Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle/ in felaueship, and pilgrimmes were they alle.

So I joined a group of pilgrims on Saturday.

OK, that sounds more spectacular than it was. It was a quicky pilgrimage (from Beyenburg to Cologne) and I only took part in one stage of it (the home stretch between my town and Altenberg cathedral). But it was on an actual real proper pilgrim's road. (If you follow it long enough, you get to Santiago de Compostela. If you don't stop there, you can get to Cap Finisterra. If you don't stop there, you get very wet.) It's for a sample article for a regional magazine about - who would have guessed - guided pilgrimages in this region. (I don't know about other places, but pilgrimages are currently quite hip in Germany, mostly thanks to a comedian walking to Santiago de Compostela a couple of years back. He wrote a book about it which has now been turned into a motion picture, starring, strangely enough, Somebody Else as the Comedian. Anyway, that's why the regional magazine is interested in the topic. It's a magazine that likes to be commercial yet deep. But strictly not religious. So I'll have to write a non-religious article about pilgrimages? Look, I didn't make this up, I'm just trying to deal with it.)

We were ten people, which I think isn't bad for a tour taking place on the first three days of the year, when everybody else is busy recovering from their New Year's Eve celebration. And we were a pretty mixed group, ranging from a hip outdoorsy couple to "normal" elderly ladies to a Klezmer duo. Everybody was older than me, which is fine (I was told that most of the magazine's readers are aged between 40 and 60). It was quite nice, actually. I wouldn't normally go out hiking in the weather we had (drizzle, 5°C) but once we'd got going and once I'd got used to the idea that my glasses just wouldn't be dry, the drizzle wasn't hard to bear. I mean, if you went on a real pilgrimage, you'd presumable have to plough on regardless of the weather, too. You don't really get into pilgrimage spirit on the 19 km to Altenberg, or at any rate I didn't, but it was a nice change from normal. I was a bit worried that the pilgrims' guide would be overbearing and continually giving "impulses" to turn the hike more spiritual, but after one long stop (for singing!), everybody just got to walk along at their own speed, and talk, or not talk, at their own leisure. The impulses were more like "food for thought", which was offered at the beginning of the hike and you could think about it, or not. As it happened, it seemed to fit my situation, so I thought about it. I had time for a lot of thinky thoughts. Which I will not put in the article. I'll try to focus on the experience of the pilgrimage. In this case, it was a limited experience, but that's OK. I can extrapolate from my trip to Japan. (Which was no pilgrimage, but in retrospect featured many of the internal processes often ascribed to pilgrimages.) If I need to. I mean, it's just a short article. But it needs to be extra good because it's sample work, right?

Ironically, one of the thinky thoughts I had was that very likely this freelancing-for-the-magazine thing wasn't going to pay off, that it's putting pressure on my schedule that I'm not sure it's worth, and that it might not even be what I'm looking for. So it's quite possible that the very reason why I went on the pilgrimage (hike) is going to be made moot by said pilgrimage. But we'll see. Write first. See what comes out of it. Decide later.

Ellesmere manuscript icon used for extra lulz.