The Last Essay… a what happened next… a reflection 

The walk has been done… the story told… and me, I am back behind the wheel of a truck. I figured it would be good to write one more essay… a reflection (a ‘what was all that about’ kinda of essay). But first, what is it that happened next. With the walk finished (…an offering somehow made) and with my threadbare, tread worn boots in some bin down on the south coast of England and me back home in Scotland… 

 
…The what happened next… Three full years at Oatridge College (a Scottish Rural and Agricultural college). The course that I had signed up for was ‘Countryside Management’. Not really sure where this would take me… as I had said in a previous essay, the going back to college was more about confronting the world of academia… I had left school with nothing, figured it was time to put that right. Three years of essays and deadlines… it was pretty tough… not sure I would like to do that again… and yet looking back I was glad of the chance to pick up a stack of books and learn new things. It was through college that I found myself working on a farm for a number of years (West Craigie Farm). That guy on the walk, that was at times pretending to be a farmer… well he became a couple of steps closer in his pretence… yeah, I know, who am I kidding… proper farmers are a rare breed. Farming, I think is a part of who they are… it is in their blood… they have an understanding of both the land and of the seasons (that I guess I will never really have) an understanding that has been passed down from one generation to another and then to another and many times again to another… the land very much a part of their DNA. I’m thinking, farmers need to be a little more appreciated, they are the guys that put the milk in our morning coffee, give us tatties and sprouts alongside our roast beef (yeah, you're right not to sure about the sprouts) … more than this… farmers play a major role in both the conservation and in the maintenance of these islands… We should never take for granted, the diverse and beautiful landscapes that we have throughout these British Isles...

… any road, back to this pretender… much of the work on the farm involved ‘poly- tunnels’, building new ones, fixing old ones, covering them at the start of the season, and then dragging the plastic back off at the end of the season, the taking care of / or replacing the different plants within the tunnels. Other jobs included some tractor work of one kind or another… Being in the fields, digging out vegetables for the farm shop, bouncing half rotten carrots of another guy’s head… I smile at the memory… working on a farm is not always easy (the winter months can many times be cold, muddy and wet)… what makes it easier are the guys that you work with… I got lucky, the gang I worked with, were among the best of people, (some half my age and with far more experience with working on farms than me… a barn load). The language barrier did sometimes get in the way… that said when a carrot hits its target square on, laughter is a universal language. 

Between us, over the years we planted an apple orchard of over a thousand two hundred trees… close to the same number of cherry trees were planted, this time inside new poly-tunnels (… tunnels that we had built from scratch)... and in between the thousands of other jobs that need doing on a farm… we found the time to plant a number of hedgerows and tree lines, for the purpose of creating windbreaks, in doing so, giving back a little bit of space for beetles, bugs and butterflies. Once in a while we would be called on, to help in the rounding up of sheep that had broken free. Yeah, the years at Craigie Farm were good. I still meet up occasionally with a few of the guys, to share a coffee and retell old stories… not as often as maybe we should… life is busy… not sure that’s an excuse, people and friendships matter...  

Towards the end of my time on the farm, with a guy called George (a beekeeper of many years) and later another guy called Davie, we set up an apiary down at the apple orchard. I am no longer working on the farm… back to driving trucks (diesel in the blood and the open road in the bones I guess) but on my days off I am back at the farm with a bee suit on (apart of a small group… ‘The B Team’) taking care of now two apiaries… there are days when I will go down to one of the apiaries and do no work at all, just sit, lost in thought and watching bees… bitten by the bug… or is that stung by a bee. 

That is the first part of the essay done, ‘The what happened next’. The second part of this essay is me looking back on this walk. A walk that took place between one door closing and another door opening… the wide-open space between a truck and a classroom. The disappearance of a ‘Winter Wonderland’ from the high street (Woolworths) and the stepping back into the ‘Wonderful World’ of education (Oatridge College)… oh boy.

A quick recap: Simply put the idea (between those two doors) was to stand at the top of mainland Scotland and walk to the south coast of England via Ireland and Wales, without a penny in my pocket… and behind that daft idea, was a believe… A believe that most people (if not close to all) are good, and that they care about the stuff that matters… from a world where to many trees are being cut down… the taking of natural resources without giving nothing back, the dumping of rubbish and sewage into our rivers and oceans… plus the stuff that (in my head) matters that little bit more… the peoples of this world, be it a mother struggling to get a buggy onto a bus, a family on the other side of the globe trying to find the money to send their little ones to a school, or an innocent child caught up in the middle of some senseless war zone… a conflict created by those that should know better… What we need are statesmen and women with integrity and high morals, not politicians that are playing the game for their own glory… I cannot help but wonder, where have all the hero’s gone (I guess that’s a little unfair… we should value our democracy… I am pretty sure most of our politicians are wanting to make this world a better place). Most people do care, or at least, that is what I see… people will even care about a raggedy guy with his collar turned up, kicking stones and heading south. 

