Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

Sun is shinin’ in the sky
There ain’t a cloud in sight
It’s stopped rainin’, everybody’s in the play
And don’t you know
It’s a beautiful new day? Hey

ELO – Mr.Blue Sky

Eagle eyed readers of this blog may have noticed with alarm9 that for some days there has been no mention of the Chemin Urbain V from Nasbinals to Avignon.

Instead of heading south east through the Lozère toeards Avignon I seem to have been heading south west through the Aveyron. Have I inadvertently taken a wrong turning?

Well the answer is yes and no! For logistical reasons it would have proved difficult if not impossible to return home from the Lozère region in time to attend the funeral of the friend who tragically died last Saturday. The region is pretty remote and not blessed with a plethora of train stations.

Continuing on the GR65 towards Moissac takes me nearer home in the Tarn and Garonne and passes through places with better transport links. The Chemin Urbain V will have to wait for another time.

I’ve so far walked 600km in two weeks and thankfully have no blisters or aches and pains to report! All that training (walking Puzzle down the track twice a day) has worked wonders!

Perusal of the weather forecast this morning for the next few days provided some welcome cheer. No rain! Cue loud cheers of joy and relief. However, overcast conditions and temperatures in the high teens mean I probably won’t be slapping on the Factor 50 with gay abandon.

I left Claudine and Marcellino’s armed with a bag of her cakes and a banana which were to be kept for emergencies.

I spotted the first pilgrims of the day heading out of Figeac. There must have been ten of them – they were Dutch and had their luggage ferried ahead of them by a transport company.

I also passed a chap struggling up a rocky path with what looked like a shopping trolley. In fact it contained his backpack. Walking like that to Compostella seemed like one of the Labours of Hercules!

A little later just outside the hilltop village of Faycelles, I met a Belgian wearing a natty T-shirt who seemed a bit surprised when I asked to take his photo.

From Figeac to Cahors, the GR65 crosses a region called the Quercy, named after an ancient celtic people called the Cadourques or the cadurci who inhabited the region at the time of the Roman invasion.

The terrain is mainly limestone which made for much easier walking conditions than yesterday’s rivers of mud!

At Gréalou I stopped for a short break and was soon joined by Francoise and Claude-Alain, a French couple from the Var who were walking to Cahors and kindly bought me a coffee and asked me my secret to avoiding blisters.

I spent much of the afternoon thinking about three strange extra curricular episodes which happened while I was at Winchester.

The memories must have been triggered by the sunny weather which in turn triggered memories of listening to Mr.Blue Sky by E.L.O (The Electric Light Orchestra) in the late 1970s.

The first episode revolved around a school outing to Bath and a visit to the Roman baths followed by a visit to the Victorian pump room where we got the opportunity to taste ‘the waters’. I can still remember it to this day – it was absolutely foul.

On the journey back to Winchester, our coach was stopped on the M4 by a police car. A stern faced officer came on board and asked who had been throwing paper cups out of the coach window onto the motorway for the previous 5 miles. It turned out that a boy in my house ( who was the bane of my life for five years) was responsible. A search of his belongings revealed that he had removed nearly 200 paper cups from the dispenser in the pump house and spent much of the return jouney lobbing them onto the motorway. I secretly hoped that he’d be hauled off the bus and be incarcerated for the duration. Sadly he merely got a mild ticking off and returned to his merry way up to house of making my life hell.

The same boy used to play E.L.O’s Mr.Blue Sky at high volume in the communal mugging hall whenever given the chance. He played the bass guitar in a band called ‘Red Baron’ in an old air raid shelter in part of the house and spent much of his spare time listening to Heavy Metal.

It was probably through this same boy that I was introduced to the delights of heavy metal music and so found myself, along with five other Wykehamists attending an AC/DC concert at the Gaumont Theatre in Southampton in 1980.  We were escorted there by an economics master called Mr Metcalfe, who claimed to be a heavy metal fan.

It was the first music concert that I had attended and I can’t remember ever feeling more out of place in my life. Surrounded by hundreds of leather jacketed ‘head bangers’ with unkempt hair reaching their shoulders, the five of us stood out like a sore thumb with our short back and sides haircuts, our ties and tweed jackets. The only blessing was that we hadn’t had to wear our straw hats to the concert!

The third memory revolved around a trip to London in 1981. I was studying politics A level with two other boys. The lessons were given by the athletics master John Hemery. If the name sounds familiar it’s because his brother, David Hemery, won the gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles at the Mexico Olympics in 1968.

For reasons which seemed obscure to me at the time, John Hemery organised a trip for the three of us to go up to London for the weekend sometime during my final year at Winchester. We checked into the Rubens Hotel near Buckingham Office soon after arriving by train on Saturday afternoon and were then whisked off to see a film – La Cage aux Folles, a racy French movie, released in 1978, about a gay couple operating a drag nightclub in a French resort town! Quite how this was connected to our A level Politics studies was anybody’s guess!

The film was followed by a visit to the Hard Rock Café in Pall Mall where we gourged ourselves on American cheese burgers, fries and milkshakes as well as copious quantities of alcohol.

At around 9pm, with all of us feeling very light headed, Mr Hemery enquired if we’d be ‘interested in’ accompanying him to Shepherd Market. If so we’d needed to bring £20 with us! Sadly I didn’t, so I made ny way back to the Rubens Hotel to watch ‘Match of the Day’ and research the hotel mini-bar while Mr Hemery and the two other Wykehamists disappeared into the night and headed off to Shepherd Market.

Breakfast the next morning was a gloomy affair. Whatever had happened in Shepherd Market had clearly not gone entirely according to plan. At the time I didn’t have a clue what the three of them had been up to or indeed why the trip to London had been organised in the first place.

It was only recently reading excerpts from Charles Spencer’s autobiography ‘A Very Private School‘ that the proverbial penny finally dropped. We had been taken up to London with the express purpose of discovering ‘real life’, including the services available in Shepherd Market of a Saturday evening. The Politics A level awayday to London finally made sense! 

Back in France in 2024 earlier today, nestled on the banks of the Lot, Cajarc was the sort of place where you could easily spend a day watching the world go by. The riverside café where a couple of pilgrims were sipping beers in the early afternoon sun, looked extremely tempting.

I’d been expecting another 47km day to reach Saint Jean-de-Laur. As it turned out, I’d got the distances wrong and it was only 41km. So I ended up reaching my gite ( the Mas de Jantille) at St Jean-de-Laur, shortly after 5pm.

What a great place it turned out to be. The owner greeted me with a glass of pineapple wine and introduced me to thecother guests – six French and two Dutch.

We shared a convivial meal together discussing the best and worst gites we’d stayed in (it turns out I had been extremely lucky with the places I’d stayed compared to some of the horror stories recounted by the other guests around the table. At 9pm it was time to head off to the dormitory, put the earplugs in and get a good night’s sleep in before tomorrow’s 47km walk to Cahors.