Therapy

your whole self, body and soul, for two or three months. I read a book about the history of it, and was completely fascinated. Literally millions of pilgrims went along this road, when the only way of doing it was on foot or on horseback. They must have got something tremendous out of it, I thought to myself, or people wouldn’t have kept on going. I got myself a guide to the route from the Confraternity of St James, and a rucksack and sleeping-bag and the rest of the kit from the camping shop in Wimbledon High Street. The family thought I was mad, of course, and tried to talk me out of it. Other people presumed I was doing it as a sponsored walk for charity. I said, no, I’ve done things for others all my life, this is for me. I’ve been a nurse, I’m a Samaritan, I’m-“
    “Are you really?” I interjected. “A Samaritan? Bede didn’t mention it.”
    “Bede never really approved,” said Maureen. “He thought all that misery would leak out of the phone and infect me.”
    “I bet you’re good at it,” I said.
    “Well, I’ve only lost one client in six years,” she said. “I mean, only one actually topped himself. Not a bad record. Mind you, I found I was less sympathetic after Damien was killed. I didn’t have the same patience with some of the callers, their problems seemed so much more trivial than mine. Do you know what our busiest day of the year is?”
    “Christmas Day?”
    “No, Christmas is second. Number one is St Valentine’s Day. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
     
    In our slow, looping dawdle along the Camino we were frequently overtaken by younger, fitter, or fresher walkers. The nearer we got to Santiago, the more of them there were. The annual climax of the pilgrimage, the feast of St James on 25th July, was only a couple of weeks away, and everybody was anxious to get there in good time. Sometimes, from a high point on the road, you could look down on the Camino ribboning for miles ahead, with pilgrims in ones and twos and larger clusters strung out along it like beads as far as the horizon, just as it must have looked in the Middle Ages.
    At Cebrero we ran into a British television unit making a documentary about the pilgrimage. They were ambushing pilgrims outside the little church and asking them about their motives. Maureen refused point-blank to take part. The director, a big blond chap in shorts and tee-shirt, tried to persuade her to change her mind. “We desperately need an older woman who speaks English,” he said. “We’re up to here in young Spaniards and Belgian cyclists. You’d be perfect.” “No thank you,” Maureen said. “I don’t want to be on television.” The director looked hurt: people in the media can never understand that the rest of the world doesn’t have the same priorities as themselves. He turned to me as a second-best alternative. “I’m not a true pilgrim,” I said.
    “Ah! Who is a true pilgrim?” he said, his eyes lighting up.
    “Someone for whom it’s an existential act of self-definition,” I said. “A leap into the absurd, in Kierkegaard’s sense. I mean, what could be-“
    “Stop!” cried the director “Don’t say any more. I want to film this. Go and get David, Linda,” he added to a freckled, sandy-haired young woman clutching a clipboard. David, it appeared, was the writer-presenter of the programme, but he couldn’t be found. “He’s probably sulking because he had to actually walk a bit this morning,” muttered the director, who was also confusingly called David. “I’ll have to do the interview myself.”
    So they set up the camera, and after the usual delay while the director decided where to set up the shot, and the cameraman and his focus-puller fiddled about with lenses and filters and reflectors, and the sound man was satisfied about the level of background noise, and the production assistant had stopped people walking in and out of shot behind me, I delivered my existentialist interpretation of the pilgrimage to camera. (Maureen by this time had got bored and wandered off to look at the church.) I described the three stages in personal development according to Kierkegaard — the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious — and suggested that there were three corresponding types of pilgrim. (I had been thinking about this on the road.) The aesthetic type was mainly concerned with having a good time, enjoying the picturesque and cultural pleasures of the Camino. The ethical type saw the pilgrimage as