Sometimes I think we forget about the stuff that really matters…

…Here's the thing, if we lived in a world that was only Darwinian, a world in which things would only matter if science could measure them… hmm, I don’t know if I would much care for such a place… How do you measure an impossible smile… The tears (and joy) of a mother and child reunion… The sharing a beer and retelling old stories with a bunch of ex RAF Mountain Rescue guys that you haven’t seen for near on a thousand years… How do you measure the opening chords of ‘Pretty Vacant’… What about the paintings of L.S Lowry, the guy who painted Salford’s smoky tops, kids with nowt on their feet, men outside factory gates and match-stick cats and dogs… or the marble sculpture of the Veiled Virgin by Giovanni Strazza… Not forgetting the beautiful game of football …all these things stand outside the field of science... Can you apply scientific instruments to morals and values, to the knowing of what is good… and what is not… not sure that you can… Yeah, I know, I know… I say all this and yet I also recognise, science absolutely has its place, used properly science will make this world a far better and a fairer place, it will figure out ways to better use the resources that we have, cure diseases… and maybe one day even take us to infinity and beyond (ok maybe that’s a tough one… infinity being what it is). It wasn’t that long ago we managed to land a machine on Mars (how clever is that)… I know that doesn’t quiet count as infinity…  but still a whole lot further than I can kick a stone. Knowledge and the need we have in wanting to understand how it is things work, is very much a part of what being human is. That desire for understanding (for truth) goes beyond just the physical world. Science and religion are not needing to be in conflict with each other… I remember someone telling me a story about boiling water. Two guys are stood next to a kettle, a kid walks in and asks, ‘Why does water boil?’… one of the guys explains, ‘When you plug the kettle in, electricity will heat up the element within the kettle, and that will cause the particles in the water to start jumping about, the hotter it gets the more the particles jump about, causing the water to boil’… and then the second guy steps in, ‘The other reason the water is boiling is because I need a cup of tea’ … the two guys give very differ answers and yet neither are wrong… both speak truth… there is no conflict. The ‘How’ (the mechanics) and the ‘Why’ (the purpose) are explained. The one thing I would add to the story… is to say, that the kettle was switched on after the guys had decided that they were wanting a tea… the ‘How’ the water was boiled came after the ‘Why’ the water was boiled (action follows thought)… purpose is the driving force… Cup of tea anyone...

… rattling on again… sorry… Every now and then I get a little bit lost… Turn around… the map around that is… get my thoughts back on track… be that a mountain pass, a country lane, a woodland trail or a public footpath cutting through some farmland... Yeah, there was a lot of walking, I guess a lot of thinking to, for sure, there were times when I would get a little bit lost… many times finding myself wondering down a memory lane, other times lost on some trail of thought (that wasn’t always going anywhere)… and sometime wondering why it is I would walk five hundred miles… and then another five hundred more on top of that.

I remember the first morning of this walk… the top of mainland Scotland… empty pockets… a can of Irn Bru pushed into my bag… close to a thousand miles in front of me… and not really having a scooby what it is that lay ahead… where it is I would sleep each night or where my next meal would come from… If there was ever a time to believe in six impossible things before breakfast, now would be a good time to take that onboard… only that’s me getting ahead of myself… breakfast was no longer a given. 

How do I sum up this walk in a handful of paragraphs... Turns out breakfast did happen pretty much every day… and most nights I was under cover… and many of those nights I slept in a proper bed. 

It is in the truck, over the past couple of years that much of this story has been written… parked up at the end of a long day, boots kicked off, seat pushed back, laptop propped up on the steering wheel… to the side of me, a mug of tea, plus the diary and maps that I had taken on that forty day walk… the broken pencil long gone (I think I dropped it someplace). My thoughts bouncing around the cab, some fall to the floor and others land on the keyboard… fingers tap away… and the memories of places and people turn up on screen… I don’t think I fully appreciated, just how out of the ordinary that time was between those two doors (there is something to be said for walking in the rain). Looking back, a part of me thinks it was not the door of a truck that I had climbed out off, but instead it was the door of a wardrobe in the corner of some forgotten bedroom that I had climbed into… I had found myself walking through parts of these Isles, that have been somewhat forgotten… and yet once upon a time as children many of us knew this place well… The foothills of Narnia… aye the innocence of childhood… The verse from the book of Matthew comes to mind… ‘I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven’... Hmm, I wonder… maybe, just maybe, that raggedy guy was for a short while, just a kid living in the moment, making up stories about Gruffalos and the like, kicking stones and hoping others would take care of him (I’m thinking somebody should)… making sure he was fed, to give him a place of rest at the end of each day, once in a while wash his clothes and to send him on his merry adventure with a ‘good luck’ and wrapped up sandwiches and cake… did that kid get to enter the Kingdom of heaven… no not at all… but he did get a glimpse of what a better world could look like, and that was something… 

