Eleven days were 'lost' when the Government changed the calendar in 1752, and a lot of people were very perturbed by it. When was the 'real' Christmas, they asked? How would they find out?

Glastonbury seemed to have the answer, in the form of a miraculous thorn tree that flowered on Christmas Day. All over the land people gathered anxiously around cuttings of the famous Thorn to see whether it would stay true to the old calendar, and blossom on Old Christmas Day, or cave in to parliament and blossom on the New one. 71-year-old John Jackson from Wakefield in Yorkshire went one better, and decided to go to Glastonbury and find out for himself. On foot, and through the mud and the mire and the floods of an eighteenth century winter.

There's something about his nutty journey that I found deeply inspiring, and so this December I'm going to be walking in his footsteps, across industrial middle England, surveying the same terrain from the other side of the Industrial Revolution and musing upon Glastonbury and pilgrimage and change, and no doubt sore feet as well, with a whole range of interesting people. I'm hoping to write a book about the journey, and will be sharing the first fruits with the Positive Living group...