By the time you read this I should be there – and that state of being there, will, I hope, be altogether different to being here. Look, as I’ve been at pains to stress in this column over the years: I’m not a believer, let alone a Christian; nonetheless, in the immortal words of Chaucer, “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote / And bathed every veine in swich licour…” blah-de-blah-de-tum-te-tum “So priketh hem nature in hir corages / Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…”
Yes, in my case it’s also to Canterbury – and in common with the lowlier of his 14th-century, post-plague pilgrims, I will have done it all on foot from London. Being in the modern parlance “faith adjacent”, and multicultural to the tips of my hennaed fingers, I would just as readily have gone to Mecca on the haj, or to the Golden Temple in Amritsar for my yatra, or circumambulated Kailasa, the mountain most sacred to Buddhists that lies in the Gangdise range of trans-Himalaya.
Readily – but not safely, given my ill health; which is, of course, the reason for the pilgrimage in the first place. Or is it? I’ve been walking back and forth across this right, tight little island for decades now – quite possibly looking for a way out, although usually opting for routes that are arbitrary to the point of quixotic, and that begin from my front door, rather than the car park of some state-mandated area of outstanding natural beauty. So, a trek downriver via Deptford and Dartford to Gravesend, in the footsteps of any number of my literary forerunners – from Pepys, to Dickens, Conrad and Celine, is par for the course of this very pedestrian life.
As to whether the effects of my pilgrimage will be salutary because of divine intervention or physio/psychotherapy, I’ll set out with an open mind – which is not, I hope, the same as a mind that’s ready to be taken in by any mummery whatsoever, no matter what pomp or piety with which its performed. That noted, I am looking forward to visiting a lot of churches – and you’d have to be the very essence of a contemporary puffa-person (all nylon fluff in your noggin, rather than nous), not to appreciate the cultural significance of such a journey, and to respond at an emotional – if not spiritual – level, to the great antiquity of the English folkways.
It’s perhaps one of the most grotesque slurs against the half of the country who, in 2016, wished to remain in a viable political entity, rather than a nation that aspires to be some bizarre – and unholy – mind-child of Singapore and Legoland Windsor, that we were in some sense traitors to our own culture, whether we be white or black Britons; Muslim or Jewish ones. Citizens of nowhere, was the slur – but I’d like to throw it back in the faces of those who played the Kulturkampf card (without even knowing, of course, what that means).
I bow to no one when it comes to being-in-place (now I am here – in a week, I will be there). I know where I am – politically, quite as much as geographically – precisely because I’ve walked through and around and out of and back into the city of my birth, not just once, but many times: orienting myself with all of my senses, rather than an algorithm.
So, as I head downriver, I’ll be steeped in the culture of these places, I suspect, rather more than the Mark Francoises of this world, who wouldn’t know their Gurdwara from their Magwitch, let alone that the distance between the former in Gravesend (the largest in Europe), and Dickens’s setting for the near-murderous encounter between the latter, and the young Pip, is only nine miles that I intend on walking. But then, to be fair, unlike Pip, I wasn’t “raised up by hand”.
Obviously, I’ve all sorts of cherished delusions about my pilgrimage besides the obvious one – at the very least it should be a sort of interfaith continuation of the tonsorial-sartorial concordat I’ve been trying to foster between Jew and Muslim in my own person and habiliment. Fortunately, all such vain delusions have been punctured even before the get-go: I’ve just phoned the Gurdwara – there’s no option for personal visits on their website, so I asked would it be possible for me to drop by? “No problem,” said a gruffly, big-beardy sort of voice, “just don’t expect there to be anyone available to show you around.”
“Fine,” I rejoined, “no problem for me, either”, while at the same time thinking how refreshingly different this was to missionary faiths’, um, zeal.
“Oh,” he continued, “and don’t have a cold, or carry tobacco, or any other form of intoxicant on your person, got it?” I came off the phone appropriately schooled for my yatra.