… no, I didn’t come across any lions or witches… that said, I did come across a bear on ‘day four’ and in the days that followed I came across a whole bunch of other characters that could have easily been a part of the C.S Lewis’s Narnia chronicles… Early one morning I had stood on the side of a hill, at the edge of some woodland looking across at the waters of Dornoch Firth and stood beside me (or maybe he was inside my head, I don’t remember), a Neolithic guy from ten thousand years ago, only he was looking across at the wide-open plains of Africa... a man with the ‘eye of a tiger’ (a sabre-toothed tiger) and his will to survive… I had walked past a closed down factory and heard the raised voices of men no longer there, turning rainbows into sheets of aluminium … Walked alongside Roman soldiers that were kicking stones and wearing full battle gear (helmets and spears) and alongside them modern-day ramblers kicking the same stones, in full hiking gear (silly hats and walking sticks)… I had had the idea of wanting to walk in the footsteps of the saints and the sages of old, only to find myself following in the tracks of fallow deer, a whole bunch of sheep and sometimes picking up an old cattle drive, I squint my eyes and see the Drovers (the once upon a time cowboys of these islands) moving cattle from one place to another… Saw a guy from near on three thousand years ago walk down the side of a mountain, from an Iron age fort, then through the backdoor of a Pub, to serve me a meal fit for a king… When washing pots and pans on the shores of Loch Lomond, I had come close to feeling this world spinning through space at 67.000 miles an hour (I remember needing to hold on)… Stumbled across a couple of druids sat in the corner of another pub on the isle of Anglesey, both crouched over a pint, with a bag of Pork Scratchings between them, discussing the meaning of a bright star that they had seen in the east… I had walked out of a café, wondering what more is it that angels need, that they are having to work in a café to make a little extra cash… Slept on the floor of a workhouse listening to a blackbird singing in the dead of night, eyes closed tight, holding back tears for the many life’s (past and present) that a world had swept under a carpet and then conveniently forgot about… Caught a glimpse of Little White Dove on the other side of the river, such a lovely sight to see… I had stood hidden in the wings of a stage and watched Ebenezer nearly collapse under the weight of his past, followed by the tears of being given a second chance… Sat on an upturned wheelbarrow and witnessed the foundations of Salisbury Cathedral being dug… Saw a bronze age farmer climbing into a modern day tractor (not sure how that worked out, I kept my head down and carried on walking)… Touched the names on war memorials and thought of the generations gone, the cast of thousands that had gave their todays for our tomorrows (…you are not forgotten here)… hmm, not sure how much all the above was for real or just inside my head.

If I could only use one word to describe this walk, it would be ‘gratitude’… give me a couple more words and they would be ‘humility’ and ‘privilege’… I was incredibly grateful (and still am) for each and every one of those miles walked.

What other things did I take away from this walk…what lessons were learnt (not that you need to learn lessons each time you climb out of a truck). My believe that people are good was made real, only I never really doubted that, nothing to learn or see there… Don’t know why, not sure how… but the more I walked the more I appreciated those that came before us… Sometimes we grumble a little too easily… we are quick to see the rubbish, the stuff that’s not right, the stuff that’s all wrong… Once in a while we need to stop in our tracks, close our eyes, turn around and give a moments thought to those that have loved, lived and toiled before us… and then maybe close our eyes that little bit tighter and count our blessings. These islands are not a bad place to be… there is a lot of good here. The same can be said for many places around this world… sadly the same cannot be said in every corner, the world is not always an easy place to be in, many times incredibly unfair… but it is a world that is also beautiful… and we should not forget that... and if (if only) we could get our act together… this old place could be all the more beautiful, simply because of who it is we are… Sorry, danger of me getting soft, I’m supposed to be a truckdriver.

