I have just helped friends move house. The fact that they were only shifting to the house next door only seemed to make the task more difficult. There was no loading of household goods onto a truck and simply driving them to the new house. Instead, everything had to be moved by hand up the road and pathway to their new home. 

We women worked, ferrying the lighter items - chairs, pictures, domestic appliances, mats, and books - while the men portered the heavy and awkward items. 

Most remarkably, they moved a beautiful but hulking Indian cabinet over two metres high. It took the combined strength, ingenuity, and teamwork of four of them to coax and nudge and drag the thing through one doorway, down a set of steps, up the road for a hundred metres, then up another set of steps and through two more doorways before restoring it to an upright position in its new home. 

Nelson’s famous annual pilgrimage has begun. Every year, during the cold, bitter days which mark the birth of Queen Elizabeth II of England, thousands of pilgrims, young and old, abandon the comfort of home and hearth to walk the Peregrinatio Ad Libros.  

Clad simply and modestly in warm jackets, woolly hats, and sturdy footwear they come from all points of the compass, holding in gloved hands the empty bag which is the symbol of the pilgrimage. The Peregrinatio Ad Libros, a sort of Antipodean Camino Way, dates from the last quarter of the 20th century, a time when e-books and digital content were completely unknown. Words then, were printed on sheets of paper which were bound together to make “books” and “magazine” and “newspapers”.