conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Daily, Times, Moore with the genre: Reference, Writing, Research & Publishing Guides?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Spanish Steps'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Spanish Steps
  There was nothing to do but walk on into Estella, an 8-kilometre round trip. It was 5ish. I should have minded this more, but Shinto had done well that day and for once I was determined to see him right. A dramatic darkening of the sky diluted this determination rather, and I can't pretend I wasn't glad to find myself before an industrially proportioned bakery less than a click up the road. Wheat, rye, barley: it would be a multi-grain banquet for Shints tonight.
  Slowly he led me towards one of the vans parked in a rank behind us. I watched him crank its back doors ajar and vault in, then rustle out a brown paper bag the size of a mail sack which he motioned me to hold open. I did so and he crouched off to the van's dim depths, emerging with half a dozen stale baguettes. These he dumped in the bag, returning with another load, and another, until my arms could barely encircle its circumference.
  I shed a couple of loaves on the way back, but Shinto still seemed rather overawed by the scale of his nutritional undertaking, piled up before him like some daft inversion of the feeding of the five thousand. I had made a cathedral-sized prannet of myself on his behalf, but I was happy. And also hungry: it was now 7.30, and the dinner my landlady had promised would be cooling on the second-floor dining table.
  Indeed it was, a brimming bowl of ketchupped pasta amidst a table full of empties. Four other pilgrims had arrived in the interim, and the one with her head under the formica was Welsh. 'Oh, God,' she said, with a sort of intrigued disgust. 'My big toe is just one huge... well, have a look.'
  Yet it could have been worse. The Cathars were a twelfth-century French sect who concluded that Satan, not God, had created the world, and thus reviled procreation with an unusually righteous passion. Forget actually having sex; they couldn't bring themselves even to eat anything created by it, directly or indirectly. No meat, no eggs, no milk. Oddly enough, they didn't last long.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Spanish Steps
  There was nothing to do but walk on into Estella, an 8-kilometre round trip. It was 5ish. I should have minded this more, but Shinto had done well that day and for once I was determined to see him right. A dramatic darkening of the sky diluted this determination rather, and I can't pretend I wasn't glad to find myself before an industrially proportioned bakery less than a click up the road. Wheat, rye, barley: it would be a multi-grain banquet for Shints tonight.
  Slowly he led me towards one of the vans parked in a rank behind us. I watched him crank its back doors ajar and vault in, then rustle out a brown paper bag the size of a mail sack which he motioned me to hold open. I did so and he crouched off to the van's dim depths, emerging with half a dozen stale baguettes. These he dumped in the bag, returning with another load, and another, until my arms could barely encircle its circumference.
  I shed a couple of loaves on the way back, but Shinto still seemed rather overawed by the scale of his nutritional undertaking, piled up before him like some daft inversion of the feeding of the five thousand. I had made a cathedral-sized prannet of myself on his behalf, but I was happy. And also hungry: it was now 7.30, and the dinner my landlady had promised would be cooling on the second-floor dining table.
  Indeed it was, a brimming bowl of ketchupped pasta amidst a table full of empties. Four other pilgrims had arrived in the interim, and the one with her head under the formica was Welsh. 'Oh, God,' she said, with a sort of intrigued disgust. 'My big toe is just one huge... well, have a look.'
  Yet it could have been worse. The Cathars were a twelfth-century French sect who concluded that Satan, not God, had created the world, and thus reviled procreation with an unusually righteous passion. Forget actually having sex; they couldn't bring themselves even to eat anything created by it, directly or indirectly. No meat, no eggs, no milk.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Whilst the mason was drafting up an inflated quote for the bishop, back in León the good times were almost over: like so many along the route, the town was a victim of the pilgrimage's success. Pilgrims brought the wealth and weaponry that by 1350 had driven the Moors almost out of Spain; there was no longer a reason to squash all the markets and monasteries up in the north-west. And they also brought the Black Death.
  Many of the San Marcos rooms, I had noted, languished in a contemporary annexe tacked on to the back, but not mine. It wasn't huge, or in fact spectacularly well appointed, but it overlooked the river – a broad stretch of sandbanks and shingle sparsely plaited with streamlets – and was handily proximate to the hotel's most impressive feature: the upper storey of a two-floor cloistered courtyard. I could have propped an elbow on that shady balustrade for hours, a thin-stemmed schooner of amontillado in my rose-watered fingers, gazing across at the scallop-shell medallions on the facing walls. And, most deliciously of all, soaking up the embittered skyward glances of visitors to the adjoining museum of antiquities as they patrolled the formal gardens below. If they could see me now, those pilgrim friends of mine.
  My family's route to León required them to fly to Santiago and drive back east, covering in three hours what at current rates of progress would take me nearly three weeks. It was a slightly deflating calculation: I felt as if I'd spent an agonising age acquiring some skill now rendered embarrassingly redundant, like a farm labourer coming back from sickle school to see the bloke in the next field fire up his combine harvester. Everything was about to change, and as I lost myself in a vast towel I realised how far I'd moved away from any sensible definition of domestic normality.
  Most of the pilgrims I'd talked to couldn't understand why I was looking forward to my family's arrival. Using language familiar to any woman who's ever proposed attending a poker night, and any man who's offered to carry the bags around Harvey Nichols, they muttered ominously about boredom, filth and danger, when what they actually meant was, This is my outing, and I don't want you spoiling it. Directly or not, partners and children represented what many had come to escape from. 'You are with people on the camino, but you are selfish,' said Jean-Michel. 'I am doing this for myself, and by myself.'
  The bedside phone warbled as I was buttoning up the least ravaged of my two remaining shirts. It was Birna. Two minutes later three young faces were carefully surveying me across the threshold of room 454, wondering what this flash-fried, straw-haired castaway had done with their daddy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last two paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If a common theme was emerging to these crusades, then it was the search for something beyond the typical tourist routine, an antidote to the vacuous consumerism of contemporary travel. A trip to the moral high ground – I hear the view's excellent from up there. 'Pilgrimage', even more so than 'sabbatical' and 'retreat', added an instant gloss of worthy righteousness to what on the face of it was just a very long holiday. Plus, three years on from the monstrous bike ride round France that represented my last proper workout, I was at the stage of my athletic career where triumph meant successfully returning the big Le Creuset to that shelf above the fridge–freezer. A physical service was long overdue, and this one came with a spiritual overhaul thrown in.
  A structured rationale was taking shape in my mind's eye, and I liked what I saw. A trip purged of the empty decadence that characterised most foreign trips, yet still demanded alcoholic indulgence in the name of historical authenticity. A holiday that wasn't a holiday, even though it involved going to Spain. A journey of transcendental discovery that was also a stiff but sensible aerobic challenge, and whose inherent asceticism had the happy side benefit of economy. A medieval tale retold for our times, but at 1350 prices.