A veteran solo traveller, Mary Russellwonders if she'll survive a group outing on El Camino de Santiago . . .
So, what's the problem? Do you not know these people?" "Know them? They're my good friends." "How good?" "Very, very good.""So?" Freya, my daughter, was running out of patience.
"I'll have to say 'good morning', every morning for 10 days. I might even have to smile."
My normal, unsmiling, routine is: first, wake, pick up clothes from floor and put them on. Second, get out and jog for 40 minutes. Third, shower. Fourth, walk to newsagents to buy paper. Fifth, continue to coffee shop and drink very strong cappuccino while reading the paper. Sixth, walk home and switch on computer. All this I can accomplish without uttering a word, apart from please and thank you, though I do admit that the cappuccino can bring on the occasional smile.
But Freya has other things on her mind, like her impending civil partnership gig: "Oh, well then, put a brown paper bag over your head," she advises. "They probably won't notice the difference."
The idea had started small: just a few friends walking in Spain along El Camino de Santiago - The Way of St James - a journey I had previously done solo, as indeed I do all my travelling.
But small had grown to big and before you could say blister, we were 13 and that's a crowd. Fifteen if you count Bertie and Brian Cowen, for we left on election day, and isn't it great the way you can get the latest results even while you're plodding over the Pyrenees? The group ethos wasn't the only thing I had to handle. At the refugio in Roncevalles - which purists maintain is the official start to the Spanish camino - I was handed a form to fill in asking me to state my religion. The options were impressive: Catholic, Protestant, other and none.
Could I put the S-word, I wondered. After all, I was in Spain and only the previous week I'd attended an event to mark the first anniversary of the death of Spanish Civil War veteran Mick O'Riordan. So, under religion, I wrote socialismo to commemorate not only Mick but also another companero, Spanish Civil War poet Antonio Machado, driven out of Spain by Franco, and whose famous lines almost every Spanish-speaking person knows off by heart: "Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar." Which, roughly translated means: "Traveller, there is no path, you make the path by walking."
There was once a thriving monastery at Roncevalles and the tradition is to give the walkers a sturdy send-off with a sung Mass, which led to the next hurdle: Communion. Why is it that, while in Ireland, I rarely set foot inside a Catholic church but when far from home, I approach the altar rails with all the confidence of a white sheep who has never strayed from the fold? This time, though, there was an added problem: can you go up to the altar in shorts, and in muddy shorts at that? The answer is, yes you can, for this is a welcoming place where from the altar, the priest read out the names of all the countries represented among the congregation: Guatemala, Portogallo, Italia, South Korea and, yes, Irlanda. Then he sprinkled us with water and begged us to pray for him.
Religion, in its various guises, played a part throughout our walking week. Like sirens, churches large and small seduced us into leaving the straight and narrow to admire a glittering gold canopy over an altar, a Murillo-like painting on a wall, a nave, elegant in its austerity.
In Pamplona, I stayed in a former nunnery, abandoning my fellow walkers in the bar of their hotel in order to scurry back to the convent before the 10pm curfew. The stairs smelled of furniture polish and the woman in the bunk below me was a hefty Afrikaan from Stellenbosch, doing the camino by bike. I fell asleep in awe of her.
My own crew walked at a steady pace, neither too fast nor too slow, and when the chat about Bertie got too much, I devised a means of shutting it out by walking equidistant between two groups so that any mention of the B-word got carried away in the wind. I developed other survival strategies as well, like positioning myself so that there was no one in front of me, nothing except the camino surging forward through 800km of poppy fields and vineyards, along paths bordered by columbine and clover.
In a group, silence is a refuge and solitude is bliss. It's then I can do some walking meditation or think about my alter ego, Margery Kempe, who, in 1413 after 20 years of marriage and 12 children, sailed from England to what is now Holland, walked across the Alps and down into Venice, where she boarded a galley for Jerusalem. She was both an enthusiastic and a vociferous pilgrim as well as a lusty hymn-singer, though I thought it judicious to remind myself that when she became too obnoxious, her group gave her the slip.
We sang, too - anything and everything from the Credo to Óró Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile and There's a Hole in the Bucket to the song we all love to hate. Yes, dear reader, I sang The Fields of Athenry, not once but many times. Though to balance that, I must also say that when one of our own was evicted from a refugio by an inhospitable hospitalero, I gave a rendering of the Internationale, though its significance, I suspect, was lost on the other bemused walkers, most of whom were trying to get some sleep.
The thing about a group is that you get caught up in the fun of it all. On my own, would I have ploughed through the streets of Logrono as part of a Celtic phalanx, belting out Oh Flower of Scotland? I think not. But then, neither would I have enjoyed an energetic couple of hours dancing in a late-night bar, the shared pleasure of a jacuzzi shower and the many glasses of wine we had, some of which might even have been cognac.
Though the glass of wine I cherish most was the one I had in a tiny bar in Viana over which I later rented a grand little room for €18. As I took my place at the bar counter, weary after a long day's walk, my sticks, rucksack and shorts telling their own story, a local who had just bought himself a glass of wine wordlessly slid the glass along the counter and into my waiting hand. My need was clearly greater than his.
But would it be churlish to say that there were occasionally times when I needed desperately to be on my own, to shrug off the weight of the Dublin baggage, to enter a soul-space where silence fell on the body like a balm? Where thoughts and not words were the common currency? Would it be ungenerous to say that I felt isolated from the spirit of the camino when, on a rare occasion, I found myself walking up the carpeted stairway to a well-appointed hotel room?
When these feelings welled up, I gave myself a good talking to, expelled the demons by reminding myself that the group, in its various manifestations, consisted of friends whose kindnesses were many and whose tolerance knew no bounds?
If I still have doubts, I have only to recall the first day's walk over the Pyrenees from France down into Spain, the day which is generally accepted as being the most challenging of the whole camino. As with the legend of Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child, my rucksack grew heavier by the hour and my lungs felt as if I had been blowing my saxophone for an hour without pause.
Light-headed for want of oxygen, I calculated that, at the rate I was walking, I would need extra time to complete the day's walk and that the group, meantime, would be held up. And so it was decided that everyone would take one item from my rucksack, so out came the book I was reviewing for The Irish Times, the extra T-shirt, the Spanish dictionary, the spare knickers (thankfully, the balcony bra remained hidden at the bottom of the pile).
Companeros and companeras, I take my brown paper bag off to you. You lightened my load and that surely is the mark of friendship.