My journey began here. I was born in 1953 in Pontefract, a town in the coal mining area of northern England. That industry has now gone! It once had a magnificent castle dating back to 1096 but which was almost demolished during the English Civil War (1642-1649).

Early Years

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I was an only child but I had a total of twelve cousins, four of which lived very close by and to me they were my brothers and sisters. In 1961 my mum and dad moved out of the ‘back to back’ type houses illustrated above. We moved into brand new houses which had the luxury of an inside toilet and a ‘proper’ bath!!!I lived in that house until I was 18 at which time I left for University in 1971.

I had a great childhood. All of us did. I loved Christmas Eve night looking out of my bedroom window hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa on his sleigh delivering the presents before falling asleep from sheer fatigue (me not Santa , that is!). I enjoyed it so much I retained a lot of the child within me.

For even the wisest can learn incalculably much from children.

Rudolph Steiner

A tree doesn’t forget what it has been, with each year of growth it leaves within itself the mark, the ring , of the previous one behind it. Similarly I still have the child I was when I was 5 within me, as I still have the 18 year old, and the 30 year old, and so on. What our folks lacked in money and so-called ‘wealth’ they more than made up for in the loving atmosphere within which we were raised. Never once was my mind poisoned by prejudice, bias, hatred nor bigotry. Never once did they force me to do ‘this’ or do ‘that’. Never once did they get in the way of my journey along the path that I was destined to follow. All our parents worked and worked hard, each and everyone of them so that we could have a ‘better’ life than the ones that they had to live through. I thank them so so much. Before the widespread availability of cars in Britain our world as children extended as far as the ends of the roads in which we lived. The novelty of the year for us were the two rail journeys each year that the entire community took to the Yorkshire or Lancashire coastal resorts. Having said that it didn’t stop my cousin and I making several trips to the Moon (in our imaginations) always miraculously getting back to Earth just in time for ‘tea’ at 4:30pm.

Adolescence!

At the age of 11 I went to the ‘Big School’…King Edward VI Grammar School to give it its imposingly correct title at that time, founded in 1548 though I think it had changed quite a bit by 1964. It was a great school academically and it had good teachers. But it was also quite strict. Discipline was still very much alive and well at school back then. I just wanted to learn everything, literally everything.

I couldn’t wait to learn all about the fascinatingly shaped benzene ring compounds in chemistry, I couldn’t wait to learn all about radiation and nuclear physics, I couldn’t wait to learn what all the strange symbols meant in differential and integral calculus, I couldn’t wait to start learning French and Latin and German, I couldn’t wait to learn all about European history (1492-1798) etc. As you may gather from overuse of the expression ‘I couldn’t wait to…’ I was a bit impatient to say the least at that time. I couldn’t stand having to plough through all the stuff you had to learn before you got to the benzene rings, or the nuclear physics, or the symbols in integral calculus. I always considered the preamble as boring. Exam time would be the worst. Doing the exam itself was ok, but it was having to do all the revision beforehand that I hated. I just never wanted to go back over old stuff, I just wanted to keep on learning the new.

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But comes a time where the school authorities feel themselves responsible for making you aware that you ought to be thinking about a career in life. For someone like myself who was interested in almost everything I found it a bit of a shock to have to now think about what it was I wanted to ‘do’ in life. I’d have loved to continue with the languages, I’d have loved to continue with learning more of the history although I was never sure what sort of career a comprehensive knowledge of ‘The History of the World’ would have set me up for ( university professor perhaps?). In the end I decided to continue with the sciences…i.e. mathematics, physics and chemistry as at that time you were pretty well guaranteed some kind of job/career with a qualification in any of the three subjects. What a shame though to have to give up, at such an early age in life, on the other subjects that I’d enjoyed studying up until now. I always thought it very sad how life forces you to go down certain channels that then very much determine your fate in life. This in turn can very much influence how others think of you.

People judge you for what they THINK you are. Which is almost always not what you REALLY are. If you qualified in physics then a physicist you were fated to remain for the rest of your career no matter how much you might have wanted to change that. The number of times in life that I’ve waxed lyrical upon something other than ‘science’ to then get a response of ‘how come you know so much about that when you’re supposed to be a scientist?’…so what is a scientist supposed to be, exactly? An Einstein lookalike, perhaps? Anyway I have badly digressed…..To cut a long story short I did quite well at school academically….good enough to move on to the next stage of my life’s journey along the path of knowledge acquisition. Though I had qualified for university in 1970, I was ‘too young’ to be admitted to it at that time….and so from January 1971 until September 1971 I had my first paid!!!!job at a chemical plant just a few miles away from where I lived. I enjoyed it immensely. It was a really good laugh being there. We had a great boss and my work colleagues were very accepting of my relatively short stay I had with them.

Of course outside of school and work a whole ‘other’ life was going on in the background. Remember that most of this period of my life occurred in the 1960s!!!!. What a truly truly truly eventful and iconic time it was to have grown up in. Where do I begin? The Beatles perhaps? (January 1963). Then there was the assassination of JFK, Civil Rights, Martin Luther King’s brilliant speeches, England won the football (soccer! in the USA) World Cup, Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, Vietnam, great cinema films, Hippies, the first big music festivals in the US and the UK, and the Space Race with Man on the Moon in 1969.

