11) “Here’s to a good whisky…”
The first thing that I noticed – and it was already apparent on my journey back home – was that I no longer had the least compunction when it came to talking to strangers. It was of no importance what people might make of my thin, sunburned face and my still somewhat straggly hair and beard. I was like some prophet, like some ancient mariner addressing whomever he could manage to corner.
“Don’t worry, friend. I’m not going to ask to borrow any money. I simply want to tell you a story…”
It was evening by the time I arrived back in Edinburgh. The sky was overcast, and the familiar smell of the city’s breweries hung in the damp air. I breathed deeply, as this was the city that had for more than twenty years now been my home, and I had come to cherish just those aspects of the city which, to my mind, marked it out from other cities in which I had lived. Cork, for instances, in Ireland, had smelled of its peat fires.
No doubt it had ever been the practice of pilgrims to recount their adventures upon their return, and I was no different. What soon became evident, however, was that it was no easy matter to explain to anyone who had not already experienced the Camino just what was the appeal, or the benefit, of sleeping in oftentimes over-crowded dormitories, of using bushes as lavatories, and of covering from ten to twenty miles a day on foot, day in and day out, regardless of the weather.
Nevertheless I believed, as a writer, that language provided the ways and the words to describe all that could happen to us in our lives. I had kept a journal on the walk and I was soon at work editing it, cutting out whatever was pedestrian, predictable, or repetitious. A good part of writing had always been, for me, re-writing, and less, in my experience, had invariably proved to be more.
I completed an article for a pilgrim magazine, thinking that this would be the end of it and that my mind would then be clear for moving on. I set myself the task of describing in the article the events which had, unfailingly, made each day on the Camino memorable, reaching no real conclusion apart from the obvious one – that I had since returned home and was once more walking the streets of Auld Reekie.
I received a note from a fellow pilgrim, marvelling at how much detail had gone into the article. His own memory of the Camino, he claimed, could have been summed up with just a single sentence:
“Got up, walked all day, went to bed.”
I was also reading. I had arrived back with the pockets of my rucksack stuffed full of books purchased in Santiago. The Camino was defined by its lore – the myth, the legends, the miracle stories – and the more I read the more obvious it became that the lore and the history of the Camino were in fact inseparable, having been woven, as it were, into a single rich tapestry. And what was more telling still, the process was by no means complete, the tapestry remained a work in progress.
There were pilgrims and there were pilgrims. I dipped into the two books which I had heard mentioned most often on the Camino, one by Shirley MacLaine and the other by Paolo Coehlo. MacLaine related how, when threatened by feral dogs along the way, she was able to avoid a confrontation by being proactive with love energy. Coehlo’s book, on the other hand, included a mysterious mentor and a miraculous sword. There was no canonical text of the Camino, fact and fiction remained everywhere intermingled, and there were as many versions of the pilgrimage, roughly speaking, as there were pilgrims.
The Camino had in my case left me more alert, more attentive to my surroundings. I noticed, among other things, that the people of Edinburgh, whom I had previously found to be somewhat reserved, appeared on my return to be more open, even gregarious. How odd, I thought. How strange that my going off on the Camino should have had this effect on them.
Springtime in Scotland became the summer, and I resumed walking in the hills and along the coastal trails. I was waiting for something, expecting something by way of a sign, something like the yellow arrows which had guided me across Spain, something which would indicate the next turning.
After so many years of wandering the streets of Edinburgh I imagined that I knew the city well, but there was a new sharpness to my gaze of late, a new edge to my curiosity. I chanced upon intriguingly named lanes, preciously unexamined alleyways, and one day discovered, in a small pub that I was visiting for the first time, the following encomium:
Here’s to a good whisky,
so amber and clear
it’s not as sweet as a woman’s lips
but it’s a sight more sincere.
This in my adopted city, a city of writers and of philosophers. I got out my notebook and I copied it. This in the city of the Scottish Enlightenment, in the Athens of the North. This while preparing myself; this while awaiting, with ever keener anticipation, the next way mark.
[To be continued.]

























