I'm off to Glastonbury today, to spend a week helping to make pizza for my friends at Pandemania. It'll be a rest, of sorts, lots of late nights chatting rubbish to drunk people while whirling like a maniac to exchange pizzas for money in the shortest time possible. Lots of time during the day to stroll around the festival, listening to urban poetry in the spoken word tent, admiring the performers in the theatre field, just nice lazy days.
I hope to write during this week too. So much has happened since I last spent a few hours in a quiet place, tapping into my keyboard. I seem to move from experience to experience, with never more than a few minutes in each day to spit something onto Facebook. I can't write during the walking day, to whip out my phone and keyboard while I'm sitting, sweating on the side of a hill seems impossible somehow. Daylight hours are for walking, or resting a bit so I can walk again, I can't do it and report it at the same time.
I hope, while I'm sitting in the shade drinking warm white wine, loud music drifting through the air from the stages behind me, to tell you about walking into Chester in a Wonderwoman outfit, about the vale of Clwyd, about my route down the east of Wales again, about Sarah, Jen, Lou, Rebecca, about my feet, my tan, my happy, healthy body. It's not as unlikely as it sounds that I will find time to do this at Glastonbury festival, especially if it's raining.
It's hard to tell exactly how many miles I've walked now - the Cistercian Way isn't waymarked, there's no handy guidebook and so if I want to work it out for myself I have to do that annoying thing where I measure the wiggly line on a map with a bit of string then measure the string. So I'll estimate......the route to Holywell was 754 for definite and since then I've had a 20 mile day, plus a 14 mile day, plus about six av 10 mile days which makes it just under 850, give or take. It doesn't matter any more, I'm just walking. When I reach Holywell again I'll add another definite 602 miles to that 754, until then it's just a bit of a haze. It's probably more confusing for you guys than for me, I could have picked a more straightforward route couldn't I.
More soon, I hope......