"Better ways of talking about climate change"

This is the title of our forthcoming Christian Ecology Link meeting, this coming Friday here in Cheltenham. The poster photograph (above) is captioned, Will we be seeing palm trees in Cheltenham’s Promenade before too long?. I took it in Seville when we went there a couple of years ago.

All the details have been widely circulated, and we hope for a good turnout - Mark Letcher speaks well and authoritatively, being the director of the Bristol-based sustainable energy consultancy, Climate Works.

Camino: Day 1 report

Here is Caroline, baptising her new boots in one of the rivers we had to cross today, all swollen by the terrific rains that Andalucia has had this Spring. The other side of which is the proliferation of wild flowers.

Happily, today has been fine: what clouds we have seen were nice and high, and there was a little breeze to prevent us getting too hot. That´s just as well, as it´s a dusty old track from the Seville outskirts, with no shade.

We´re staying in a hotel made from a converted farmhouse, just outside the rather nondescript town of Guillena, and were very pleased to be able to sink into a bath on our arrival here. Although we avoided the worst of suburban Seville by catching the recommended town bus, we then spent an enthralling hour walking round the remains of the Roman city of Italica: by when Caroline made the mistake of wondering whether we had finished our walking for the day; but a sharp tap with my Leki [stick] and large coffee [carrot] combined to get her back on her feet. And soon it was me that was wilting.

Holy Week in Seville is something rather different (from Cheltenham anyway): at 5 a.m. yesterday morning, I was standing outside our hotel watching 500 black clothed and hooded men with candles process past in silence, followed by an enormous float with a full-size statue of Christ carrying his cross on it (carried itself by a team of 35 willing slaves, in the dark underneath it): this and more than 50 similar progresses have been surging through central Seville all week, watched by silent and respectful crowds of thousands: an amazing tradition, preserved with vitality, and giving hope to those of us depressed by clerical scandals.

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!

Above Coldwell Bottom

We often walk here, above Coberley. It's a convenient triangle, a variety of scenery within a short space.

The Winter sun was shining this morning, the sheep casting unreally long shadows on the hillside flanking Coldwell Bottom. The plantation, which we saw going in when first we came to live in Cheltenham in 1994, is now serious woodland, the track up to it only partly chewed up by the mountain bikers. It's not as bad for walkers anyway as would be the adjacent fields.

But this was a tame walk bearing in mind what lies ahead for us: on Holy Saturday, we set out from Seville for Salamanca, the first half of the Via de la Plata: the second, to Santiago de Compostela, is planned for October.

Not only longer walks, therefore, but heavier weights than a camera need to be factored in regularly from now on!