consecrated chicken soup
girl that is going to be okay because she walked the Camino
Walking the Camino de Santiago is a perhaps a cliched rite of passage for self-discovery as much as listening to Vienna by Billy Joel on loop or getting really into analysing your Saturn Return. (I’ll confess now: I’ve done all the above in the last six months.)
At the start of last summer, I joked that I was going to have Don Draper Summer – writing in my journal and swimming with a deep sense of melancholy, reflecting on whether the choices I have made in life are actually making me happy.
By the end of that summer, I realised that I’d somehow created a prophecy to have the worst summer of my life. A big monkey paw moment.
I spent the rest of 2023 trying to claw my sanity back. Which I did, thanks to a prescription for fluoxetine, watching every single episode of the David Suchet version of Poirot, and (most crucially) a life changing tarot reading in a chain restaurant behind Greenwich Market.
I returned to my usual rhythms and routines, but with a huge sense of unease when so much seemed split into “before” and “after” in my life. Putting the pieces of my life together and then realising how badly so many of them fit now, all jagged edges and wrong pieces taking up far too much space.
Like many pilgrims modern and medieval, it’s at this point that walking the Camino started to appeal to me. Over Christmas, I sat in my living room pouring over forums and books and (sorry) TikToks about walking the Camino, all the different routes, and started to form my plan.
As the final resting place of St James, Santiago has drawn pilgrims over the last 1000 years. The Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St James, is less of a single path than a network of sprawling routes that lead you to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain.
The Camino Francés (the French Way) is perhaps the most popular and the most famous. To reach Santiago, pilgrims start at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and cross over the Pyrenees. The Camino Primitivo (the Original Way) is named such as it’s reportedly the path taken by the first pilgrim to travel from Oviedo to Santiago.
The Camino Ingles (the English Way) starts in Ferrol or A Coruña, and historically the starting point for pilgrims from Northern Europe travelling by sea. When I was away, my boyfriend sent me a picture from a walk in Winchester which bore the distinctive scallop sign. A modern pilgrim can still follow the route to Southampton on St James’ Way.
I chose the Camino Portugués (the Portuguese Way), the second most popular route. You could start in Lisbon or as I chose, to start from Porto Cathedral – but even then, you’ve got more than one path to choose between the Central Route or along the Atlantic on the Coastal Route.
But of course, all the starting points are just suggestions - you can choose your own starting point, route, pace. You can book your accommodation in advance or see how far you walk each day, walk the route all in one or in parts over the course of years. There’s a lot of noise out there about the right or wrong ways to approach it, but what I liked before I’d even walked a single step is that I could literally take my own path. And this felt very important to me at the time.
To qualify for the compostela, the certificate given on completing the Way, you need to walk at least 100km and you carry a credential, or pilgrim passport, with stamps collected each day to mark your journey.
The other qualification for the compostela – and probably the most obvious – is a spiritual or religious purpose. Or at least an attitude of search.
Spirituality is a strange thing for a vaguely agnostic-atheist type of person to reconcile. I’ve never had an ounce of faith in my mind or body, so there’s never been a sense of loss. I went to a mix of Anglican and Catholic schools, several of my friends are related to vicars, and I worked in a Christian housing charity for a time.
(Among the chaotic jobs I’ve had, this was perhaps the best – I used to head to South East London to meet a household of nuns hosting refugees. Sister Patricia, I loved drinking tea with you. I think about you often.)
All of which is to say, I’m familiar around Christianity, and while I don’t have faith, I didn’t approach the Camino in an ahistorical, detached way.
In the early stages of planning, my friend (and colleague) Keziah joined my plan and we spent our lunch breaks planning our journey. As an outwardly obvious Christian, people assumed that Keziah drove our plans for the pilgrimage forward. Even my mum did not entirely understand what I wanted to do until I got her to watch the trailer for The Way, a film about the Camino starring Martin Sheen.
(Someone pointed out that this was not entirely wise to show my mother, as the premise of the film is that Martin Sheen’s son dies walking the Camino and he ends up finishing the journey on his ashes. The most dangerous part of our trip was when Keziah and I both fell asleep in our Porto hotel’s sauna, so take that as you will.)
