Author: Scribblebank

Things had been stressful in Sussex recently. I decided what I needed was a walk to Santiago, and found a cheap flight to A Coruña.

“Your first stamp,” said the border guard. I wondered afterwards if there was a question in there – I like being chatty if I speak only some of the language, but I’m not keen on airports or airport security (or flying itself), and his follow up to “Buenos dias” was in English anyway. Also, I hadn’t slept (having taken the last train to Gatwick the night before the flight).

It didn’t take long to find a bus into town. It was hot and sunny, although far from the heat I’ve felt in southern Spain in the summer. By now it was 11am, and I walked around until I found a supermarket, and bought things for a sandwich which I ate by the marina – with a massive cruise liner pulled up. For some reason, I didn’t take any pictures of A Coruña that day, but here’s one from 10 days later, of a smaller ship just leaving: 

I also bought some disgusting cigarettes and a lighter for just over 2 quid. 

After finding a cheap hostel in Pereiro (in the opposite direction to Santiago de Compostela) I got a bus to Fene, and faced what seemed a dangerous and possibly illegal 5 km walk from Fene to Pereiro, so I hitchhiked the last few km – but not before taking my first photo of Spain in 20 years: 

Building in Fene, Galicia, Spain (Sept 2025):

Not very exciting, and I’m not now sure why I took it – probably just looked to me quite Spanish, but I like nature staking its claim. But maybe I just thought I ought to get snapping…

Alda Cabanas Nature was clean and modern, and had everything I could want from a hostel, with the exception of a spoon – I drank my gazpacho from a glass.

The other 4 people in the 24-bed dormitory were nice: a Czech mother and son, and an Israeli couple. They were on the Camino Ingles from Ferrol.

Un/Fortunately, this isn’t the kind of travel writing where all the people I met smile out of photos – I hardly ever take non accidental pictures of people, and I didn’t think to ask the names of anyone (although over the next week, a couple of other people did do an introduction), but we talked about a few things, although the Czech mother I think could understand a bit but didn’t seem confident to speak. 

The next day, I ended up walking to Ferrol (failing to catch a bus or hitch a lift) – to do the walk I’d loosely planned. One of the guests had mentioned a Decathlon shop in Ferrol, and I noticed from its website that they had shoes up to size 54 (which turned out to be about 7 sizes larger than what they actually stocked there…

“Ferrol is an industrial city”

Cars for scale:

Those things (parts of a tunnel?) were huge!

Here’s me in central Ferrol:

More historic than industrial, that bit.

Almost-empty train from Ferrol to Pontedeume:

Followed by a 5km hike up the hill…

I’d walked a lot, and not slept very much, over the last 60 hours. In the run up to this 2 weeks, I’d been doing an average of maybe a mile a day – maybe 2, and the morning I walked to Ferrol, I made the somewhat rash decision to gift my expensive hiking boots that pinched a little, sticking with an old pair of trainers I’d packed that used to be very comfortable…

…I think they’d started to smell, rather than having worn a hole somewhere, and I think I hadn’t thrown them out in case time would kill the germs. I decided to stick with them, and to get something with more strength and durability baked in and remaining for most of the walking: to get that from the shoe shop – that turned out to not in fact have shoes in my size.

So I spent 2 nights back at the hostel in Pereiro, waiting for the blisters and aches to subside. Which I think probably wasn’t the best decision at all. Photo-wise: I only took one picture.

Here it is – is it a pine cone?

The Cacophony of laughter-pine-cone.

I left just before dawn on day 4…

Nice house in Cabanas, with pampas grass growing out of it:

I saw my first stag beetle. Dead, unfortunately:

But I don’t think it was dead beetles that inspired me to up the conversation with the chatbots; into death, sociopathy, and whether or not the world is a simulation…

So, I’ve only gone and got myself cast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream! (I’m playing a reduced version of Theseus).

A few months earlier, a friend had said that I’d make a good Oberon (which I promptly googled — not being much of a literature buff). I wondered aloud if they thought that because I’m quite tall, maybe a bit unusual looking… although I’ve also been told I have a good voice – if that was why they saw me as a King of the Faeries. But (to focus on the more polite elements of the conversation), they declined to comment…

So, the late callout for someone to play Oberon (or Theseus) really caught my attention…

I’d recently joined a local amateur dramatics group, after enjoying one of their productions in 2024 – though I’d been unable to attend the original auditions as I was in Ireland for a few days. Fast forward through an enthusiastic first read-through (which I quickly had second thoughts about) and a few rehearsals (with a few absences)

We were then asked to submit a short biography for the programme.

