Hypothermia Hotel with a Sea view: The Portuguese Way to Santiago by the Coast (6)

Sunset in Hypothermia Hotel

After my night in the football ground in Oia, the rain continued to pour down.  Another cyclogenisis explosiva was brushing the Galician Coast in early February.  As I write it is summer in Madrid: I muse about my motivation for writing this blog.  It has grown around my spiritual journey, a pilgrimage to my heart’s destination, wherever that may be. When I walked from Spain to Iona people would often say to me, “You must write a book about this pilgrimage you are on” and I always replied, “I have no such intention” and then explain that there are many, many thousands of pilgrims walking huge distances these days, even in Britain.

These last few months I have had little opportunity to write but I have met a few people who say “I like your blog” but the most honest comment came from a recently married nephew, indeed the first subscriber to The Raft of Corks who said, “I like the stories but I can’t be arsed with all this spirituality stuff.”  I suspect he speaks for most of his generation.

Mostly torrential rain but I took out the camera when it eased off a bit.

The camino hugs the coast at this point.  The sea, the rain and the saturated earth all touched my flesh, saltily entered my lungs and chanted a spulg-splug beat to the rhythm of my steps. Water embraced me, fell from me, took possession of every fibre of my impermeable walking gear and made a sponge of me. There is no doubt about my motivation for writing in this Spanish heatwave today: I want to bathe in the memory of Hypthermia Hotel.

I had been let out of the football ground when it was opened up for a match, about 9.00 am.  Oia in winter has nowhere open on a Sunday morning, so when I came to the Glasgow Hotel, after about 6km,  I went in.  I have no idea why it is called “Glasgow”.  When I visited it 40 years ago nobody could tell me. My interest lies in Glasgow being my birthplace but I was not to be enlightened in this huge, deserted hotel on this occasion either.  The only staff was the owner who couldn’t answer my question.  My memory is of bleakness and puddles left where I had been sitting,  just like the mystery of the name.

A sight to cool down by in a Madrid heatwave.

Part of my motivation in writing this blog is to help me delve further into the great mysteries of life which my experiences on pilgrimage seem to touch at certain blessed moments.  The spirituality which is emerging in me bears little relationship to the religion of my childhood although I know I am informed and moulded by Glasgow Catholicism.  As a child I can recall being bored by the love scenes in the cinema, saying “That’s yukky”,  probably because in the fifties they only kissed in the pictures: there was no explicit sex.  It would have made no sense to me anyway and I think spirituality is of the same ilk.  When the happy hormones got going in adolescence there would have been nothing more interesting than explicit sex.  Now in my middle sixties, with the happy hormones tamed and much less intrusive, a new, equally compelling phase of life is taking hold of me. We are butterflies, with our inner form  changing radically at different stages of life. Before we enter a new phase we can have little idea what those who have passed to the next are on about, just as, as a child, I couldn’t see why on earth a man and a women would waste time kissing each other when they could be playing or eating ice-cream.

So, younger readers, and nephew Robert, bear with me when I explore here these spiritual matters.  I understand they may make little sense, like calling a Hotel on the Galician coast “Glasgow”.  This post, though is not filled with much God-talk.  That day the storm was so bad that, after a mere 9 kilometres, when I stopped for shelter in the next hotel just around midday, I asked for a room.  I imagined the warmth and the dry, a place to dry out everything I carried, a moment to stay still and enjoy the tempest from the comfort of a cosy room.

One of the advantages of travelling along the coast in winter is that hotels will usually offer you a room with a sea view, since nobody else is staying there.  Indeed, I was given a room with a view.

room with a view

The room had radiators but they were cold. I was told the heating would come on in the evening.  Not one item of my clothing or my equipment was dry so I felt that the best I could do would be to get into bed and warm up.  The bed, however, was damp and as the hours passed and the clouds shot by, rushing inland, I began to shiver and got colder and colder.  I dressed again in wet trousers and shirt and pleaded for some heat only to be assured it would come on in a few hours. So I went into a large, empty and unheated dining room for lunch which was substantial but lookwarm, shivering throughout; then back up to bed.  I couldn’t sleep for the intense discomfort aware of each of my aching bones in turn.  Prayer, in these circumstances, means just staying with what there is: humidity, cold and pain.  I find it best not to think, not to have words, just to be with what is. Then, by 6 o’clock I allowed myself to feel aggrieved that the heating did not come on and by 7.30 I went storming down to the bar to complain that the radiators were still cold only to be told that the boiler had been on for the past two hours.  The proprietor, a gentleman much older than I am, came up to the room and switched the radiators on by turning a white knob on the end of each. Even the bathroom warmed up.  And quite quickly I fell asleep.

[mapsmarker layer=”43″]