Why did I feel the urge to walk 260km and carry all my possessions on my back and walk in the rain over two weeks of annual leave? I can’t say it was ordinary for me. I like the odd day hike but I’ve never been particularly keen on an outdoors holiday. I’d never travelled abroad without an absurdly large suitcase checked in the hold. I do have a sense of adventure and thrive on the element of surprise (see also: when I took up rollerskating or ran the Hackney Half Marathon) but that alone doesn’t really cover the why.
An attitude of search is what chimes for me.
Deep down, I do have a sense of power in something greater than myself. For me, it’s something like a collective sense of the earth and nature and the possibilities of forming and building linked to that. I believe in this so strongly, that another way of living and another world, better than the one we have now, is not only possible but within our grasp. I’m being very sincere here, even though it feels hard and clumsy (and perhaps a bit cringe) to spell out something that must sit so obviously and comfortably to other people.
I knew that I needed to shed my old life - wholly - for a time to figure out my new path forwards and remember those possibilities for myself. Before I try to tackle the whole world.
In February, I spent the day at a ritual building retreat hosted by the person who’d told me about their Camino in the first place.
I realised that after my breakdown, I never marked the transition from the old half of my life. I’d muddled along in pure survival mode. I didn’t have the framing or words for it yet, but I realised that I didn’t just want to walk the Camino. I thought about all the essays about ritual and rites, the secular and the profane, that I’d written as a student of anthropology, and I thought about the stages I’d been through since the summer. I was on a farm in Kent on a January, with the winter still present but the first hints of spring starting to slowly emerge.
I needed to do something, to mark a hard boundary between one part of my life and the next, and that needed to be different from my ordinary life.
We started our journey in Porto on a sunny and warm day. We picked up our first stamp at the Cathedral and followed the scallop shells marking the path out of the city. Our journey to Santiago would bring together a jumble of routes - starting on the Litoral Route (walking on the broad walks by the beach to avoid walking by the airport), before sticking to the Coastal Route up to Caminha, before switching over to the Central Route at Valença and crossing into Spain at Tui.
Keziah is still friends with me. Thankfully. Even though I didn’t account for the distance from our accommodation to the path for that first day, so we walked 6km more than planned. We started far later than most pilgrims, meaning we walked in the heat of the day to Labruge, a seaside town. Keziah is a vegan, and with only one spot in town serving a vegan meal that wasn’t plain chips, we had to race to make it there before closing. Also, I’d recommended my hiking sandals to her which cut up her feet so badly in the morning that she kept Compeed firmly in business.
(I accept that this last one isn’t really my fault, but I do still feel bad. Keziah would ask me occasionally, wistfully, whether I had any blisters. I never did.)
Our first day of walking was also the last day of warm, dry weather. On the second day as the clouds and rain started to descend, we headed towards Póvoa de Varzim.
We met Adam about 10 minutes into this second day of walking. The markers along the beach confused us at one point and became fast friends over finding the right pathway. The next day, the three of us walked to Esposonde together.
It poured with rain pretty much the entire day.
We walked along the beach, wading through sand, whipped in the face by the wind. A few mishaps took place along the way, like Keziah stepping into a puddle and then me laughing at her plight so I didn’t realise I did exactly the same thing. (My shoes did not dry entirely for several days. A fair trade.)
That morning, we stopped at cafe where Adam and I wolfed down a very non-vegan pastel de nata. But then the owner of the cafe appeared with bread and jam for Keziah - in and of itself a welcome sight after a morning of walking. The woman had arranged a little plate for her, where she’d cut up and toasted the pieces of bread, and spread strawberry jam. I don’t know how to put this experience into words to convey just how much care and love had gone into this one small act from a stranger, or how I felt like that piece of jam and bread had warmed my soul as though I was the one who’d consumed it.
The second moment came that afternoon, as we were wetter and more exhausted than I’ve ever been before in my life. I bitterly regretted our decision to book ahead to Esposonde, still one town or another hour of walking ahead. The rain went from pouring to torrential rain. The final straw. We stood in the street, debating whether we should wait it out in a nearby church or push on through, when we heard someone shout “bom caminho” across the street.
