands of years. Will they marvel at tyre tracks in the mud and put them in museums? Will they weave fantastical stories around the objects they find, like discarded vapes and perfume bottles? What will we make of it all, a thousand years from now?

The Camino gives you a lot of time to think. Six hour walks through the countryside, every day for six weeks… It’s a test of resilience, if not of your sanity. Thank goodness I’m perfectly happy with my own company! BB x

Camino V: Along the Aragón

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue de Peregrinos de Arrés. 13.48.

I bid Mariano adiós at around 5.45 this morning and left Jaca just all the young folks were finding their way home after an enjoyable Friday night on the town. Far away to the south, a summer thunderstorm lit up the sky every four or five minutes, and by counting the seconds between flashes, I was able to catch one of the strikes with my camera.

With Jaca behind me, I am very conscious I am headed into a world of great distances and tiny villages, so I did double-check to make sure I had enough cash to last at least three days – the time it will take to get to the next town with a functioning ATM.

With the thunderclouds rumbling away in the distance, I had to keep turning back to watch the sunrise, which was singularly spectacular this morning. The sky was a shade of pastel pink normally reserved for Renaissance paintings, and the clouds building up above the mountains could only hold back the sunburst for so long. When it came, it pierced two gaping holes in the clouds, like gleaming eyes, before ripping an almighty gash right through the centre and sending a hundred golden rays into the morning sky.

I had a choice to make today – to press on to Arrés or take a lengthy detour via the Monastery of San Juan de la Peña – but in the end it was the weather that made my mind. A gentle summer rain began to fall shortly after sunrise – not the heavy, sheet rain that makes any outdoor activity miserable, but a light, warm, refreshing rain. The kind that provides relief after a long morning on the road – but makes cross-country hikes hard and soggy work. Rerouting to San Juan de la Peña turns an already reasonable itinerary (24.6km) into a trek (38.4km), and after my ascent and descent of the Pyrenees in one go two days ago, I thought it wiser to forgo the monastery this time – after all, these feet have to take me all the way to Santiago. I have to be careful!

The Camino from Jaca mostly follows the road and the river, but it does provide several forested cross-country stretches that offer some relief. On one of these, in the hills south of Ascara, I stopped for a breather and there I found a most remarkable thing: a symbol of Santiago, a shell, but ancient. A fossil from an ancient sea, perhaps ten million years old or more, just sitting at the side of the Camino, waiting to be found.

I’ve always wanted to come to Aragón for its fossil beds. Teruel, Aragón’s southernmost province, is believed to have the highest concentration of fossils per square metre in Europe, and there’s even a sauropod named for the region (Aragosaurus). There are some incredible relics from the ancient world to be found in this vast region, including a large number of well-preserved dinosaur footprints at El Castellar and Galve. I wasn’t expecting to have any luck with dinosaurs on the Camino, as the fossil beds themselves are far from the pilgrim road and pretty hard to reach without a car, so I can’t believe my luck in finding a Miocene scallop shell – and in such good condition!

Today’s hike was a pretty solitary one. That’s not to say I’ve met many pilgrims on the road – today I saw one, and that’s one more than the last four days – but the distances between the towns today felt immense. That’s fairly typical of the Spanish interior, and Aragón is no exception. What makes this part of Spain so striking is its singular orography: so many of the hills in the Río Aragón basin are perfectly flat on top, forming an alien landscape that reaches its peak in the Bardenas Reales to the southwest.

Naturally, in this land of shifting frontiers, many of these mesas have a hilltop town or castle sitting neatly on top. I can see at least one from my stop for tonight in the hill town of Arrés: Canal de Berdún, away to the north. If Arrés had proved to be a ghost town, I would have tried my luck there.

Fortunately, it isn’t. Arrés is little more than a hamlet tucked away in a cleft of the long wooded sierra that runs the length of the Río Aragón, with some fifty permanent residents or less to its name, but don’t let its silence deceive you (even on a Saturday afternoon when everything seems to have ground to a halt). The municipal albergue is fully operational and perfectly equipped, allowing for a stay in possibly one of the most beautiful corners of the Camino Aragonés.

I’ve done my washing by hand, as usual, and it’s hanging out to dry. In this heat, it already will be within another ten minutes or so.

To end the day, the French hospitaleras, Lulu and Nicole, gave us a tour of the village, showed us the sunset from the highest point (which was spectacular) and cooked up a wonderful dinner which we shared between the six of us (including two Aragonese bicigrinos who showed up five minutes before dinner).

