Travels with my Donkey

Prologue
     

     
    I was on a small boat in Norway when I first heard about it. 'Now I am going to do the Camino de Santiago,' said Per, and for a heady moment seemed primed to leap to his deck-shoed feet and perform a vigorously sensual one-man tango up and down the galley. When this moment had ended — and with Per being a bald and precise teacher of languages I couldn't say it was a long one — he explained that the camino was a path or way in Spain, or in true accuracy across Spain, a path or way with a most particular historic and religious tradition, a... a...
    'A pilgrimage?'
    Just so, said Per. A pilgrimitch. In the next summer. He looked through the porthole beside my shoulder and nodded distantly at the bobbing horizon.
    It was the sort of revelation that made me glad we were puttering up a sunny fjord beneath a merry deckful of day-tripping divorcees, rather than alone together on a vast and wild ocean. The pilgrims I'd mumbled about in hymns and seen in Monty Python films wore pus-crusted hoods and hair shirts. They crawled across continents on bare and bleeding knees, fuelled by turnips and raw zeal towards that distant shrine where divine deliverance awaited those who pressed their blistered lips to the shrivelled gall-bladder of St Pancras.
    I stole a surreptitious look at Per and saw him cowled in a filthy felt cloak, chanting Latin and smacking himself in the teeth with a stout plank. Eyes ablaze with fundamentalist fervour,- clawed hands ready to force some sarky heathen's face through a porthole of slightly inadequate diameter. Perhaps I heard the first echoing organ chord of John Bunyan's 'To Be a Pilgrim', a school-assembly regular of wrathful, Old Testament righteousness, whose indefatigable protagonist fought with lions and giants and then, as the fearsome Judgement Day descant kicked mightily in, saw off the last wave of hobgoblins and foul fiends to inherit eternal life.
    This was first-degree Christianity, ill at ease in the third millennium. On the ferry home I pondered that these days, in England at least, even its mildest churchgoing variant was no more than an eccentric if harmless hobby, as might be poodle clipping or my father's enduring love for the Red Army Marching Band's rendition of 'It's a Long Way To Tipperary'. Say 'pilgrim' in a questioning tone and people might mutter about the Mayflower fathers, or possibly a Gothic-scripted supermarket cheddar. But footsore fanatics? Not now, not in Europe. We've been there, done that and worn the hair shirt. Per might as well have told me he was giving up teaching to retrain as a cooper. Yet he had spilt his seed on my stony soil — I'm going to have a word with him about that when we next meet — and there it lay awaiting germination.
     
    My wife Birna and I travelled, settled, bought a house. One Christmas a card from Per dropped on the doormat — he had met a new woman, been promoted to head of languages, and what he had learnt and felt while treading the hallowed path to Santiago had been the catalyst to it all. I thought, Well, good for him. Here was a man whose life had been a bit of a mess, and a nice long walk in Spain had helped him clear his head and sort things out. My life, pleasingly, was not a mess. But then we had a child, and then children, and suddenly it sort of was.
    Pushing forty, or rather being pulled brutally towards it, I had felt the usual twinges of angst; not quite a what-does-it-all-mean existential crisis, perhaps, but the vague sense that my soul-ometer might benefit from a little recalibration. I'd find myself sitting on a Tube train with a Boots carrier bag on my lap, wondering how 'Ideas for Life' had triumphed as the under-logo corporate slogan, rather than 'Just a Bloody Chemist'. The Power of Dreams, Engineered with Passion, Because You're Worth It: all these preposterously overblown mission statements suddenly seemed the anthem of a consumerist society disappearing up its own two-for-one arse. But then what were my Ideas for Life? Why was personal growth just something I read about in medico-sexual junk emails?
    Responsibility for three young humans sharpened concerns over the poverty of my spiritual bequest, and the mirror wasn't shy in emphasising that I really ought to get my immaterial affairs in order for the next generation. With empathy furrowing my brow I read an interview in which Bob Geldof described the improbable tipping point that had caused him to reappraise his own life values: his