The Schalter

Written by: Stephen Gray

It’s the end of January and London has been washed with multifarious monochrome, the impatient few months which run from the disintegration of last year’s fallen leaves to this year’s new buds. Melatonin levels are up in the short grey days as we wait for the weather to do something, anything, and prod the slate clouds into action to give us hollow shards of sunlight or, if we’re very good, maybe even snow? Me, I’m at work in a good office at a bad job ruminating again on how little I like dragging myself there in the mornings and how much harder I find it to drag myself home in the evenings, wondering how, seven months after graduating, I had found I was only really comfortable with a couple of friends and a couple of pints in the pub most evenings.

At 21, that can’t be a great sign.

I couldn’t stop work, I needed the money (the Amstel wouldn’t pay for itself) and had no idea what else I would do. I couldn’t move out to solve the other problem, I’d signed a contract. But then, after a while, I realised I couldn’t live in the pub. And so it was that one lunchtime a week later found me on Blackfriars Road at a church for the first time in years, standing ankle-deep in books and maps, wondering whether I would follow it through. Two months later I found myself on a plateau in France’s Massif Central, walking ankle-deep in snow, wondering where I was going.  

There exist in France four medieval pilgrimage routes that benefit from literature and guides, and a staggering number of others which criss-cross the country, originating in England, Norway, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe. Most of these converge near the Atlantic ocean to cross the Pyrenees on a track at one point used by Napoleon’s armies, running parallel to the northern coast of Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela, capital of Galicia, where the fabled remains of the apostle St James may or may not be buried. These routes have brought people by foot from all corners of Europe for over a millennium. It was a far cry from wondering whether to get the Tube home before or after the O2 turned out.  

I had quit my job, bought a one-way ticket to Lyon and given myself about a month to walk the 460 miles to the Spanish border. It wasn’t so much about post-University travelling, I didn’t want to go East to learn about spiritualism or psychotropic fungi. It wasn’t really about culture; though the route was steeped in it, admittedly beautiful Romanesque chapels don’t set my pulse racing. It wasn’t about religion, though days of walking through the sublime would, I knew, have enforced any belief or awe I felt for a deity. Instead it seemed that to have left everything I knew behind, and to be standing there in the snow trying to remember that the sun goes east to west and so in the mornings I should be following my shadow, was the natural result of how I had felt a month before, in that office breathing recycled air in the time between cigarette breaks. 

It turned out to be one of the most personal and painfully rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. I didn’t go to find myself, Jesus or enlightenment, but to get time and space away from everything that bogged down my mind. It was almost unwittingly over those weeks, walking through snow, wind, rain, hail and (unfortunately since it now looks like I’ve been on holiday) the occasional bit of sun, that I deconstructed facets of my life and personality and came to understand things I wouldn’t have had a hope of knowing if I had stayed put in England. These I won’t be discussing with anyone, partially because I’m terrified of appearing someone who has discovered who they are and now, puffing up their chest and looking pensive, can fix your problems too; and partially because, even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t find the words.  

There were moments when I looked at myself with the sort of disdainful bafflement some of my friends adopted when I left, wondering whether I wasn’t a slight danger to myself. After a week I sat, soaking, in a forest and would have given anything I owned for five minutes in that same pub, in the same life, or to hear my father monger doom about the woes of old age, or just to have a sip of proper tea in my mother’s kitchen. But, of course, it wouldn’t happen, and so you choose an appropriate cliché and root around in yourself for some strength to carry on. And despite the emotional turbulence there were physical concerns. Tendons which were used to 30-minute jaunts to the station fought back petulantly when asked to walk 30 kilometres through mud, to do the same the day after, and to repeat with no end in sight.  

Youth was only maybe on my side. Evacuation of the French countryside to the big cities means you can walk through villages not seeing a soul, and the relative unpopularity of the French sections of the journey, compared with the Spanish, means you can see no one else walking all day. There were other people, and you find you fall into step with some and spend the night at the same gites d’étapes, little places on the routes where for €8 or €10 you can get a bed for the night. But the vast majority of these were retired French or German people, who walked because they had the time to spare. I only met two other people under 30, and we were there because we felt, unlike the others, that we had had to get away from our lives at home.  

There were days when things went wrong: when I got lost and walked for 10 and a half hours and nearly 30 miles to find myself back on the route but nowhere near where I had wanted to end up; when I climbed 600ft, lost again but convinced I was on the right hill, through one electric and three barbed wire fences to reach the summit only to realise my mistake, climb back down and repeat with the right hill; though I was only once slightly bitten by a dog which didn’t get through the leather on my boot. There were chronic mistakes too: thinking a 1.2kg edition of War and Peace was an acceptable weight concession in a rucksack that weighed 15kg without food or water; or that an old pair of fcuk jeans wouldn’t start to disintegrate on the first day. You can add to all this the cacophony of snoring which kept people awake, and the inclination of these ronfleurs to get up at 6am, turn on the lights and loudly discuss where they would be going that day while I tried desperately to shut off the part of my brain which impulsively translates French, to get just a few minutes of sleep before a breakfast which more often than not comprised bread and prune jam, having the consistency of wet sand and a comparable taste.  

But, for all these there were days whose benefits far outstripped the annoyances. First catching sight of the Pyrenees 550km in, sitting on the grassy banks of the Lot where no one knew and no one could reach me, standing in the trees at the foot of a 900-year-old guard tower in a low patch of land so untouched and untended it could have been centuries earlier in time. But as for the final moment, the official end of my trip, passing under a gate which has stood at the entrance to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port for 600 years, there were no fireworks or whooping, no cheers or celebrations. A quiet beer and a phone-call to my parents, a raft of text messages to friends, and a train timetable were my only concerns. In the same way that I wasn’t happy or sad when I left the sandstone and breccia entrance to the cathedral in Le Puy-en-Velay, I wasn’t happy or sad to stand at the door of a red schist church in Basque country while storm clouds moved over the mountains ahead. 

There were exactly four weeks between those points, to duck out of life, out of media, politics, taxes, careers, fashions, feuds, elations, squabbles, commutes, dents on the car and scratches on my mobile to figure things in their place, myself included. It wasn’t a panacea, I won’t be able to cure my ills, let alone make an attempt with anyone else’s. But if you’ll excuse the saccharine taste of this sentiment, it let me return to find an entirely new and more understandable life and country of beautifully finite complexity. Even better, it hasn’t changed a bit since I left.  

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This post is tagged France, London, Travel