I’m just penning the last details now, drinking a chamomile tea, and listening to the night sounds of crickets, a distant dog barking and, somewhere in the valley below, the ceaseless extraterrestrial churring of a nightjar. It’s blissfully quiet here. I’m looking forward to the sociable side of the Camino Francés, but I’m so glad I came this way. It’s been spectacular. BB x

Scorchio

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Gate 17, Bristol Airport. 18.52.

Blimey, but it’s hot outside. If the hordes of ruddy topless locals in the streets of Bristol weren’t enough of an indication, then the winged ants might have been. They always seem to appear out of nowhere when the heat reaches its apogee. Where I’m going, it’s a full ten degrees hotter, and here I am with a cardigan tied about my waist. I felt just slightly insane packing the cardigan, but it’s best to be prepared for all eventualities – especially when I’m up in the mountains. Heatwave or no heatwave, a lot can happen over the course of six weeks.

Check-in at Bristol was a breeze – unless you count the security team selecting my satchel for “explosive checks”. I’m not sure what they expected to find in there: seven different grades of black pen, a rubber, a pencil sharpener, three pencils, three empty pilgrim passports, a hand-drawn map, a very battered journal and a rosary of La Virgen del Rocío… but no explosives. I’m not sure they’d fit! My rucksack might be light but my satchel is, as ever, full to bursting.

I broke the habit of a lifetime and lingered in duty free, where I picked up a few last minute supplies: namely, a solar battery pack and a watch. I’ve left the guidebooks behind this time, and I’m trusting in the plans I scribbled down on three flashcards (spot the teacher), but if it comes to it, I’ll need my phone for navigation. There’s a few stops without electricity on my itinerary, and sometimes you don’t get a bed near the sockets, so a battery pack is a pretty good investment for a trip like this.

Lord knows I’ll be moving and removing the watch a lot this summer to avoid getting a watch-strap tan, but I figured it was high time I had something to look at when I hold up my wrist.

It’s funny how regional Bristol feels. Half the tannoy voices are human (London’s human airport staff bowed out of their tannoy duties years ago), and with the automated RP infiltrating just about every corner of the country these days, it’s curious to hear the voice over the speakers drag the not-so-gentle R in airport. Sometimes it feels like the only place you’ll find the West Country burr that was once so widespread is on public transport. It’s a shame. It’s really quite endearing.

My flight is at 19.25, so I had an early dinner. My usual compulsion for continuity set in, so I grabbed a burrito from the Real California stand upstairs. I had my first non-school burrito in Chicago O’Hare International Airport at the end of my American adventure, so it makes sense to start the next grand adventure with one, too.

It’s a busier flight than I expected. Mind, it is a Sunday night – if anybody were here for the weekend, I suppose this would be the obvious flight home. I’m hoping the public transport situation at the other end is more reliable than the one in Tenerife, as I don’t really fancy another late night wander. All being well, I should be in bed by midnight, and it’s not a dreadfully early start tomorrow to catch the southbound train, but I would like to see a little of the city before I go, so I might start the early morning routine and grab a bite to eat.

After Bordeaux, we’re into the swing of things. I haven’t booked anything beyond the connecting train to Oloron-Sainte-Marie, so I’m putting my trust in God and the road. For somebody who genuinely despises planning in advance, the Camino is the very best sort of holiday. I have no doubt that there will be trials ahead, but that only makes the adventure all the more exciting. We don’t get an awful lot of real adventures in the day-to-day of adult life, so I’m off chasing dreams again. Only this time they’re not red-haired and American, but European and full of light and love.

I’d better save my phone battery and stop blogging. I expect we’ll be boarding soon. Oh – and there’s the bell. À bientôt.

BB x

A Farewell to Armchairs

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The Flat, Taunton. 21.49.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash – The Rolling Stones

Tonight is my last night in the comfort of my own home. By this time tomorrow, I will have checked into my hostel in Bordeaux, the first of six weeks of bunk beds, temperamental showers and creaky metal lockers. Six weeks is as long as a half term – I have to keep reminding myself of that fact. Six weeks is a very long time to be on the road. But my bag is nearly packed and I’m starting to get itchy feet. Let’s hope that’s the only condition my feet suffer from over the next month and a half!

