I was walking in circles on a large expanse of lawn in the monastery grounds when I was approached by two brothers, fully robed. One pushed the other in a wheelchair. There had been rain at some point and the wheelchair’s progress across the lawn was rather halting. The brother who was pushing asked the brother in the chair if he might leave him for a moment and walk on alone, but the wheelchair-bound brother said ‘no’. Just ‘no’. Which I felt was rather mean of him, under the circumstances (not at all the kind of behaviour one might hope to expect from an elderly Benedictine). Finally, they reached me. The ‘pushing’ brother – a shorn redhead, tall but stooped, with giant, pale hands and deeply melancholic yellow eyes – stepped forward and introduced himself.

‘Good morning,’ he said, ‘I am Brother Linus and this’ – he indicated, respectfully, towards the older monk – ‘is Brother Prosper. You currently find yourself in the grounds of Douai Abbey and school. May we be of any assistance to you?’

This monk had a slight accent. Dutch? Flemish?

‘I am here to meet up with Brother Hugh … uh … Pietr,’ I stumbled. ‘I have walked here from Pett Level which is close to Hastings, a distance of around ninety miles.’

‘May we be of any assistance to you?’ the brother repeated. By now a small group of schoolboys in PE gear were sauntering by. There were a few sniggers and barbed comments, which I suppose were only to be expected under the circumstances.

‘Move on, boys!’ Brother Prosper bellowed.

The boys moved on, sharpish.

I was still walking in a circle (Brother Linus closely in tow), but had circumscribed my movements to an area of – at best – ten square feet from the still centre of Brother Prosper’s chair. Brother Prosper’s head spun like an owl’s to keep up with my perambulations.

I was probably still speaking in Spanish. I was probably still speaking through my nostrils. Brother Linus had a kindly demeanour. In fact Linus was my favourite Peanuts character (among the cast of ‘humans’. My actual favourite was naturally Woodstock – with Snoopy a close second). After several more circuits I finally decided to take a risk and confide in him, in English, with my lips.

‘I have walked here from Hastings, Brother Linus,’ I puffed, ‘to see Brother Hugh. A kind of pilgrimage. In fact’ – I stopped walking – ‘could you just …’

So many unanswered questions! Where even to begin?

‘Here …’ I showed him the strange ridge on the back of my head. ‘I recently discovered this strange … this curious ridge on the back of my head; might you possibly do me the great favour of describing it to me?’

Brother Linus quietly inspected the aforementioned area.

‘Is it some kind of parasitic infection?’ I demanded. ‘Some kind of … I live in Mexico and there’s a disease spread by the sand fly, Leishmaniasis … I’ve seen … in my time … terrible … horrible, festering bumps, with strange, ridged edges; a man I once worked with had the infection on his arm … Or there’s River Blindness which can sometimes exhibit itself in its early phases through nasty-looking skin lesions …’