As ever with updates to this, me bothering to write anything coincides with getting the annual fee for the davedawsonhaswaytoomuchtimeonhishands.com domain name registration which, although cheap and useless to anyone else, I can’t bring myself to risk losing.

More significantly though, I retired late last year, partly as I’m nearly 60 and partly as my MS was making working all a bit of a bother really. Whether anyone reads it or not, I find writing this stuff strangely entertaining though and, although the original reason for the ..toomuchtimeonhishands thing is lost in the mists of time, I do now genuinely have time on my hands so may resurrect the whole thing.

In that vein, latest news is that my co-stroller Bob and I will be ambling along a chunk of the Camino de Santiago starting next week. The Camino was a religious pilgrimage of sorts as one of the apostles was supposedly buried near the Cathedral there. The body of Richard III was found in a car park somewhere in the UK, so there is precedent for St James to be in the NCP by Santiago Cathedral I suppose.

What seems unlikely is that someone moved a body all the way from Jerusalem to Northern Spain a few thousand years ago. I’m of the live and let live school of atheism personally and deliriously happy for people to believe in whichever God/Gods they fancy though.

Having said that, Pete Hegseth of late seems to be quoting lines from Pulp Fiction as a homage to his own religious f’wittery. He can just stop all that as far as I’m concerned. Of course, he’s far too busy slaughtering people right now and his boss, the orange halfwit in chief doesn’t spend a fat lot of time reading at the best of times.

The whole history of relocating an apostle’s body tradition sounds made up to me. It does make for a nice tradition now of people walking from start points in various bits of Europe to have their aching muscles and blisters generally bettered by the will of God. We’re doing a subset of the Camino Portugues from Porto to Santiago de Compostela. Will probably only do a bit over a 100km of that, as somewhere in the 10-20km range per day, I start falling over and/or seem to mimic the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks sketch. Looks all a bit disrespectful to people doing as a real pilgrimage I imagine.

in any case, I’m expecting enlightenment of some kind to happen during the walk. I’ll report back on enlightenment stages during the walk, although not really sure what the units of that are – it can’t just be a binary switch from gloom to seeing the light I would have thought. Other religious folk on here know more about all that though.

There is a temporary state called purgatory in the Catholic Church I believe that’s just a kind of waiting room for people who’ve behaved pretty shabbily but still good enough to just evade Hell in the long term. My start point must surely be well above purgatory.

I’m maybe more at good natured non-contributor stage – in the kind of half light before any proper enlightening.