That’s me – a much younger version of me, that is – on my first Camino, some six years ago. A lot has changed since then! Back then, I was still a humble teaching assistant, without the PGCE or the workload that comes with it. I couldn’t walk more than a week or so of the Camino because I was being ousted from my house on site, which had caught the eye of an ambitious young minister, and I had my PGCE Numeracy skills test to revise for (which was nowhere near as hard as I thought it would be). The girl I was with at the time would also not have been overly keen on me staying away so long, so it was only an eight day affair, from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Logroño.

I considered various Caminos this summer, including the Norte and the Plata. The fiendish heat forecast for the summer put me off the Plata, which would have taken me through easily my favourite regions of Spain – Andalucía and Extremadura – and the tarmac trails and relatively high cost ultimately dissuaded me from the Norte. Rumours are currently circulating that they’re filming the sequel to Martin Sheen’s The Way on the Norte this summer, so I think I’ve made the right choice.

I’ve done the Francés before, so why am I doing it again? For the same reason I second-guessed the Plata: you are more likely to find people on the Francés, and it’s the people who make or break the Camino. I met an ensemble cast of characters on my last run: Mikkel the Dane, Domenico the Carabiniere, the Professor, Mamasita the German drunkard and Simas, who walked with me to the end of the road in Fisterra. People from all walks of life can be found on the Camino, and especially on the Francés, which is by far the most affordable of all the available options.

But I’m not doing the same route. Not entirely. This year I’m starting in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, some sixty-five kilometres to the east of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. The Camino Aragonés – by some accounts, the “original” Camino Francés – starts a few days’ march to the south at the pass of Somport, but I want to enjoy the unbridled majesty of the Pyrenees, so rather than catching a bus to the border, I’m going to walk the last few days of the Chemin d’Arles, one of the French pilgrim roads that leads up into the mountains.

The more popular Napoleon Route from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port begins with a monstrously steep climb up and over Lepoeder summit at the western edge of the Pyrenees. I walked that way years ago with three Italian guys. One of them had done the Aragonés before and was full of praise for its natural beauty, and so it is to him, I suppose, that I owe the seeds of this itinerary.

The scenery on the Napoleon route is spectacular, and the elevation is certainly nothing to sniff at, but if memory serves, it felt more like a giant hill than a mountain (or, at the very least, a Scottish highland). The Camino Aragonés, on the other hand, cuts straight through the heart of the Pyrenees.

I’m rather picky when it comes to mountains, largely on account of having been dreadfully spoilt by a year in the rugged limestone-scarred hills of the Sierra de Grazalema as a kid. Unless it’s sheer, craggy and haunted by the hulking shadows of an eagle, it’s not mountain enough for me.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and see a lammergeier – easily identifiable by their diamond-shaped tails. Maybe. Right now, I’d settle for some mountain air. My flat has only one window that can open, and all the others are frosted and quintuple-glazed – one of the downsides of living attached to a boarding house.

After Somport, the Camino Aragonés winds down to the Aragonese city of Jaca before arcing around to the west. I’ll be joining the Camino Francés at Puente La Reina, after which I will be on familiar territory as far as León. The meseta is legendarily testing, but I wouldn’t walk it any other time of year. There’s something powerful about taking the pilgrim road straight across the Sun’s anvil.

Well, I suppose I’d better start packing my bag, and then try to get some sleep. I’ve a routine to get into, after all. See you on the other side. BB x

Preparations

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Reports written. Exams marked and feedback given. A couple of workshops with the Y12s on character strengths and interview skills given. With the exception of six lessons at the start of next week, the school year is all but finished. I had nothing to do this afternoon, so I popped into town to get some Camino supplies. In two weeks’ time I’ll be on the road, and for six weeks at that – the longest adventure I’ll have ever taken – so I need to make sure everything is in place.

One thing I won’t be short of this time is stamp space. The credenciales I ordered from Santiago have arrived: two, plus a freebie with the guide I ordered to the Camino Primitivo. Each one has space for about 78 stamps, so even if I collect three stamps per day every day across those six weeks, two should cover it nicely. I can hold onto the spare for myself, or give it to a pilgrim who is running low. I’ll take all three in any event.

Am I hoping to meet some people around my age? Of course I am. There weren’t all that many the last time I did the Camino in the summer of ’23 (compared to the spring, that is) but maybe I just timed it wrong. Being a teacher, summer is all I really have to work with, so summer it is.