If we were looking for a sign, this was it. As a refuge from the rain, this cafe in Fão would have my devotion anyway. But again, it was the small acts of kindness that warmed us the most. My latte arrived with a smiley face in the foam. Keziah’s americano came with bom caminho written on the saucer. Before we left, the man gave us each a little blue pebble with different camino symbols that he’d painted on with yellow nail polish then and there. I held mine in the palm of my hand as we finished our day’s journey. It felt like that cool stone held an extra reserve of energy that I needed to tap into.
The next day, we split ways with Adam - he walked on ahead to the next big town, but we broke the journey into two shorter days to mark Keziah’s birthday in a village instead. We drank coffee together before we parted ways, after we’d tried and failed to convince Adam to come with us. The bridge to Viano do Castelo was so treacherous in the wind (and nearly broke our spirits the following day) that Adam decided to head back to Porto. When we reached Santiago, we stood outside a bar at night on FaceTime with Adam, who drank a vinho verde to toast us from England.
In a discussion about my life and choices, my mum solemnly told me that I need to acknowledge the “suitcases” in my life. She meant baggage, but I think the metaphor still works.
I didn’t bring a suitcase. Instead, I carried a blue Osprey backpack to complement Keziah’s purple one. We read endless forum posts about bags and spent an evening in Covent Garden in February trying on every single light backpack vaguely designed for women. I packed and repacked my backpack every day for a week ahead of the trip. At one point, I weighed my passport with and without the cover to factor in the difference in mass, firmly crossing a line in sanity.
Some things were essential. I have terrible eyesight, bad allergies and the stress levels of a gazelle, so I had to bring enough contacts and medications to last. I brought my second-hand Kindle, a portable washing line, a dry bag to hold my electronics and valuables. I cut down my bag to small but practical tools like safety pins, a S hook, a set of carabiner clips.
One physical book made the cut.
I brought the guidebook written by the late John Brierley, who accompanied us on our trip. When we had any doubts about our route, I stopped and asked Keziah to “grab John” out of the front pocket of my backpack.
What I liked is that amidst all the notes about albergues and optional detours and sights to look for, this book offered prompts for the inner camino. (I know, I’m soft now!) I liked that when we stopped to check our route or identify any landmarks on the way, we also found prompts for the spiritual. Most of these quotes aren’t anything new if you’ve ever been on Instagram or looked at a fridge magnet, and another time I might have rolled my eyes, but I found it comforting.
How many other lost and sick and sad pilgrims had opened this book and taken this same path to find themselves? I’m not arrogant enough to think that my emotions and thoughts are unique to me alone.
Plus, as much as I’d love to say that my journey was purely spiritual, I did have some practical considerations weighing on me. Booking flights, sorting our first few days of accommodation. Planning our route to make sure we reached Santiago in time for our flight home. Carving out our stages to enjoy a relative easy pace for the day that coincided with Keziah’s birthday.
I found the nudges for the mystical path in the guidebook refocused my mind away from all the maps and reviews on the tabs saved on my phone, that occupied my head. Outside of the guidebook, I started to see these markers everywhere. I saw them in the shrines carved into the exterior walls of people’s homes that we walked past, or the piles of stones at the roadside that some pilgrims leave behind to ease their burdens.
I felt more attuned to myself than ever before but also never so comforted by the fact that I was on a well trodden path by many before me. Someone once told me that that it’s easy to meditate on a peaceful mountain on your own - it’s much harder in the hustle and bustle and noise of daily life. The Camino has space for solitude, sure, but I was walking with a friend I loved, speaking with people in cafes and churches and hostels to get my compostela stamped, and in a community of others embarking on the same journey. It made me realise how busy yet lonely everyday life can be in comparison.
From Tui onwards, we started to see the same people each day and recognised them by sight, even if we didn’t speak with them. We discovered on one night that we’d made an impression a few days before. We chatted over lunch with a pair of German pilgrims and then bumped into them at dinner time, who invited us to join them and a large group of pilgrims from around the world.
A woman from Croatia told us that she recognised us, because she’d seen us in O Porriño. She said: “I remember you! You were the weird girls I saw in shorts a few days ago. Now it makes sense that you are English.”