Here’s what I arrived at (with some feedback and suggestions):

“After chickening out at the door to the theatre auditions at school, Cameron made it into Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna at sixth form college, and enjoyed it thoroughly even though he had no idea what it was about (apparently Ionesco didn’t either!) He also appeared in The Visit, and The Boyfriend, but the auditions at university (where they asked him to be fire) didn’t go so well – his acting has been on ice ever since. Cameron is terrifie…delighted to be cast as Theseus at BHTC, decades later – and is also happy to be improving his Early Modern English!”

I’m not sure the humour quite works – eg the ‘Early Modern English’ line might work better with “Shakespearean English” – which is a better known term, though I think “Early Modern English” is inherently amusing (a little bit) … but I’m not sure..

Anyway, a couple of edits later, and it’s been submitted….

TBC

So, I thought it would be funny to say to my teammate (whom I’d only just met) “That was all you” after we had just lost our first game* against two others, one of whom had played a few times before (it was new to three of us).

*I don’t remember the name of the game, but it’s a bit like a shrunk chess – where when you do a move, you can’t do that move again until your opponent has done it (a list of possible moves is written on cards, one of which is passed to the opponent with each turn) – so it’s a bit of a concentration hog, at least while it’s a new game…

But, this isn’t a discussion of those game mechanics.

It (“that was all you”) was supposed to be a sort of comedy-awful thing to say to someone.

I think I do that sort of thing quite a lot – in person, and in writing… but what I’m thinking now is that I used to deliver such lines in a silly voice (or at least, with a bit of incongruous intonation), whereas now… well, it’s more like if I had to call myself “an expert” on anything, it would probably be something like “the trials and tribulations of not winking enough. Or, ever.”

…though an expert should probably have sat back and digested – and now have the perspective – where I’m more like me just lyin there with ma guts all hanging out, still in the middle of it all…

So, I dunno… You decide…

Anyway, I’d also been trying to download some app to get freebie drinks from the bar, so my concentration (game playing and socialising) was a bit divided…

I had been conscious of the fact that I hadn’t suggested a move. Not even a mumble…

Here’s a pic of Venus and the moon (earlier the same evening, over Brighton UK) while I decide where to send my memory pen next…

Venus was actually pointed out to me a little later than this photo (on my way to the pub) by a woman on a low bridge who had been looking at the pair of celestial bodies… whereupon, I’d decided to try to get a clearer photo (than this one) of the moon.

She also showed me Mars (a first for me) which was also quite cool…

BTW, I’ve just read that Venus and Jupiter are brighter than any of the stars (and Mars and Mercury can be) which is good quite pocket sized info, IMHO.

Anyway, back to the party…

TBC;)

For a long time, I’ve thought I’d be good at advertising. So, I’ve decided to keep a list of adverts I’ve written for fun…

First up: Haggis

“Haggis is the pride of Scotland, that blossoms in your belly into a warm happiness that can keep out the chill of the Highlands”

TBH that could probably count as an advert for Scotland as well… this was following encountering a post on social media, on what to put on a menu (of a Scottish restaurant in London) for something as unappealing as a haggis…

Next up is, while enjoying a very nice coffee and cake in London, a couple of drafts:

First draft: “Our blueberry pastel de nata is so good we’ll have you licking the napkin after dabbing your mouth like the nice boy/girl you are”

Second draft: “Our [insert flagship cake/pastry/coffee product] is so good we’ll have you(“you’ll be”?) licking the napkin clean after delicately dabbing your mouth like the well-behaved muffin you are”

After which, I lost interest a bit – as urges to munch a napkin has probably been done before, but also that I found myself a bit bogged down in whether or not it would be a good special offer deal to have customers adding an “I am a well-behaved muffin” to their “large cappuccino, please” at the counter…

Scotland/haggis take 2:

“Haggis is the pride of Scotland, that cheers from your belly into a warm happiness that can keep out the chill of the Highlands”

Is that ermm, less evocative of stomach fungus? (“cheers” instead of “blossoms”)

And, maybe the final, multipurpose, version (after 3 days of not coming up with a new fun project to work on):

“Haggis is the [culinary] pride of Scotland, that warms from the belly into a canny happiness that keeps out the chill of the Highlands”

TBC

The message had landed in Cat. C Elite Walks (a humorously named WhatsApp group) a few days earlier:

“The red route is wot we’re doing Sunday.

Assemble at Chanctonbury Ring car park 12pm.”

Sunday morning arrived, and at 9am I dropped half a tab of acid.

The morning passed fairly smoothly. I’d ended up taking half of the tab (dissolved in water and measured precisely) a few weeks previously, as it turned out it was quite a weak batch – so I wasn’t seeing mushrooms growing out of the walls or pixies etc.