I’ve been walking in my new Keane sandals, and they’re as reliable as ever. I have some new Merino wool socks that should help with the prevention of blisters, and I have dug up my supplies of Compeed blister plasters from whatever hole they’d disappeared into since the last Camino – I was surprised by how many I still had. I didn’t pick up a First Aid kit today, but that might be an airport job, as there are useful implements that I wouldn’t be able to take through security anyway.

Not too much to report. It might not be such a bad idea to get back into the habit of blogging daily before I go – writing requires regular exercise, just like training for a hike. Maybe I’ll try to do something with the books I’ve been reading. That might be illuminating. BB x

Saudade

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SAUDADE – (n.) a deep nostalgic longing for someone or something absent, infused with a melancholic awareness that it may never return.

I looked up last night and saw a plane coming in to land at Heathrow. One of the big ones that comes in from across the Atlantic, like the one I flew home on nearly five weeks ago. It made me think of that Monday morning, seeing the sunrise over London, knowing in my head – even if I didn’t want to admit it in my heart – that I had come to the end of a cheery chapter in my life.

A plane like that one brought her here to this cloud-covered island many months ago. I wonder what my summer would have looked like if it hadn’t?

The Portuguese have this wonderful untranslatable expression called ‘saudade’. It’s often taken to mean the feeling of missing someone or somewhere, or more precisely a sense of longing for that thing, but many Portuguese and Brazilians will tell you that it’s a lot more subtle than that. There’s a sense of finality to it, also: an understanding that what you once had may never come back at all, an acceptance of that, but a wistful longing for it all the same. Not the raw kind that breaks you in the days and weeks that follow, but a tempered and reflective sense of nostalgia for what once was and what could have been.

It’s not unique to the Portuguese, but it is especially common in their culture – and perhaps even more so among the Brazilians. It is said that the expression may have evolved during the Age of Discoveries, when the wives of the great explorers of the day bade farewell to their husbands and lovers as they set out for the Americas (how ironic) knowing full well that they may never see them again, and that if they did, they would return as changed men.

Among the Brazilians, it has taken on the sense of a nostalgia for a lost future: a golden country that never was. The American dream isn’t just limited to the States – a shard of it can be found embedded like a splinter in the subconscious of all the descendants of the colonists, I believe. Why else should they have made such a journey if not in hope of a better tomorrow?

I feel that way about Spain, sometimes. Perhaps that’s the generational shockwave of my grandfather’s death in his mid-twenties, rippling across the years to the present, an echo of a lost world that could have been. Spain calls to us. It has been calling for sixty years. Come back. Come home. Sometimes you spend hours, days and even weeks waiting for somebody to reply (looking at you, folks on Hinge) without realising that something greater has been waiting for you all the time, if only you knew how to answer.

I have been the architect of my own saudade by choosing to devote my life to gazing upon that dream from afar: teaching Spanish to the English, sharing my love for a country I can only touch a few times a year. It is a test of endurance, to look upon a thing of beauty and not to touch. Spain has always been that thing. It fills me with awe, excitement, a deep-seated admiration and an infectious appreciation for life itself, but a sense of longing all the same, knowing that it is in my heart, but beyond my reach. Like there’s something blocking the way that I can’t see. Perhaps it’s akin to sleeping beside a former lover, after the love has gone.

I wandered through the woods as the sun came down. I think the nightjars have already gone back to Africa – there must be plenty of them around for a local bar to bear the name The Nightjar – but I was followed across the heath by a pair of stonechats. In that year I spent growing up in the Andalusian sierras, that was a sound that accompanied me every weekend on my forays down to the abandoned railway at the foot of the mountain where we lived: a whistle followed by a song like the clash of two small stones.

Further in, I found a couple of kite feathers. There are so many in these woods. When I was a child, you would have been lucky to see a buzzard – poison and poor public perception very nearly wiped them out – but now they’re everywhere once again. The red kites that once quartered the streets of London before their extirpation in the 19th century have also come back with a bang, and their feathers turn up in the forest quite regularly. I left some in a small tree for another person to find – some bright-eyed kid like me, perhaps, who might take them home as a treasure. Something they can look back on in years to come, and remember the day, remember the smell of the forest, remember the one who took them there by the hand – the feel of their hand, the sunlight in their laugh. I’d like to think that. BB x

Upping Sticks

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2nd August, 6:53am, Lincoln Train Station

Today is the first day of a new life. I’m moving to Somerset to take up a new job, a place where I’ve never lived before and where the only folks I know are my godparents who live in one of the neighbouring villages. I’ve done this kind of thing before several times now – Durham, Villafranca, Tetouan – but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. I’ve got AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on repeat in my earphones to keep me looking up. It’s been my go-to pick-me-up of the summer.