… and here I am again sat in the truck, the working day done, and again the laptop propped up on the steering wheel, trying to figure out how to put this last essay to bed… staring at the screen but not much happening… my eyes drift from one screen to another… feels like I’ve spent half a lifetime sat behind the windscreen of a truck … and what is it I have seen looking at the world from behind glass… I have watched the seasons come and go… the autumn leaves fall… geese flying in from the north (winters are a little warmer here from where it is those guys have just come from)… as spring kicks in, a shift change takes place, the geese head home and the swifts fly in from the south (summers are a little cooler here from where it is those guys have just come from)… I rattle on don’t I… and what more is it I’ve seen from behind glass… I see industry… dockers, coal miners, steel workers, guys working in paper mills and on the land, in distilleries and recycling plants (…plants that turn what we see as rubbish back into raw materials for a whole bunch of different industries)… I see men digging holes and climbing telegraph poles… and I am thinking how it is we still do what people have been doing for a million years and more… be that sat behind the wheel of a truck, out at sea on the deck of a fishing trawler or clocking into an office job… we are not a million miles away from those early hunter- gatherers, the guys that were slowly figuring out how to farm… for want of a better phrase… we somehow muddle through… the end of each day putting food on the table… raising the next generation… figuring out how to do things better than those that came before us and no doubt pondering the bigger questions… It’s not hard for me to imagine some Neolithic guy close to the Rift valley looking up at the moon, a Druid in a woodland glade chewing on a hazelnut, a scholar in the ancient Library of Alexandria, Father Mackenzie writing the words of a sermon, or some professor in the grounds of Oxford University, I can see them all sitting up half the night, maybe more and wondering what it’s all for…

… not sure a truck driver kicking stones is in the same league as those guys… more club level than premier… and yet that was pretty much what this walk was all about… taking time out…to un-muddle a head full of questions and answers… not wanting to pretend to understand stuff that I don’t understand. 

Am I a guy of faith… I guess I am, only needing to do better… and religion… hmm I’m not so sure, probably… I know when I step inside an old empty church… my conscience (the ‘I am’ part of me) is more than this raggedy guy I see kicking stones… somehow bigger… with a potential of being a whole lot better than what I am… does that make me sound a little arrogant… it’s not meant to… those feelings are real. I think we all have moments like this… doesn’t have to be in a church, could be standing on the side of a mountain watching the sun go down or maybe sat at the dock of a bay watching the tide roll in… I guess it could be anywhere, anywhere at all… these moments are real and yet we many times dismiss them without a second thought.

This island that I had walked through, stands on over a thousand years of Christian history… and it shows through the countless chapels, churches and cathedrals that have been built throughout this land. It matters not of what faith we belong to or be it of no faith at all… on these islands, we live in the realm of a Christian culture… A culture that is about thinking, before we pick up that first stone… A culture where to give is better than to take … A culture that sees the value in all. knowing that people are infinity precious (created as equal)… A culture that understands compassion and the power of forgiveness… A culture where love will always come before hate… 

…I say all this, but sometimes I don’t know. Earlier I spoke of my eyes drifting from one screen to another… what of that ‘social media’ screen we all carry around in our pockets… maybe I’m a luddite (I try not to be), only many times to me it seems like social media is trying to turn those values upside down, it is quick to pick up a stone, to throw insults, pass judgement, there seems to be no mercy, if found guilty (or just out of favour) that’ll be you ‘cancelled’ (whatever that means)… It can sometimes feel this media is about putting the individual (me) first, others can take second place… Division, conspiracies and hate will get a thousand more clicks than compassion, truth and reality... Crumbs, is that me turning into a grumpy old man… I guess social media is not the problem, it comes down to how it is we choose to use it (a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon can save a life, the same scalpel in the hands of some gang member can take a life).

… I am a ‘glass half full’ kinda of guy, there is a lot of good in this world… if I didn’t believe that I would not have taken on this walk. Only here's the thing, knowing that there is good in this world is not enough… we are needing to turn that ‘knowing that there is good in the world’ into a desire of wanting to do that good…and then follow that up by going out and doing good… I know, I know easily said, not always that easily done in such a muddled-up world (there’s a lot of pressure to stand in line and just as many temptations to step out of line). I don’t know why we struggle so much, we kind of know living our life's doing good is the road to a happy and fulfilling life, it is what brings us closer to the ‘I am’ of who it is we are (… put another way, the being who it is we are, only better). What makes this journey all that more joyful is to walk that walk with others... to share the laughter, the tears, the quiet moments, the friendship and if they should take a tumble and end up on the floor, should we not be there with a helping hand to get them back on their feet... that is of course after we have stopped laughing. 

The story of this walk would have meant nothing at all (nothing) without the many incredible (beautiful) people that I had met… Thank you to each and everyone of them… 

Best I sign off… it's beginning to sound like I'm turning soft... again.

Thank you to all  

                                                from a truck driver walking 

                                                                                                    Paul  (aka Kid)

One of the motivations behind the telling of this wee adventure was to raise money for the charity Sunrise Africa Relief. The times I have spent in Africa, I have met many incredible people... people that have little and yet give so much of themselves for the sake of others. All the funds raised will help support orphanages, schools and other social projects.

Thankyou

The Character Development presentations taken into Schools, Colleges and Universities  comes under the organization Universal Peace Federation and is funded independently.