At last, no more pain!

Walking into Santiago there was a kind of silence, and yet the city was humming. When a pilgrim comes in from the Camino de Levante people know. It is the longest, and it is the hardest. But for me, a humble man, it was also so very strange. Vic was fine, and I saw him swiping left a lot on his phone which probably explained his disappearance later that evening. 

Pregnant women, they made me touch their bellies, same with the infirm. Priests bowed before me. And when I reached the gates of the Cathedral, I don’t mind saying, I wept openly. And, as I was there, my left foot started to bleed - you remember the problem with my left boot - and people gasped. Like Padre Pio with his stigmata, the bleeding wouldn’t stop. And next thing, 12 swallows hovered far overhead, representing the apostles presumably. And then this young, very attractive french woman,  26 or 27, a cellist, came over and rested her finger on the wound and crossed her forehead with my blood, and said, ‘Vous avez le Sang du Christ’. And she took my hand and we went into one of those confessional places. What could I say, maybe she was right. Maybe I did have the blood of Christ. Maybe I did have a higher purpose.....

Anyway, here’s Vic (looking like a Russian hit man) and myself at the Cathedral. We arrived in Santiago on 27 May 2019. Hard to believe we came from Valencia, what were we thinking.......