Personally I blame Jim Broadbent. He's always worth listening to and even though this wasn't the first time I'd heard The Late Mr Shakespeare, the play was doing a grand job of distracting me as I toiled across yet another arid plain, with little to divert me except a series of unpronounceable Scrabble challenges.
This one sign alone has got to be worth a significant number of Scrabble points...
After several days' exploring the area by bike, I was pretty much ready for a change of direction and, prompted by a dodgy hamstring, had taken a bit of a turn north, towards Roncesvalles, one of the crossing points of the pilgrim route. It was a bit of a cop out from my original plan of the High Sierra and all that but kneeds must and all that...
Cue spooky music. I don't think it happened in the tunnels. There were a couple of short, cool ones that weren't actually marked on my map and in which I took some shade for a few minutes while choosing the optimal aural accompaniment to the next punishing climb.
Wherever it happened, by the time the Great Fire of London had reached the brothel in which Broadbent spent his latter years, I suddenly realised that I was cycling up a leafy valley with a stream running down it. This was a bit more like it!
But how annoying to spend five days hammering across the parched and generally unsympatico plains of Northern Spain, not to mention some of the most ghastly urban landscape I have ever encountered, only to miss the moment when you left it behind!
Of course the journey is yet barely begun and further trials await. But to find myself at over 1000m, after what seemed like a gentle climb up the Wye Valley - a climb which was sufficiently gentle for me to cycle all the way without walking once - seems just a little bit magical...like the violets that were popping up right by the patch of lush grass on which I pitched my tent with a mixture of gratitude and just a bit of disbelief. I'm not sure how you did it but thanks Radio 4!