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In the UK the early sixties was a time when working people could purchase their first cars (automobiles). Our family had the Wolseley 1500, my cousins had the Ford Anglia.

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This was to have a profound impact on my interests in life. Having the cars available we all realised that there was something called ‘countryside’ not very far away….and all within our own county of Yorkshire. Once having seen the vast open spaces all I wanted to do from that time onward was to explore them. My love of walking as an activity was born then and I have never ever looked back. That was 1964.

Phew! What a decade! A time of great promise for most of it. A time of change. A time where there seemed to be the possibility of a much better life for everyone just around the very next corner….

I will in due course do a couple of separate posts, one about music and the other that will summarise the walks in the UK and in Switzerland where I learned so so much about myself. Both factors have been such a colossal influence in my life. Both were very important in making me feel so well prepared on that morning of September 21 when taking the first step on the journey to Santiago and beyond.

Leaving Home

September 1971. I left home to go to London University (King’s College) to study chemistry. I was the first person in the family ever to go to university. I chose to go to London because it had always fascinated me. It was said that you can get anything in London, you just needed to know where to look. So at the same time that I was starting out at King’s College I was also starting out in the University of Life. I enjoyed the place and got to know it very well…..oh! and I also got my degree in Chemistry.

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In September 1974 I went to the University of East Anglia in Norwich to study for a PhD. In 1979 I got my first career job. It was during this time (July 1975) that I walked my first Long Distance Footpath (LDP) known as the Pennine Way. I have described this in a separate blog on this site. Walking the Pennine Way taught me two lessons. One of these was quite a pleasant surprise in that I hadn’t foreseen just how much the other groups of people with whom we were fated to share the walk with would add to the enjoyment of the journey. The other lesson much more painfully learned was how devastatingly immobilising carrying too much weight is particularly when going uphill. What I learned from these two lessons I literally carried with me to the Camino 44 years later.

Career Years

In May 1979 I began my career job as a ‘scientist’ let’s say. I worked for the same organisation until 2012, though it did change its operating name and location a couple of times. This was the time that I met up with three other work colleagues, John, Rick and Warren who we are to meet again in other parts of this blog. As a foursome we did many trips to Scotland in both the summer and the winter. Scottish mountains in the winter become a serious mountaineering proposition. From there we progressed in the late 1980s to Switzerland and the European Alps.

In 1985 I moved with my job to Gosport…in the county of Hampshire. One problem with life in the far south of England is that it is a couple of hundred miles further to visit my beloved hills in the north and the west. However the south isn’t without its own version of countryside…the land is a little lower, a little softer and gentler and the weather is certainly warmer and drier. I will do a sort of ‘Lifestyle post’ about it at some stage. Suffice it to say here that it’s the sort of terrain where you can put together walks of great length….the longest being 56 miles which I did twice in 1984. I did very much continue the running that I’d commenced back in 1977 at university. Between 1981 and 1986 I did three marathons. You see I do (did) take some things seriously!!!

In 1989 I went to Colombia on a 4-month secondment. See this link. I returned to my parent organisation in December 1989. But I did return to Colombia in 1990 and 1991 where I got married. My daughter was born in October 1991 and as you may well imagine this had quite an impact on the scope of my outdoor activities. I did somehow find the time to study for a third scientific degree!!! but there were to be no more trips to the Alps nor Scotland at this time. The running continued on a very regular basis that kept me in reasonable physical shape. I retired from the main career job in March 2012.

Retirement

In July 2012 I entered the world of social care, at first volunteering. It was quite a shock to go from the hallowed confines of the job that I’d been doing for 33 years to this one. I drove one of the vehicles that was used to transport the various ‘service users’ to and from the Day Centre where we based. Then I would help out through the day. It’s an awfully impersonal term ‘service users’. In reality they were human beings who, through no fault of their own, had been dealt a bad hand at some stage in their lives, and so were classified as ‘vulnerable’ persons. There was a quite a range of ages, from late teens right up to one person who was 90! There were also a range of conditions manifested across the entire group of about 40 persons. There were cases of Downs Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Asperger syndrome, Autism, Epilepsy, general lack of confidence and with the more elderly people it was the all too frequent Dementia. I learned a lot in the 18 months that I was there, and I also obtained another diploma!!!(this time in Health and Social Care) not surprisingly. I was touched by (a) how trusting each one of them would be with me, (2) I received more ‘thank yous’ from them in 1 week than I did in my entire career from the organisation in which I had worked for 33 years. It sort of makes you stop and think really.

In January 2014 I became Transport Coordinator for our town’s Voluntary Action Centre. In April 2017 I moved to Age Concern Hampshire, once again acting in a dual role as driver and carer, where I remained until July 2018. At this stage I was completely retired, finally. I had originally planned to walk the Camino in September 2018, but it had to be postponed until 2019. So I had plenty of uninterrupted time to fine tune the preparations-logistical, physical and mental before leaving for Spain, where my Camino de la Vida would for 7 weeks align itself and become at one with that of the Camino de Santiago.

The next phase?