Don't fear the dead

Today, I drove a very long way to talk to some people for an hour.  Then I drove a very long way back again.  It was deemed a good thing to do.  The people applauded spontaneously.  I felt embarrassed and thanked them.

I hired a car through work to get me there.  It was almost new and as big as a bus.  Tonight, I just drove my own car to a local garage and posted the keys through what I hope is the right letterbox.  If not, the neighbour of the garage has just been given a thirteen year-old Ford Fiesta with a hole rusted through the oil-sump.

The trouble with using hire-cars is it makes you realise just what a heap of shit you drive around the rest of the time.  But, then, what’s important in life?  I’m working on that one right now.  I’ve been working on it for as long as I can remember.

I have a plan:  to leave all this behind – quit office life and cold, dark nights and teach English in Madrid.  There!  Utopia.  Nirvana.  Distilled into a quickly achievable dream.  Problem solved.

Or is it?

It’s a bit like the new car conundrum: it’s nice to drive round in a new car – if I stuck with what I’m doing, I could follow others and take out a loan to buy one.  No more driving old heaps.  But new cars don’t stay new for long.  And even the nicest of cars eventually reveals niggles, or isn’t quite as nice as the one that parks next to you in the car park. 

Similarly, waving goodbye to the office for the last time and starting that new life teaching in the sun may be exciting and new, but it will also be frustrating, exhausting and at times lonely.  I don’t expect to be able to understand most of what’s being said around me for a long time.  I know people who’ve almost given up after the first year.  Nirvana is not achieved simply by dumping one place for another.  It may take years of hard work.

All of this is going through my mind as I walk along Lower Bristol Road in the darkness – hair blown about by the Atlantic wind, twigs snapping and falling around me.  Clouds scudding across a damp sky, painted amber by the town below.  It’s good to get air in my lungs after nearly eight hours in a car.  I need this walk.  Eleven days of walking the Camino taught me that I need to use these legs and force air through those lungs.  I’d become sedentary.

Looking from Worlebury Hill across the town and taking in the darkened Mendips, I see the first stone crosses of the cemetery across the high boundary wall.  There was a time when I would have quickened my pace – kept my gaze straight ahead under the lime trees.  Now, I take the time to look into the old boneyard. It’s not the dead I need to fear.

I turn and press on.  Home is only a couple of streets away.  I used to run this route – I should again.  Soon.

I have an aching longing – half plan, half dream – that I’ll fire up the laptop and do some more Camino notes.  Write something good.  I’ve got three or four days’ worth in draft, but there just isn’t the time to transport myself back to those Jacobean villages and hills and rough-out another seven days.  A problem we all have, no doubt. 

People, places, events, thoughts.  I need to get it all down in rough before the urgencies of the job obliterate it. I need to do this for myself. Preserve the summer fruit.  But the one thing I don’t have is time.