My taste of lockdown freedom on the Camino pilgrimage

A few of the hip young things sitting along the Lisbon quayside turned their heads my way as my walking sticks scraped along the pavement. I didn’t slow down, though, because I was self-conscious about how I looked. Hiking 2,000km along an extended Camino pilgrimage from the French-Spanish border through northern Spain then down through Portugal will do that to you. My beard had gone feral, my greying hair was out of control. The gaze of my eyes was increasingly unhinged; one friend cautioned similarities to King Lear. Nevertheless, I tried to hold my head high. Little do you know (I silently said to the quayside beauty pageant), but this apparent vagrant used to be an officer in one of Her Majesty’s finest cavalry regiments.

Just as I never expected to end up in a 70-ton main battle tank with the Queen’s commission, I didn’t foresee escaping the UK’s revolving lockdowns by existing as an itinerant praying mantis on the Iberian Peninsula.