Black and blue

The Confraternity of St James celebrated their patronal feast with lunchtime tapas yesterday, but those of us present in North Paddington were in somber mode: the deaths and injuries of so many train passengers en route for Santiago cast a black shadow over proceedings.

It comes less than a fortnight after the fatal crash near Paris. I reflected on having travelled along both stretches of line in recent times: the French and Spanish maintain that provision of excellent rail links fit for the 21st Century should not merely earn them a bubble reputation - a claim now punctured (at least in Spain's case) by what looks like the negligence of one man.

One woman has made a difference to Trafalgar Square, with the unveiling yesterday of Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock. I biked past after dark, the polyester resin sculpture, nearly 5 metres high, roosting surreally on its plinth. Great!

Camino: interim conclusions

On Friday afternoon, we sat down here and celebrated the conclusion of our planned walk from Seville. The Plaza Mayor in Salamanca is said to be the world's grandest drawing-room: on a sunny afternoon, with a glass of white wine to hand, you couldn't disagree! Our only problem was that we were seated rather too near a stag party from Essex, all its members wearing sombreros and drinking large beers, their glasses not being allowed to stand empty for more than a moment.

What a great feeling it is to walk towards the cathedral towers of Salamanca, visible for a good 10kms! Modern blocks of flats only screen the old city when you reach the rather dismal outskirts, but even there we found something to wonder at: a new motorway has been built, at present unused, and in the tunnel which takes the Camino under it was a man recording his own extraordinary voice in a Basque lament!

One of you readers has been wondering about the availability of accommodation along this Camino. Did we use a guide that has this information? Did we generally reserve ahead or find places on arrival?

We were indebted primarily to the Confraternity of St. James' guide (and its web-based update), which has addresses and telephone numbers. There are various other web resources too, which we explored before we left. We found a number of places with a new casa rural, and one, in Torremejia, with a new albergue. We did book some ahead: it is not necessary, and it gives greater flexibility if you leave deciding where to stay till you get to whatever you feel is the right destination for the day. Having said this, some of the villages are many, many kms. apart, so you do at times feel glad of the security of a booking.

Huge amounts have been invested in tourism all along the route, which can "take" a much larger number of pilgrims than currently walk or cycle it: we just felt so lucky that more people - particularly the dreaded cyclists - don't!

To be, a pilgrim

We have walked on the pilgrim way in France, and a little in Northern Spain, but the idea of walking the Via de la Plata is what has attracted me recently. And so, in this Holy Week, and in a Holy Year, Caroline and I make our way (via five trains) to Seville on Wednesday, before embarking on Saturday upon our four-week walk to Salamanca: it's a convenient half-way point on the Silver Route - next year (God willing) we shall walk from Salamanca to Compostela.

One of the strangest of Luis Buñuel's strange corpus of films is "La Voie lactée", featuring two people tramping towards Santiago, and meeting a mysterious man in a Spanish cloak, a heretic from the past perhaps. The latest Confraternity of St James Bulletin arrived the other day, always worth a read. It makes mention of that, and also of a more recent film, "Al final del camino". This 2009 road movie/romcom, set on the pilgrimage route, clearly provides a different form of enjoyment from that sought by the reviewer: at the end of what might be called a "mixed" notice, the Bulletin's Editor adds: "[The reviewer] is a retired Methodist minister who can sometimes be old fashioned, especially on the camino."

Walking has never quite gone out of fashion, and today we have double-lined socks, Lekis and mobile phones to aid our passage. I might even get to blog a bit. People temporarily turn themselves into pilgrims for many different reasons, some only finding out on the camino itself: I hope to be one of them!