I’m like a bloody sentry, obsessively patrolling my own little stretch of coastline – sometimes out there marching up and down the marshes three or four times a day. There’s a little hut or hide out near Stiffkey where I’ll often stop and eat an apple or a piece of flapjack. Especially when it’s wet. If it’s dry there’s a hollow in the long grass that I’m particularly fond of, set back from the path. I’ve tucked myself away in there several times now, with nothing but the occasional birder puttering by, perfectly oblivious. Spying on twitchers has, I feel, a pleasing irony to it. Though so far I’ve witnessed nothing more incriminating than the odd adjustment of underwear.
I’m a bit of a late convert to the joys of walking. Of course, I’ve always been as willing as the next person to hike up some hill to admire the view. And I can see that there’s something to be said for wandering through the woods in autumn and kicking up the leaves. But the sort of walking I do these days is more forced march than ramble. It never fails to get the blood moving round my body which must, I imagine, be of some benefit. But it’s the way it gently shakes me up that I’m beginning to appreciate might have some positive influence on me.
Which is not to say I’m feeling healed, by any means. And yet there’s definitely something in the simple mechanical action of sustained walking that seems to encourage my mind to quieten down a little. Like those parents who endlessly push a buggy round the block to get their babies off to sleep.
One of my self-appointed duties, aside from keeping an eye out for any belated Anglo-Saxon invaders, is to measure any additional minutes of daylight and gauge whether the sun gains any strength. Well, the days do indeed seem to be getting longer, albeit incrementally, but they also seem to be growing colder. I keep the fire going in my tiny cottage pretty much round the clock, which is only a problem in that I seem to be forever dragging bags of coal around the place.
I do wonder what the original pilgrims got out of their walking – the ones who hiked for days or even weeks to reach their destination. I mean, were their journeys carried out in an atmosphere of celebration or penance? The latter, I would imagine. We northern Europeans don’t really go in for fervour. We’d rather focus on the guilt.
But we do like a bit of a procession. According to the little booklet I picked up at Walsingham museum, the band of silent pilgrims I recently encountered would have just hiked the mile or so up from the Slipper Chapel, where traditionally they would’ve removed their shoes in order to walk barefoot into town. But what were the early pilgrims after, exactly? Absolution? Or simply the desire to arrive, suitably exhausted, at what they considered to be a holy site?
I have to say, I find the whole idea of paying one’s respects to some saint’s withered finger or shin-bone fairly gruesome. In fact, I’m pretty sure I once saw a photograph of a saint’s head sitting pickled in a church somewhere. It really is quite barbaric. And yet I can see how people would be drawn to the idea of a relic. How could a sliver of the True Cross or a drop or two of Mary’s own milk possibly fail to have some magic to it? And there are times in all our lives when we’re in need of a bit of that.
It’s not quite the same, I know, but a friend of mine happened to be living in Berlin when the Wall came down. I remember speaking to her on the phone as it was all going on. A week or two later a package landed on my doormat and in it was a small cardboard box with a note attached, explaining that it contained a tiny fragment of the Berlin Wall.
For all I know she just went out into her backyard and took a sledgehammer to a couple of breezeblocks and distributed the various bits to all her friends. But there’s no doubt that in the days that followed, whenever we had people round and I happened to mention it to them, they all got mightily animated, and wanted to see it and hold it in their hand. As if it carried in it some charge, or potency. Some sense of its own history.