Day 11.March 23, 2024. Villafranca de Los Barros toTorremejia. 27 kms

 

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,

Your house is on fire, your children are gone. 

It was a very long day indeed, so we left before six and had breakfast at a nearby bar.

As we left town before dawn, I noticed two rather sensuous twin peaks far, far away, and remembered walking towards them eight years ago. Our destination  was somewhere near them.

Olives and grapes, olives and grapes, olives and grapes, and then rather more grapes than olives, along a gravel road that stretched on forever. But it was flat.

Everyone who has walked the Camino will speak of the pleasures of the little social encounters along the way. You become an infinitesimal part of each other’s lives.

This morning at about the tenth kilometre I was about to sit down to have a rest, when a couple of elderly German ladies caught me up. We introduced ourselves. One was Rita but I couldn’t quite catch the name of the other one. We tried again. Was it Marcellina? No. Finally, she said, “Jesus’ girlfriend.” “Ah, Magdalena, Mary Magdalena,” I said, and we laughed.

I chuckled on for another few kilometres, and then, I took my halfway rest, sitting down with my back to a concrete block. A ladybird settled on my knee, and we stared at each other for a while, part of each other’s life. It was a pleasure and a privilege, but one that I didn’t extend to the ants that were then crawling up my leg. Time to go. 

And now, a little epiphany. Prompted by the spiritual encounter with a ladybird, and the earlier biblical allusion, and the friendly encounters I had been enjoying with other pilgrims during the morning, I reflected on the essence of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. I used to think of it as a former Christian pilgrimage, now a secular one, but I was coming to think of it still as a Christian pilgrimage, not in the sense of the procession of penitents in pointed hats and the statue of Our Lady raised on high that we had witnessed yesterday, but in the words of Jesus before they were appropriated by the Church and forgotten by the zealots.

Love thy God, and love thy neighbour as thyself.

And God? Manifested in the ladybird. 

Enough profundities, or profundetti . I wondered whether the ladybird verse was still part of the child’s golden treasury of nursery rhymes. Probably not. It might upset the sensitive child. A shame! I remembered other rhymes from my childhood that I think I survived.

I’m the king of the caaastle

And you’re the dirty raaascal.

How we used to stretch out those vowels! Or,

Fat and skinny went to war,

Fat got shot with an apple core.

Some nice literary devices there. I’ve read worse poems.  Does the recitation of these childhood rhymes lead to an appreciation of poetry?

Enough frivolity. By now, Circe was much closer, but sadly, rather uneven and misshapen.

Five more kilometres and I arrived at the rather Wild West town of Torremejia. Pilgrims had been passing me all day and getting to the albergue before me, but fortunately, Rob, who walks at the speed of light, had arrived before them all, and saved me a bottom bunk.

Much joviality at the restaurant over dinner: a rabble of pilgrims and a babble of tongues.