Camino de Santiago - 2026

They still give you actual metal cutlery on Singapore Airlines and every single opportunity I had to pilfer a teaspoon tempted me greatly. When we were kids, our Dad would take one of us camping each year - or at least I think it was an annual event, to a kid time is a very elastic thing. Child A would go spend something like two nights on the side of the Mersey River rafting and toasting marshmallows and sitting on his back as he swam around, and Child B would get Mums Undiluted Attention, a heady and intoxicating brew.

On one of my turns at being Child A, washing up cups in the river, I found amongst the stones a teaspoon with JAL stamped on it, and what I was reliably informed was the Japanese Airlines logo. It's still in mum and dad's cutlery drawer some 25 years later, possibly because I treated it like the most notable archeological triumph known to man. I assumed - which nobody bloody challenged, I'll add - it had fallen out of the plane, and landed in the river. It did not occur to me that someone had just nicked it. I left all these teaspoons in the sky where they belong.

If we're ranking things from best to worst, and we are, because content at the start of these trips is scarce (woman spends 38 hours transiting through various tubes and corridors with 40,000 of her peers, ground breaking) and I am bored, then things I ate on the plane are organised thusly:

1. Pesto pasta salad with hot smoked salmon - banger, what a DARK HORSE

2. Raspberry yoghurt - more very long odds, the bookies will be spewing

3. Pork stew with mashed potatoes - Branna told me that my assertion braised things stand up very well on planes was odd, but it certainly isn't wrong

4. Cherry cake thing with custard - v nice even by ground standards and this is from a custard agnostic

5. Fruit salad - a reminder of how good apples can be

6. Salted caramel icecream - could have hammered a nail in with it, and I'm a icecream chewer not licker so that's fine with me

7. Spicy (showing my white here) coleslaw with cold smoked salmon - bit weird but in an enjoyable way, like Anne Geddes photography

8. English breakfast - the snappiness of the chicken sausage rocketed this up the charts but points off as was too full to finish

9. Bread roll #1 - quite hard when allowed to cool, but bread-esque

10. Bread roll #2 - had not had the concept explained very well to it, but retained points for Lurpack butter accompaniment

11. Cheese and biscuits - so waxy, so dry

12. Fish with fried rice and greens - eh! fine!

13. Bread roll #3 - same hurdles as #2 but more stale

Key takeaways: far more fish than I was expecting and it's only up from here on the bread front. Branna may have different views and I'm happy to hear them on the train from Paris to Biarritz which is next.

- LexRead more