Travels with my Donkey

Leicester staring slack jawed at a cathedral ceiling and returning home with a sheaf of sketches for his local stonemason.
    Whilst the mason was drafting up an inflated quote for the bishop, back in León the good times were almost over: like so many along the route, the town was a victim of the pilgrimage's success. Pilgrims brought the wealth and weaponry that by 1350 had driven the Moors almost out of Spain; there was no longer a reason to squash all the markets and monasteries up in the north-west. And they also brought the Black Death.
    So at least I learnt, lying there up to my ears in bubbles with a book in one hand, a cold beer in the other and a jar of green olives wedged in the soap dish. Shinto, I'm afraid, was lashed to the air-conditioning plant at the back of the car park, albeit engulfed by bamboo bushes upon whose succulent upper leaves he was noisily feasting when I arrived to fill the bowl at his feet with supermarket porridge oats and French toast.
    Many of the San Marcos rooms, I had noted, languished in a contemporary annexe tacked on to the back, but not mine. It wasn't huge, or in fact spectacularly well appointed, but it overlooked the river — a broad stretch of sandbanks and shingle sparsely plaited with streamlets — and was handily proximate to the hotel's most impressive feature: the upper storey of a two-floor cloistered courtyard. I could have propped an elbow on that shady balustrade for hours, a thin-stemmed schooner of amontillado in my rose-watered fingers, gazing across at the scallop-shell medallions on the facing walls. And, most deliciously of all, soaking up the embittered skyward glances of visitors to the adjoining museum of antiquities as they patrolled the formal gardens below. If they could see me now, those pilgrim friends of mine.
    My family's route to León required them to fly to Santiago and drive back east, covering in three hours what at current rates of progress would take me nearly three weeks. It was a slightly deflating calculation: I felt as if I'd spent an agonising age acquiring some skill now rendered embarrassingly redundant, like a farm labourer coming back from sickle school to see the bloke in the next field fire up his combine harvester. Everything was about to change, and as I lost myself in a vast towel I realised how far I'd moved away from any sensible definition of domestic normality.
    Most of the pilgrims I'd talked to couldn't understand why I was looking forward to my family's arrival. Using language familiar to any woman who's ever proposed attending a poker night, and any man who's offered to carry the bags around Harvey Nichols, they muttered ominously about boredom, filth and danger, when what they actually meant was, This is my outing, and I don't want you spoiling it. Directly or not, partners and children represented what many had come to escape from. 'You are with people on the camino, but you are selfish,' said Jean-Michel. 'I am doing this for myself, and by myself.'
    The bedside phone warbled as I was buttoning up the least ravaged of my two remaining shirts. It was Birna. Two minutes later three young faces were carefully surveying me across the threshold of room 454, wondering what this flash-fried, strawhaired castaway had done with their daddy.
     

Eleven

     
    ' Y ou are ze man viss ze monkey?'
    I looked up from the breakfast table to see the Swiss pilgrims who'd passed me just outside Sahagún. 'No,' I said, extracting a small thumb from my left nostril and elbowing off an incoming salvo from the muffin cannon. 'I am the man with four monkeys.'
    Happy as they were to meet their Pilgrim Father, at least once he'd attended to himself with his new birthday razor and tired of affecting solemn conversion to Mormonism, Shinto was the main draw. It was unfortunate in this light that he'd given a very poor account of himself when I'd taken them to meet him the evening before: there was crap in his food bowl, and endeavouring to discard it I was snarled at and butted. If mine was the unacceptable face of family tourism, then here was its unacceptable ass. Nine-year-old Kristjan hardly noticed, but it was clear from the crestfallen alarm on his sisters' faces that their hard-wired affection for the equine race would be tested to its tail-brushing, mane-plaiting limit.
    Happily, a new day brought a new donkey, biddable and benign, calmly wrapping his prehensile lips round the bread rolls we'd trousered from the breakfast buffet. The