Something always gets left behind on days like today – this time it was a carrier bag containing my laptop, my Switch and – really frustratingly – my satchel, which contains my journal. There’s nothing in there that I’m going to need per se over the next few days, but that journal travels with me everywhere. It feels strange not to have it on me on such an important day.

2nd August, 9.25am, London Paddington Station

The queue for Platform 9¾ was already four rows wide when my train pulled into London King’s Cross. It’s absolutely blown up in popularity in the last ten years or so, which may be proof that, though J.K. Rowling’s fanbase may be divided about the author, the mania for her wizarding world is very much alive.

The moving team have arrived at my old house and have started what must be the Herculean task of loading all of my things into a Luton van. Meanwhile, I’m racing across country on the train ahead of them to sort things out at my end. Moving is always complicated, but moving between boarding schools adds another layer. I’ll be relieved when today is over – but it’s not all hard labour. A busy mind is a happy mind.

I heard singing on the underground and removed my headphones to see what was going on. A little gypsy lady in a face mask was shuffling down the train, singing with an alto voice so full of pain and passion that I was surprised nobody else was tuning in. Everywhere, up and down the train, AirPods were buried deep, eyes glued to screens, avoiding her eye. I caught snatches of familiar words that might have been Portuguese, or it might have been Romanian, or even Caló. She carried a small black plastic cup. There were no coins in it.

I got off the train and gave her a note. It was all I could find in my wallet that wasn’t euros or quarters. The Spanish have a saying:

Quién canta, sus males espanta.

It means something along the lines of “singing drives your pain away”. Gypsy music isn’t very good at that, since a lot of it deals with the overwhelming suffering and exclusion of the Rom, but it is powerful stuff, and it shook me from my reverie. That deserves a reward in itself.

2nd August, 3.12pm, Taunton

I’m here in my new flat in Taunton! It feels hollow without my things here, but the removal firm can only be half an hour away at this point, so I won’t be hearing my voice echoing about the place for too long. Because of that, I’m confined to barracks for the time being, so no exploring the town just yet. That, for the present, must wait, at least until I’ve put my bed together and the removal men are on their way home.

It turns out my Nintendo was flattened beneath my mum’s car as we left this morning – I must have left the carrier bag on the drive in a moment of fatigue. I should be more cut up: it’s been a trusty distraction over the last week (and the last four years come to think of it) but perhaps that’s a sign from up there that it’s time to put that world behind me. By some miracle, my laptop – in the same bag – survived unscathed, cushioned by the books I’d crammed in with it on either side. They, of course, aren’t damaged at all. Which just goes to show the superiority of books, right?

4th August, 2.11pm, Taunton

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve moved in, and I’m working on moving on. It isn’t easy, but I feel like I’m starting to get there. Perhaps you know the feeling: when you wake up one morning and they’re still on your mind, but the thought doesn’t hurt like it did the night before. It just… is. A kind of acceptance sets in. That’s healthy. What we had was beautiful, but it’s in the past now, and ahead lies only the future. I can face that now.

Luckily, I have enough books about me now to keep me occupied for months, or even years. The last month has been crazy, and after a month of living out of a rucksack I have a place to call home again. It’s strange, starting up in a new place where you don’t know anybody, and we’re a long way from the bright lights of yuppie London, but I’m hoping I can find some people on my level here in Somerset.

I was doing some reflective writing the other day and I realised I’ve had eighteen homes over the course of my life (that is, I have lived in eighteen different places for a period of more than two months). After a very stable childhood, I started moving around as a teenager and haven’t really stopped since, living in various places around the UK to far-off destinations like Spain, Jordan, Morocco and Uganda. Eighteen. That’s only twelve homes few than my age. No wonder I have a hard time finding a place to call home.

First driving lesson in several months tomorrow. Lord, if you’d be so kind, give me the strength to see this hurdle through. It would be jolly nice to be able to drive at last. Walking everywhere is fun and all, if only for the additional height it puts on people’s eyebrows when I tell them, but the joke is wearing thinner every year. BB x

Marooned

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

13.25. High summer. Somewhere in the Lincolnshire Wolds.

English summer skies are blinding. There’s an intensity to the white clouds that blanket this island in summer that demands a permanent squint, or a pair of good sunglasses. America – and even Europe – seem a long, long way away from here.

