18th February 2011

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

Broadening the Mind

 

Excitement and adventure

I was 19 years old the first time I came to Spain and that was in 1967. Goodness me how long ago it all seems now!  A crowd of us, all lads, had booked with the ill-fated Clarksons and the ten-day holiday, full board, cost just £32.  Not only was it my first visit to Spain but it was also the first time I had flown.  In those days Luton Airport was the package holiday capital of Britain, which, for those without a car, was not the easiest place to get to.  As it was an early morning flight on the Monday morning we had travelled down from Sheffield by bus hoping to bed down for the night in the tiny airport lounge.  I don’t now remember why, but for some reason that was not a possibility and we had to go and search for alternative en-suite accommodation.  Clutching our brand new suitcases we trudged up and down looking for somewhere to sleep.  After much traipsing around we found a workman’s wooden hut on a nearby building site, into which we all squeezed hoping to get some sleep.  Whether we actually slept or not I can’t remember but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because we were going on holiday to Spain!  In those days the very word itself conjured up excitement and adventure, for someone who’d never travelled further than Skegness or Scarborough. Spain was the ultimate triumph for the budding explorer.

 

A sharpened appetite

The brochure said “full-board”.  It probably was “full-board” given a loose Spanish interpretation of the phrase but a white roll with peach jam and a weak coffee for breakfast was not going to fill hungry 19 year olds.  Neither was a bit of salad with a slice of salami and a small chicken drumstick likely to make many inroads into an appetite sharpened by swimming and snorkelling.  Supper wasn’t much better either but we solved the problem by creating a four-meal day.  This is a clever ploy and has much to recommend it for those who either enjoy their food or aren’t getting enough of it. So every evening, on our way back to the hotel after a night out, we tucked into the ubiquitous chicken and chips all washed down with a bottle of rough red wine and as much bread as the proprietor was prepared to put at our disposal.

On the way home we were delayed for four hours at Gerona Airport, you always were delayed in those days, but it didn’t matter – we were not going anywhere – just home!  Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava will always be inscribed in my teenage psyche as the place which shattered my sheltered “little Englander” approach to life.  It wasn’t exactly a “gap year” but it certainly filled a gap in my limited experience of life.  The world, to use that hackneyed phrase, had become a smaller place. 

 

Trekking the world

With increasing regularity it seems that we can’t open the newspapers these days without being confronted with a photograph of yet another footloose, gap year student who’s been murdered whilst trekking the world.  Despite all the dangers I’m glad that all three of my children  decided to discover what is south of the equator.  Daughter, as part of her university language degree, spent a year at a university in Italy. ( please don’t write to tell me that Italy is not south of the equator …I know!)  For her the anticipation and fear of the unknown was a nightmare, which was not helped by the fact she missed her flight and had to travel alone without the support of her fellow students.  To arrive after midnight at the tiny Ancona Airport which, contrary to expectations, locked its doors after the last flight and without any idea of where she was meant to be sleeping was the inauspicious start for what was, for her, a good experience.

Her brothers were more adventurous. The bookshelves still hold travel guides to China, Latvia,  Russia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Ghana and too many “…istans” to mention.

 

School trip

For me at eleven years old the four-day school trip to London was the height of my expectations. I can remember lying in bed one evening, knowing that my parents were downstairs, trying to decide whether they could stump up the eight pounds that would allow me to go on the trip and the sheer excitement when my mother came upstairs to tell me I could go. 

 The mind still boggles at what can be squeezed into such a short time. Each of us was issued with an “I Spy London” book and we had to tick off everything as we saw it. Although I didn’t quite see the pigeon-dropping heading my way in Trafalgar Square but that is another story.

 

Cold, wet and hungry

As ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels loomed, geography field trips became the norm.  They weren’t exactly exotic but as the Peak District was on our doorstep the possibilities were endless.  We were made to walk for miles through a peat bog simply to look at a millstone grit outcrop or a youthful v-shaped valley.  Winnat’s Pass was always the geography master’s ‘piece de resistance’, “Here we have an underground cavern where the roof has collapsed,” he would proclaim with all the authority that only a teacher can muster.  We, for our part, were bored out of our minds.  We couldn’t have cared less whether we were staring at millstone grit or carboniferous limestone and anyway the exams were twelve months away.  When you’re cold, wet and hungry you couldn’t actually care less - particularly when your egg sandwiches are stinking out your rucksack and you fancy one of the girls in the group.

 

Ungrateful wretches

The other budding tour company for which I have to be grateful was that association of anoraks who marched around in short khaki trousers – The Boy Scouts.  Unwittingly over the years they helped to feed my wanderlust.  Why camp on the outskirts of Sheffield when there were far more exciting campsites to explore in the Lake District or Wales?  With a two-man tent, a Calor gas stove, a damp sleeping bag and a latrine shovel the world was our oyster.  Today as I speed past the various campsites I’ve frequented around the countryside over the years, it all seems a long time ago. It was a different world but we loved it, we had a great time, made many friends and I’m grateful to those Scout leaders who must have given up two weeks of their annual holiday leave each year to take ungrateful wretches like myself on a fortnight’s camp.  Time is a great teacher and I only wish that they were alive today so that I could say a proper “thank you” to them 

 

Badly let down

Field trips were a natural part of geography ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels yet somehow a three-year degree course in Theology did not seem to necessitate the same travel.  To this day I do not understand how one could have studied the history of the Old Testament and not set foot in Egypt or Israel, roamed the desert, gazed out over the Red Sea or climbed Mount Sinai.  In fact how can you study the New Testament without paddling in the Sea of Galilee, climbing up to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or exploring the sandstone caves of Bethlehem?  I may have had a degree in Theology, which was achieved, admittedly, more by luck than hard work but I still didn’t know one end of the River Jordan from the other.  It was ten years later that I stood in the middle of the street in the Arab town of Nazareth and understood what I’d missed.  Somebody somewhere had let us down rather badly and it felt as though I’d studied car mechanics without ever looking under the bonnet of a car.

 

Overseas Voluntary Work

Today things are very different.  My kids automatically presume that they will be allowed to go off skiing to Italy or Andorra without any expectation that the answer to their request will be “No”.  They jump on aeroplanes in the way that I used to jump on buses and the world is at their doorstep.  In fact sometimes school magazines look more like holiday brochures than the annual collection of hockey, netball and football team photographs which was the stuff of our youth.  Yet having said all of that I love the concept of a Gap Year before university.  The only rule I made for my children was that if it’s to be purely travel then they must work beforehand so that they can fund the expedition themselves but if they’re going out to do voluntary work overseas in a developing country……. well then I’ll see what I can do!

 

Robert Ellis is the Anglican Chaplain of Mallorca

St Philip and St James Church

Nunez de Balboa 6

Son Armadans

Palma 07014

Tel: 971 737279

E mail: anglicanpalma@gmail.com

www.anglican-mallorca.org