I decided I was fine to go for a walk with friends – but what I wasn’t factoring in was that there was the train to get there, and then watching for a car (whose appearance I couldn’t recall) at a busy junction. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I woke up early. A bit too early really, so rather than getting out of warm bed and dosing myself with something that doesn’t improve your feelings of physical bounciness, I lay in bed for a couple of hours while it got light…

At about 10am, I decided I could definitely cope with this walk (actually, more that it was a great idea, on a beautiful day) and confirmed and set a time – leaving myself 15 minutes to grab a coffee.

I had recently benefited from someone else’s brainwave of putting a plaster on a toe that was painful in new shoes (having mentioned grumbles about finding shoes that fit) – but should have had a trial run before a 3-hour walk. Anyway, I ended up on the train considering putting on an extra plaster… but stopped myself.

Was that socially acceptable? Getting my hiking boots and socks off, in the middle of a half-full train, and wrapping plasters around my bare pinky?

I walked a couple of carriages down to find a seat with at least an empty place or two between me and the next passenger… but on sitting down, I noticed the nearest passenger was in a rail uniform (and so maybe more likely to feel empowered/obligated to confront me than the average passenger). I decided I couldn’t guarantee that what I wanted to do wasn’t in fact even worse than a faux pas.

I decided that, whatever, this was a decent topic of conversation for a half hour’s drive (“was it socially acceptable to put plasters on your feet on the train?”) as well as that I could probably manage the day with a bit of rubbing – that even without one plaster, wasn’t that unbearable, in fact.

As I sat on the train, I saw this at Hassocks station:

I thought it looked like 3 somewhat otherworldly characters, watching. I thought about posting it in the group chat, but again stopped myself. This time, because seeing silhouettes in random places could sound a little bit paranoid – where this was, to me at least, an amusing random pattern in some condensation on a window.

I also held my tongue when a group of young kids sitting in front of me (this was before I decided to find a quieter seat to put on the plaster) were playing “we’ll be out of the tunnel in 3, 2, 1” – when I started wondering how amusing or formative (or probably just downright scary) it would be to put on my best weirdo face and to croak into the void “we’ll be in the dark forever, I tell you! Forever!!!”

But fortunately, I realised this probably wouldn’t go to plan, and just chuckled to myself about putting that on film (which is not something I have any experience of)

I arrived at Preston Park, and went and had similar thoughts about putting on plasters in the coffee shop there too.

I then spent a fairly unpleasant 10 minutes standing at the main junction there, expecting my friend to be coming down London Road… walking up and down to stay level with the traffic slowing down for the lights, so I could jump in elitely (like it said on the tin).

At 5 minutes late, I messaged, and it turned out they’d arrived on time (from a different direction) and were parked on the less major road, waiting for me.

I hurried over, and proceeded to fluster for the remainder of the journey.

In the past I suffered quite a lot with anxiety, and as a result of this, I have a tendency to try to plan conversations – particularly in cramped places, such as inside a car (one of my anxieties is due to being tall, and I’ve always disliked crowds etc) – but I was feeling it would be better to explain why I was so flustered, instead of trying the conversation about the plasters. And so I did.

Stopping off for a grounding can of coke, we got there about 15 minutes late, and found our walk mates had already got their car stuck in the mud…

I decided soon enough to take a bit of a back seat with freeing the car, as acid can make one do odd things – it’s not necessarily good for perspective, or not good for situations where being reliable is valuable (eg potentially dangerous ones) – but I was only tripping mildly by this point.

As some measure, I’d had no visuals, although I don’t usually notice random humanoid silhouettes (like I did with the first photo here) – and I did think the sky was particularly fantastic that afternoon. To some extent, you can judge for yourself – here’s some more photos:

Lol, that’s not that unusual for me. I like grey/brown low colour pictures with no subject – often pictures of leaves on the ground, but I’ve definitely got better (or more useful) photos of puddles in my collection.

But, taking a back seat was difficult – as I think I was the only one there who had done anything remotely like engineering or physics – which encompasses stuff like forces, and [classical] mechanics… potential barriers or wells (my mate was in a finite non square well!) so once I’d racked my brains for a bit – tried a different paradigm to see if I reached the same conclusion (that how they were trying to use the sticks to increase the traction the wheels were feeling was, if I was right, then the set up was making things harder)

But I’m probably digressing a bit much.

Fortunately, before I’d had time to rewire the car, a helpful bypasser brought his VW Golf over with a tow rope, and slightly hairily pulled the car out of the mud, and we were free to go for our walk.

TBC