Six days ago I was sitting on a low wall among the ruins of an old boathouse on the largest of the Chausey Islands, a collection of low-lying islands in the bay of Saint-Malo. I’d never heard of them until the day before, when I saw that a local ferry company was offering day trips out that way, but I do love an adventure, especially one that goes well off the beaten track. Due to its remote location, there were only two boats a day from Saint-Malo: one to the island, and one from. Which is how I ended up spending seven hours on an island measuring just 1.5km across.

The Chausey Islands are a magical place. Quiet. Peaceful. Cut-off. It’s not so far from the coast that you feel lost – neighbouring Granville over in Normandy is a little nearer than Calais is to Dover, and in good sunlight you can see as far as the spires of Saint-Malo on the Breton coast – but far enough to feel like you’ve put some distance between yourself and the world. Even on a cloudy day, you can see the ghostly pyramid of Mont-Saint-Michel rising out of the sea to the south like Atlantis. Or should that be Ys?

People have been living in these islands for centuries. The Vikings of old used to stop here regularly en route to their raids along the mainland, and you can still see the holes they bored into some of the rocks to anchor their longboats. The narrow channel between Grand Île and the other islands still carries a Viking name: the Chausey Sound, the southernmost “sound” in Europe. There were once a few farms here, and even a school until the last century. Now it plays home to French holidaymakers, who pass their jealously-guarded homes down through the generations, so I’m told.

I have a habit of winding up in places like this. Others travel to meet people, have a great time, see the world. I always seem to end up by myself, searching for myself, marooned with my thoughts. It’s not that I don’t set out in search of those things too – I just find my way to these spots quite naturally.

I found the spot I was searching for to the west of the island, on a low islet overlooking the ebbing tide beneath a crown of standing stones. But for the hulking black-backed gulls, a couple of oystercatchers and the odd lizard, I had the bay to myself.

I let my mind wander. I thought about a great many people, and wondered what they were doing at that moment in time. Were they happy? Were they wandering like me? Had they ever found just such a place and turned their thoughts to friends and lovers past? I think so. I think it’s in our nature to do just that in the far-flung corners of the world. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been a sucker for a good Western: nothing sends you on a greater inward journey than the wilderness.

I had questions, but the answers didn’t come to me as readily as they did on the Camino last year, so I waited out the hours on a beach, reading Breton fairytales and burning under the sun. When the boat did come, it was to carry me back to Saint-Malo across a choppy sea that left half the passengers on the deck soaked to their skin, though the sun was shining bright.

I didn’t see as many seabirds as I hoped, but I did clock a guillemot taking its fledgling on what might well have been its first swim as the sun came out. I also came away with a number of close encounters with the lizards that call the island home – all of them a lot less skittish than their cousins on the mainland. I used to love looking for lizards in the countryside when I was a kid, so after the nostalgia of rockpool rediscovery, it was refreshing to turn another leaf of the history books.

Until the next adventure, folks. BB x

Winds, Waves and Words

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It’s 18.00 over here in Saint-Malo and the heavens have opened. An Atlantic wind is battering against the windows and the heavyset black-backed gull that chased off Hector has given up on attacking the ashtray on the windowsill and taken his leave. I might head into town for dinner later, but for now, I’m quite content curled up on the sofa of my AirBnB with a book, a hot chocolate and the time to write. So I thought I’d start today’s post with a little history.

Saint-Malo has a long and complicated past. Originally a 6th century refuge for Welsh monks, including the venerable Maclou of Aleth who gave the town its name, the rocky outpost became a haven for Bretons fleeing the advancing “North-men” or Normans some two hundred years later. In the 17th century, its strategic location made it a natural hub for state-licensed piracy or “privateering”, which elevated its fortunes considerably and paved the way for a generation of wealthy explorers: Jacques Cartier, a native malouin, is credited with giving Canada its name (via the Iroquois kanata) and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, another son of Saint-Malo, established the first European settlement in the Falkland Islands, which – at least in Spanish – still bear their original Breton name: las Islas Malvinas, from the French Îles Malouines.

The city fell to the Germans during the Second World War as part of their Atlantikwall stratagem, and the skeletons of their fortifications still dot the Breton coastline: in Saint-Malo, the levelled ruins of German pillboxes rub shoulders with 17th century Vauban forts. Surprisingly, much of what you see today was carefully reconstructed, as around 80% of the city was destroyed by the Allies in their dogged attempt to drive the Germans from the old pirate stronghold.

