As well as my daily swim of 500 meters or so I try to keep up with my steps – minimum a modest 3,000 a day.

Of Tuesday’s 4,717 steps 900 were acquired doing the ritual triple circumabulation, a wian thian, in Bangkok at Wat Phra Chetuphon, popularly known as Wat Pho. It was Makha Bucha Day, a Buddhist festival celebrating the spontaneous coming together of 1,250 of the Lord Buddha’s disciples who were then taught, ordained as monks and sent out to spread his teaching.

Before the first step I took off my shoes as is the custom. It always reminds me of the injunction to Moses before the burning bush, ‘Take off your shoes for the place on which you stand is holy ground.’ Indian and Sri Lankan Christians often slip off their sandals before going up bare foot to receive Holy Communion. Be that as it may, I then set off, bare foot, for my three times around the great shrine at the heart of Wat Pho.

I was with two friends, both Buddhist, one of whom had been a monk for many years. He reminded me that we had first met thirty years ago when he was a novice monk. He is now married with two daughters. We were each holding incense sticks, a candle and a lotus flower which together symbolise the journey from darkness to light. The recurrence of symbols across religions always touches me. Incense, candles, flowers are common to many.

The number three is also very important in Buddhism as it is in Christianity. While I was doing my steps on Tuesday in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit my Buddhist friends may have been meditating on Buddhism’s Three Marks of Existence (impermanence, suffering, non-self) or the Three Root Evils (greed, hatred, delusion.) Or they may not. I didn’t ask and at dinner later at a noodle stall on a bridge over a canal we didn’t do theology but reminisced over old times.

Incidentally each circuit of the temple at Wat Pho was for me 300 steps but I don’t put too much store by that. It was the aspect of pilgrimage or journey that was symbolised by what so many of us were doing at Wat Pho that moved me. That I was bare foot, feeling the heat of the marble, made me very aware of my connection with the physical world.

Pilgrimage is a common practice across the religions. I like to think that my few steps at Wat Pho take their place alongside those who travel to Mecca and Jerusalem and Lourdes and Varanasi and Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury and wherever and whenever people go knowing there is more to discover and that we have not yet arrived.

They Almost Spoilt My Evening

It is almost a week ago that I flew from Bangkok to board the Seabourn Encore for my cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore. The memory of that day is beginning to fade.

The flight from Bangkok was awful. The departure time of 3:20 in the morning was my choice. I must have been mad. At Suvarnabhumi Airport I was in the longest queue I’ve ever seen in any airport. Economy class. My own choice.

I asked an official, ‘Why does everyone want to go to Hong Kong Kong at 3:20 am?’ They don’t. They were queueing for Guangzhou. He helped me find the right desk. No queue. The seat was fine but I was not.

I’m old. I like my comfort. I was unhappy: ‘Why isn’t someone looking after me?’ Space tight, sleep snatched, I survived.

Arriving at  6:50 a.m I stagger along walkways. Next on to and off a train but still not at immigration; and when I am it’s all mechanical, electronic, high-tech. It all worked perfectly well. I found that even more irritating.

Out into the world. Time to fill in. They don’t want me at Ocean Terminal until midday so I breakfast at a Japanese Ramen place. The waiter takes me by the hand and settles me down and organises my luggage. He plugs my hearing aid charger into something somewhere and brings lemon and honey tea, a glass of warm water and then noodles and pork gyoza. He almost improves my mood: Almost.

Next a taxi to Ocean terminal; except it’s not. It’s the ferry terminal. The driver doesn’t know Ocean Terminal. No one knows Ocean Terminal.  Even when I go inside to level one, then level two, they don’t know and I don’t know.

Back at the taxi. I refuse to pay until I am at the Ocean Terminal. I go through all my papers. Hong Kong Ocean Terminal. No address, No one knows.

A stranger types into his mobile phone. In English or Chinese I don’t know. And there it is. With a map. He shows it to the driver. They talk and nod and smile. Off we go.

Check in takes two hours. Group one. Group two. On board to the Grand Salon. Visas are required for Cambodia! We have to show ourselves in person. We’re not in Cambodia for another week but we cannot sail until checked. Where is my suitcase? I did not watch to see it labelled. It may be left behind. It has’t been. It is delivered to my suite at 6.15. Everything has taken far too long.  

To dinner, early. I am by the window. My view is a blank wall of the Hong Kong Ocean Terminal. Everything is reasonably familiar, the restaurant and my corner table. Yet somehow it’s not. This has been a dreadful twenty four hours; horrible, terrible, awful.

There is a couple at a nearby table. The man turns and says,

“You’re alone. Would you like to join us?”

And I must reply.

“I am feeling sorry for myself. Do you really want to spoil my evening?”

We smile and laugh and they leave me to the full enjoyment of my bad mood.

A thought for today, attributed to Gustav Mahler: ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes but of keeping the flame alive.’

Last Sunday after mass at the Catholic Cathedral in Bangkok I met three friends, two of them English the other Australian, for lunch. I mentioned that I was particularly struck by a paragraph in a piece by Bishop Erik Varden printed on the front of the Order of Service.

I had never heard of Bishop Varden. It turned out than one of my friends had met him briefly at a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London just three weeks before. The other had had dinner with him in Norway a month or so ago. The piece had been chosen by the Australian, a priest who had presided at the mass.

The coincidence does not affect the importance or not of the piece of writing. However I never dismiss coincidence as ‘mere’. So here is that small part of Bishop Varden’s writing that I noted and was in some way endorsed by those who had met the man who wrote it.

The piece was entitled, The Pain of ‘Why’. The second paragraph read:

A secular logic tells us that we ought not to suffer; and that if we do it is unfair. This can make us angry and bitter. We think things ought to be okay. When they’re not we feel we have been cheated. The Christian narrative is different. It sets out from the conviction that things in the world are not okay. God became man to heal our nature from within. The New Testament tells us that Christ healed the world, not by some wonder remedy, but by suffering through our wounds , investing them with his grace in love, making them glorious. Even death is relieved of its terror. Experiences that seem to us, humanly speaking, as dead ends reveal themselves to be passages, open doors, ways forward.

It is not that I have stopped thinking. I left my iPad behind in London when I flew to Thailand more than a month ago. It was sent to me here in Bangkok by Royal Mail. It never arrived – lost, stolen or strayed.

I have a new iPad. A Thai friend helped me find and buy one. She spent an hour with me updating the new iPad which is remarkably similar to my previous one. Everything that was on my old iPad has appeared on my new iPad. Many will not be surprised. I am. I gather it is to do with everything being retained on the ‘cloud’.

I think that this is slightly alarming, almost sinister.

I also think it is not a good idea to send things overseas by Royal Mail.

More profound thoughts may follow – or not.