I’d never thought of myself as so obviously English but there we go. She told us she was so alarmed about our lack of clothing that when her son had rung her to ask how her trip had gone, she’d regaled him with how she’d spotted two bizarre girls wearing shorts in 20°C weather. Apparently he listened politely for a bit and then asked: “but how are you doing?” “I’m telling you how I’m doing, I’m thinking about these girls!”
Another time, I had one of those side-splitting moments that we’ve retold again and again, in the pub, the office kitchen, to our families, but I’ve realised it doesn’t really resonate with anyone else.
Once we were in Spain, we became obsessed with our elevation profile. At one point, I discovered an elevation profile map on one of our apps, and we mentally prepared for a steep incline for half of the day, before heading downhill again.
However, my incline map froze, leaving us thinking that we hadn’t even reached the peak, let alone the descent. I was deep in thought, thinking about all the small easy topics that had brought me to the Camino - my life, my career, my dreams, etc. Keziah was quiet too. She told me later her train of thought was more like “fuck, my feet really hurt” and “when exactly is this actually going downhill?”
We walked silently for two hours. In my mind, I jumped from topic to topic, until I remembered a small bit of work trivia (ok, gossip) and stopped Keziah to ask her what she thought. She burst into laughter, and that laughter got even bigger and more ridiculous once my phone refreshed and I realised that not only had we been through the worst of the day, but we were very nearly at Pontevedra too.
There were some less nice moments. There was the time we had to rebook our accommodation for the night after our host didn’t show up and ceremoniously tried to charge us for it anyway. This was in Redondela and we gave up on trying to do anything meaningful, so we headed to an Irish pub where I got one of my favourite stamps and paid an astronomical sum for chicken nuggets.
And when I say it rained, it really rained. The day after Keziah’s birthday, we walked from Antas to Viano do Castelo where the weather conditions meant the rain was slapping us sideways and left visibility so poor we could barely see the metre ahead of us. We ended up sitting in the chapel of Mosteiro de São Romão do Neiva after I decided that we needed to wait it out, or at least be able to see if a car was directly ahead of us.
For me, churches have often been places of silence and cleanliness and following very strict rules, so I wasn’t ready for the sight of half a dozen pilgrims seeking refuge. Hanging their wet clothes on the back of church pews, swapping shoes out of their damp backpacks and trying to find the optimum way to repack it, eating crisps in the vestibule. I felt reluctant for a moment, but then I joined them.
I thought about a book I’d read as a teenager, the Pillars of the Earth. I’d watched the miniseries largely as I hold a torch for both historical dramas and Rufus Sewell. In the book, one of the characters retraces the steps of her lover on the Camino, trying to reunite with him, but I didn’t remember this connection to the pilgrimage until much later. The part I remembered was all the descriptions of medieval life happening inside the church walls, where people sought sanctuary and ate meals together and slept on the floor staring at the arches and vaults of the church.
It felt very old and very modern all at the same time to sit there with all these pilgrims, scrolling through my phone to look at the weather forecast and trying to find a dry pair of socks within reach.
It’s not easy to get lost once you’re on the path. You follow the shells and watch the miles to Santiago roll down with each plinth.
We realised we had a spare day, and weighed up spending an extra evening in Santiago or taking another variant of the Camino. The Variante Espiritual follows the historic route of St James’ body arriving at Padron by boat. Friends and strangers on the internet have told me this was their favourite part of their pilgrimage. But it’ll have to be a path I take on a future journey instead.
An extra night in Santiago also didn’t appeal to us, largely as we’d booked a fancy hotel for a one-night stay. Two nights would be extortionate, but the reward of the fluffy towels and swimming pool and mini-bar felt important to keep for our final day of walking.
Instead, we slowed down around Padron. Someone we’d met at dinner a few nights previously had expressly shared their contempt of this plan with us, but I’d smiled politely and let it wash over me. At this point, we’d come far enough thanks to our own gut instinct, and I didn’t really mind that we weren’t doing the Camino right. Around Padron, I remember the slower pace of the journey vividly. We took a detour to visit a monastery in Herbon where you can stay for the evening as a pilgrim. In response to a 1 star review on Google Maps, they’d simply responded: "Nothing is perfect in this world. Bo Camino.”