Allied bombers over Saint-Malo in August 1944. The fortified isle of Grand-Bé is at the centre of the blast

Most of the German fortifications have long since been torn down, but you can still see the concrete bases of many structures on the cliffs beneath the city wall and on the surrounding islets of Grand-Bé. They make very comfortable places to sit and watch the sunset.

In case it wasn’t obvious, the town’s rich history is one of the biggest reasons I’m here. But the other is its wildness: there are plenty of sandy beaches in the south, but I don’t get any real kick out of sea-swimming unless there are rocky areas to explore. The southeast coast of England with its famous white cliffs is quite a sight to behold, but it doesn’t quite have the jagged beauty that the west has in abundance, and Brittany has it to spare.

I spent many of the happiest days of my childhood scouring the rock pools of Folkestone for tiny critters: gobies, blennies, butterfish, velvet swimming crabs and even, just the once, a pipefish. Brittany is only the other side of the Channel, so much of the shoreline is familiar. I can’t help keeping an eye out for anemones when I’m out on the rocks, especially the snakelocks variety – I always thought they were especially interesting.

Across the bay from Saint-Malo stands the islet of Grand-Bé, which can be reached on foot at low tide via a barnacle-encrusted causeway. A similar road stretches on to the Vauban fort on Petit-Bé, though a small section of that road remains under a foot of water even at low tide and must be forded with shoes in hand.

Grand-Bé offers a glimpse of what Saint-Malo must once have been: a windswept escarpment just off the mainland, inhabited only by lizards, gulls, a small colony of shags and a company of oystercatchers that can be heard all across the bay. Two of these noisy seabirds were standing in attendance upon Chateaubriand’s tomb, as though to keep him company. From this spot, on a clear day, you can hear the twittering of goldfinches, the cries of gulls, the occasional grunt from one of the shags and the endless piping of oystercatchers on the rocks below or in the sky above – and, of course, the ringing of the bells of Saint Vincent’s cathedral across the bay.

I wonder if the old Romantic was as bewitched by the wild birds of his native Brittany as his writing implies? He certainly had a real flair when it came to writing about nature. Perhaps that’s why he chose this spot.

I spent some time last night watching the sunset over Grand-Bé. I had left my Camino bracelet in the apartment, but I had brought a few other tokens with me. I often take a number of “lucky” objects on my travels: little souvenirs and keepsakes to remind me of home when I’m on the road.

Well, not home exactly. With no fewer than ten moves under my belt at the age of thirty (and just under half of them international) I’m still not entirely sure where home is. But they remind me of friendships and memories that mean a lot to me, and that helps with the loneliness that is a natural side-effect of traveling alone.

In my satchel, ever at my side, I carry my journal, my fifth and longest-serving since I took up the art twelve years ago. It’s coming apart at the seams and bound inexpertly by sellotape – hardly surprising for a little book that has come with me to work every day for the last five years, as well as on every adventure I’ve been on in that time. Concealed within is my lucky dollar, a ticket to the Prado in Madrid, a tawny owl feather, the plectrum that one of my Rutherford boys used to win House Music two years in a row and a perfumed letter.

There is one more keepsake that has been sharing the road with me this summer. It even came with me to America, traversing the Bayou, the Mississippi and the bright lights of Nashville. It’s a card from one of my students, one of many I received in my last week at Worth. The lengths this particular student went to so as to ensure I got the card, as well as the maturity of its message from one so young, are just two of the reasons this one in particular has come with me. I am many things, and a great many less, but I would be a writer – and so that is why I have always believed that the greatest gift I can ever receive is in the form of words. No physical object can ever surpass the depth of feeling that comes from such expression.

I have a bad habit of making people cry when I write them farewell letters (an equally bad habit I’ve adopted for leaving students), but I very nearly met my match with this one. The student in question signed off with a favourite quote of theirs from Lin-Manuel Miranda: “sometimes words fail me”. There’s any number of reasons they could have chosen that one for me – I might well have said the line verbatim in reaction to the behaviour of that class at least once – but it’s a powerful message for a would-be writer.

Words do fail me, and often. There have been moments this year where I have been genuinely speechless, from shock or awe or wonder. It is comforting to know that such a consummate wordsmith shares that affliction.

