Burgos Cathedral

Commiserating about the body I will of course condone, I'd have very little news throughout the past few years if not for updating my friends on the various ills that have befallen my extremely frail bod. Whining about the Spanish or the cost or whatever else however, I have absolutely no time for. It irks me in the extreme and I just want to smack the perpetrators with my sandal and say go home then.

You don't air such grievances in public it's boring and unbecoming. You keep a file in your phone's notes app where you expunge anything that's annoyed or wronged you so you can move on with your day, and later perhaps you come back to it and chuckle at how silly it all was. I have four entries in my whinge ledger and they all seem funny now and nobody at all has been burdened by them in the slightest. That's, I think you'll find, not psychotic at all and actually very wise.

Also wise, I think, to have had a rest day today given it took me until about 11am to be able to take steps without sound effects thanks to the old back (see sentence one). I mushed about happily. All my clothes got a wash, while I sat commando in my dress. I had a nice lunch at a place that was absolutely packed yesterday - I always seem to be in cities on wet weekends, rather than the quieter and cheaper weekdays, so staying for a Monday was great. The shops all open again in a minute so I'll go see if I can buy another pair of undies, maybe a full brief so I can swim in any Meseta albergues with pools without scaring children.

Oh I have Camino goss. Yesterday, I heard the guy from West Virginia introduce himself as such to half the hostel, from my top bunk prison - once you're in, you're not getting out any time soon unless you're interested in shattering something. He told my friend (Marika, I think?) that he gets up at 4am to do the Rosary, whatever that is, and be on the road by 4.30am when "the birds start singing". Given dawn is at about 7.20am at the moment with sunrise about half an hour later, I reckon I'd rather see than listen to birds in the dark for three hours but whatever floats your extremely chatty boat.

Anyway, over a bottle of wine that night with Dave, Marika and her awful German mate, the bluntest woman I've literally ever met, it came out that West Virginia might be a giant fake, which is DELICIOUS. He was seen getting out of a taxi a few hundred metres from the albergue, then running the remainder to arrive puffed, before putting on a performance of massaging his calves in the kitchen. I was therefore thrilled to add to this lore by grabbing Marika in the dorm this morning and hissing that I'd spotted WV still here at 7am, wearing a head torch as if he was meant to leave at 4.30 but got held up.

Mate, just chill out? Nobody cares if you get a taxi or leave when the rest of us do. To be honest nobody would have paid you a scrap of attention if you hadn't been such a flog about it all. I hope to catch him in the act at a later date.Read more