In Padron itself, we stopped to visit the Iglesia de Santiago and did a detour to collect a Pedronía, Padron’s own certification for pilgrims. Once we reached our final night’s stop before Santiago, we sat in a small roadside bar playing card games and ordering rounds of Estrella Galicia. I remember taking out a small touristy notebook, where I tried to scribble down as much as I remembered about our route and journey.
On the cusp of reaching Santiago, I realised I hadn’t had any major epiphanies about myself or my life. Instead as the digits slowly rolled down, I unravelled parts of myself that haven’t surfaced for years.
I know I want to make more of own decisions and follow my own instincts more. It’ll sound trite to say this, but I’ve never once regretted a decision I’ve made solely on my own. Including walking the Camino.
I know I want to write more and read more, and spend less time letting work and the internet and general anxieties to spill over and reoccupy my whole life.
I know I want to continue finding my own path, but I want and need to be connected to other people. All the moments of my life where I’ve gained the most or enjoyed living are when I feel connected to my fellow humans.
Walking the Camino helped me reconnect with these parts of myself, and as we sat in the pilgrim’s mass at the cathedral, I found my thoughts taking me through some of these rediscoveries as well as the small facts I found over the course of the pilgrimage.
I learnt lots about my own body, most of it not very profound. I discovered that my right foot is larger than my left. I hated wearing my trainers and wore my hiking sandals even in the rain. The only people who gave us positive feedback about the sandals were two English women we met in a cafe, who looked at us and said “what a good idea!” I did French and German at school, so I don’t know what a man in Tui said to me exactly as he walked past, except that it was clearly derogatory.
Keziah and I learnt that we are so obviously English that we were the only people in shorts and a t-shirt in what would constitute a heatwave in London, while everyone else was wearing hats and coats and scarves. I also taught a bartender to make me a baby guinness, which amused her. She told me later that the only other people who asked for random shots like that were English pilgrims.
I discovered how good and tiring and painful it feels all at once. I often feel defeated by trying to run for the Overground, but I’ve carried myself and my possessions up hills and trails and roads in the rain for hours a day. The physical weight also did something to my brain, mentally unburdening myself. I didn’t carry a stone from home on my journey, but I feel like I left something behind on one of those stone shrines in the woods.
If anything, the Camino was a moment of absolution, leaving behind my responsibility. I know that sounds weird given I’ve been talking about valuing the collective. I always feel a sense of responsibility to hold other people’s emotions, and shove my own deep down. (I’d say something about being the eldest daughter in my family here but I think the discourse sniper might take me out if I say any more.)
The Camino made that impossible to do. Keziah and I both battled physical or mental exhaustion, waxing and waning at different points and never quite in sync. I could support and encourage and empathise, but I couldn’t shoulder her burdens myself.
On the internet, I read a lot about community, connection, camino families, and people praising or lamenting the bonds and experiences they had.
Meeting Adam reminded me that you can make your own community, forge the bonds of solidarity yourself. The things we seek can and should be made by us! We hold the power in our hands to do this!
After the woman had given her the lovingly cut pieces of toast and jam, I recited a garbled version of this passage from Franny and Zooey to Adam and Keziah:
I'll tell you one thing, Franny. One thing I know. And don't get upset. It isn't anything bad. But if it's the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you're missing out on every single goddam religious action that's going on around this house. You don't even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup - which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse. So you just tell me, just tell me, buddy. Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master - some guru, some holy man - to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose? Can you tell me that?
When I look back, I can recognise a cup of consecrated chicken soup over and over as I walked the Camino.
On our final morning in Santiago, Keziah headed to an Anglican church service we found online. I thought about joining, but actually felt a restless urge to keep on wandering around Santiago. Given the amount of walking we’d just done, this was obviously insane. I walked around without my headphones in. In London, I was rarely alone with my thoughts but it somehow felt wrong to just plug myself back in again.
I saw a couple that we’d seen a few times but never spoke with directly. I was passing by the cathedral to look for souvenirs for my boyfriend and caught their eye. We looked at each other with silent recognition and a small smile, and walked our own separate ways.
Thank you for sharing your journey with such a great mix humour and sincerity ❤️
This is beautiful Shayane 💓 laughed out loud at shorts outrage, sometimes the englishness really shines through