Tomorrow, I have decided upon a rather spontaneous adventure. I have already bought my ticket. All I can do now is hope that the weather holds. Then – we shall see what we shall see. BB x

Up and Down

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

When I’m on the road, I have a real complex about fitting in. It must be a side-effect of being a linguist, but I cannot stand the idea that I might stand out as a foreigner, if I can help it. Usually it’s simply a question of dressing appropriately, but it also makes me think very hard about my accent when I speak. This has had some brilliantly cringeworthy outcomes, such as getting into a blazing row with a taxi driver in a French that has never been as fluent since, and defaulting to a makeshift (albeit stateless) American accent while riding the Amtrak train two weeks ago… The worst has to be that two-hour drive in a Luton van with a dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshireman in my university days, where I was so self-conscious about my southern accent that I feigned a northern accent so as not to come across too posh… My housemate, a Wensley lass herself, took an exceptionally dim view of the whole affair. In her own words, my accent had only made it as far as Sheffield.

Fortunately, I’m in France, not Sheffield, and with just over a week to go until the Olympic Games begin, the city is so full of tourists that it’s probably easier to blend in as one of them than to ape any Parisian. So I caved and bought myself an Olympic T-shirt, since it’s unlikely to come back here in my lifetime.

I only have the one full day in Paris, so I decided to make the most of it and go supertouriste for the day. With Nôtre-Dame still under heavy repairs after the fire of 2019, and the Louvre fully-booked up for days, that left the Eiffel Tower, l’Arche de la Triomphe and the Château de Versailles. I didn’t really set out with a specific itinerary in mind this morning – I rarely do when I’m traveling solo – and the decision to join the queue for tickets up the Eiffel Tower was very much a spur-of-the-moment one. After all, the website said that all the summit tickets were sold out, and while the views from the second floor are good, who’d make the climb and not go all the way up?

Turns out the website doesn’t know jack. The queue was about half an hour long, but when I did get there the ticket seller simply raised an eyebrow when I inquired about the availability of summit tickets and said “bien sûr”. So if you’ve considered seeing the tower on your trip to Paris and you haven’t made any reservations, fret not – they always keep some to sell on the day.

Preparations are well underway for the Olympic Games here in Paris. The Olympic torch has completed its relay of the various départements, including far-flung Outremer, and is now circling the city in an ever-shrinking spiral. All around the city, cyclists are coming and going with pink signs in their panniers, pointing visitors in the direction of this or that event. Stadiums and stands have sprung into being like enormous steel mushrooms, and the avenue that stretches from Trocadero to the École Militaire now hosts a giant show ground, which looks like a building site from the ground but a lot more like a Roman circus from above.

It’s also impressive just how big the Bois de Boulogne is. Hyde Park may be a green lung for the heavy London air, but it pales in comparison to the dark forest that has clung on in Paris’ northern district, as though threatening to break the encirclement and rejoin its sister Meudon in the west, given the opportunity.

The summit of the Eiffel Tower really is quite something. Photos don’t really do it justice. There’s any number of skyscrapers that have now beaten its giddying record, but none so old, so charming, so immediately recognisable. It’s quite something to perch high above the City of Light, pigeon-like, and join the ranks of historical characters who have stood in the same spot: kings, shahs and statesmen, warmongers, tribal chiefs and Buffalo Bill. You’re more likely to be elbowed out of the way by an errant child angling for a better view or jostle for space with a Brazilian family taking every possible angle of each other than you are to meet any of the former, of course, but who knows? With the Olympics converging on the city, now’s as good a time as any to go stargazing up the Eiffel Tower.

I’ve been a bit reckless with the traveling this summer. I’d like to argue that this latest venture is purely tactical, with French being a very valuable commodity where I’m going, but it’s also methodical: it’s a very good way of keeping busy in the yawning maw of the summer holidays, which can go on and then some if you don’t find some way to keep busy. At the moment, one wedding after another plasters my social media feed as old friends tie the knot. It should make me smile, but on one level it always reminds me just how cut off my career has left me. That’s just one of many reasons I’m moving to a new job and a new part of the country this summer. It’s high time I hit the reset button and started from scratch.

But until then, I have the joys of the open road. Perhaps it’s my way of justifying my existence in these long, empty stretches we call holidays. I might have missed the boat festival in Brest by a matter of days, but I’m really quite excited to explore Britanny. After all – it’s supposedly the location of the indomitable Gaulish village of Astérix and Obélix. Between those two comic rascals and St-Malo’s long history of piracy, I should be in for a treat! BB x