The Trouble with Siestas

Too much gold for the church, nothing for locals or pilgrims

Photo by David Magalhães on Unsplash

Salutations to the sun which I always took to be my friend before the philanthropist Bill Gates tried to block it & a khaki-clad bush warrior from Texas railed about lazy Spaniards & the countless opportunities presented by molten weather as we trekked the field of stars in that infamous first week together across the north shore of Spain. We had crossed the Pyrenees the day before in St Jean, France & stumbled across the Americans in one of those regrettable fated meetings en route. I couldn’t help think of greased hips & that first day’s waddle up the hazardous red route although to be fair I was carrying a few extra pounds myself & not in the rucksack ruthlessly slimmed down to two of everything. That first week stretched interminably as we marched across the Camino’s physical part, like out-of-practice mountain goats who had traded tin cans & patchy grass for beer & cream cheese. We all got on famously at first but we Brits found ourselves cornered & endlessly quizzed about the olde world until we wondered why our companions’ forebears had ever left. They seemed to know little about Europe except lengthy theorem on how economies should work & how this one didn’t. Everything was better in the land of the free — or so they thought —its own world like an island race with little interest in others. In every church we encountered in each mountain top village gold leaf spouted like a font of living water. There was no shortage of money the economy was doing fine until the decadent syphoning which taxed the working poor, the church like any government stockpiling vast treasures, this time in Rome. I suggested to Matt perhaps the refusal to work all afternoon had as much to do with giving the finger to the man than avoiding the sun’s rays. But a good catholic, he wouldn’t have it so we trekked on until eventually we went our separate ways.

Simon Heathcote