When I started a blog thirteen years ago I was resting, recovering and taking stock, while staying in a barn on a friend’s farm in France, not quite sure what life would bring next. What life brought was donkeys! I experienced an introduction to the art of walking with a donkey and then a surprise new life in Spain, with a contract in the Costa Blanca where I would begin my final eight years of useful working life teaching in secondary schools. Then I retired, five years ago.
When the blogging began there in 2010, I was (to use Bunyan’s phrase from A Pilgrim’s Progress) in the ‘slough of despond.’ I had been the victim of a serious computer failure in the UK and for half a year denied a police certificate necessary in order to work as a teacher. I would later receive an apology and compensation when the mistake was rectified, but at the time, my life was truly wrecked and I was at a very low point.
It is curious that I began writing a blog at a moment when I was without hope. Looking back, it was a way of making sense of life: writing was good therapy, a way to get my thoughts in order. Even if nobody was reading the blog! The very first blog post was called ‘Piligrimin’s rest’ and began “After two weeks on the road, I arrived very tired at Antigny two days ago and have been resting since.”
I had cycled from Canterbury where I had been living – a place of pilgrimage itself, of course – and I had followed the French pilgrim routes from Dieppe via Chartres and Tours, to my friend’s farm halfway down the west of France, where I had once stayed for two rest days several years before, when I was walking from Worcester to Compostela in a three-month pilgrimage.
The first blog post included this photograph. It shows my bicycle propped against a farmyard wall, next to my friend’s donkeys. Rosie on the left is still alive in 2023, but Dalie the bigger donkey sadly died a few years ago. It was she who guided me into the strange ways of donkeys, on a walk along the local chemin de Compostelle for a short ‘taster experience’ of walking with a pack donkey. Looking back, the symbolism of the photo is a changeover moment: I dismount the bicycle that I rode from Canterbury and on the other side of the wall are donkeys. They would be the vehicle on which my pilgrimage would continue.
My new job in the Costa Blanca was offered a few days later by phone and later in that summer I moved to Spain. When I received my compensation for the computer error two months later, I went and bought my donkeys, Rubí and Matilde. As it turned out, they were both pregnant and that is why I ended up with four donkeys, and the Brother Lapin’s Pilgrimage blog told the story of those early years with the donkeys: the joy of the arrival of the foals, and the sense of liberation of my life on a kind of ‘hobby farm’ while enjoying my work as a teacher and rediscovering Spain again, which I had known in my childhood schooldays in Ibiza in the 1960s, and also in a wonderful year spent working in Barcelona in the Olympic year. Now it genuinely seemed like a homecoming: a return to light and warmth after the profound disillusionment with everything about England.
That feeling would be further reinforced in 2016 during the madness of ‘Brexit’ and I am now five years into my retirement and those days seem so far away, almost as distant as my teaching career in Canterbury or my years before that as a Franciscan friar, and the time spent in France with another community in a mountaintop abbey in the Pyrenees. Life before all of that now becomes a remote blur and somehow unreal, as if it were a memory of a life belonging to someone else, and not to my life. I can only suppose this happens to everyone in retirement? The past becomes something a little unreal.
When you live alone in a remote place and sometimes do not speak to another person for a day or two, the last contact you had – the last conversation with another person – lingers for a long while. If it was a prolonged contact with a significant person – a house guest you don’t see very often, for example – your conversations with them can stay with you for a very long while. So I remember the happy few days that a friend spent here several years ago, as if it was yesterday! Conversely, things can also go very wrong, and when that happens and you live alone, it can stay with you like a curse for a very long time and plunge you into negativity.
I’ve now been in such a negative space for more than a year, and it is like that time thirteen years ago when I began that first blog post in France, and in fact much worse. Daily life with the donkeys is a comfort in such a time: they are great fun and so gentle. But they can’t properly heal the damage done by the last negative contact with a human!
I am not alone in this: British residents here all have a similar tale to tell: about friends or family who come to stay for a cheap holiday in this Mediterranean setting, with no hotel bills to pay! Sometimes friends or family members who haven’t contacted you for years, suddenly – upon discovering you live in Spain – want to rekindle all the affection they rediscover that they had for you! They arrive with a frighteningly large suitcase and an even more frightening lack of a return flight and take over your home. On the second day, over the breakfast you have just cooked them they ask, “What are we doing today then?” I’ve heard this from so many who suddenly realise, not only has their home become a free hotel, but also they are now the unpaid tour guide!
It happened recently to a friend and one-time work colleague, who also lives alone, ‘living the dream’ of a simple life in the mountains with animals. What really angered her this time was her visitor, who on the day of her departure said, “I’ll leave these clothes here with you, so I don’t have to bring so much with me in December when I come out again.” No such visit had yet been discussed! This kind of thing is just the easy end of the spectrum: on the more difficult extreme you find friends or family running away from all their troubles at home to come and treat you as their therapist or at worse, perform a whole week of psychodrama in your home, just to get it all off their chest!
Why? we may ask. The answer is simple. We live in the Mediterranean, so we should be able to put up with all this and understand that things are tough for the people who have escaped from miserable England for a while.
Yesterday, I delivered a talk to a mixed group of English and Dutch residents. My talk was one of five talks on the subject of food, after which we had a glorious meal in a nearby village restaurant in which the chef had put all of the themes of our five talks into the five different courses, with matching cocktails as a starter! During the meal a friend asked me, “Have you considered writing your life story?” I replied that I haven’t and I never will, mainly because I cannot imagine why anyone would want to read it! It is not as if I have achieved anything with my life, nor would I regard my history as worth emulating, and I have absolutely nothing to say about the burning issues of the day nor any recommendations as to how humanity can improve the way it does things. My opinion on this last subject is that humanity is obviously on the point of destroying the planet, so there’s little point in writing anything – let alone my own miserable autobiography – as everything will shortly be burned in the conflagration that marks the end of the ‘Anthropocene’ epoch. And I’m a pessimist, as you can see, so I wouldn’t want to encourage any more gloom.
However, that hesitation aside, I am committing myself to writing this blog more regularly, as I need the therapy. People also tell me they miss the Rubí Tuesday ‘blogue’ posts, so I need to nudge Rubí donkey and see if she is willing to write her blogue again! Comments are welcome below (not ‘bellow’ as I once misspelled it, encouraging readers to shout at me) and I would be interested to know how many of the old regular readers still subscribe to this blog. It has been dormant for a while because I have been indulging myself for too many months on the donkey corner of the ‘fediverse’ (Mastodon) for longer than is healthy. While I’m not signing off from there, I have not found it an altogether helpful experience, and I feel guilty for neglecting this blog.
(A pilgrim at home: Part 2 will follow shortly.)
