Travels with my Donkey

table under a bamboo canopy, a decent bottle of rosé and crayons with which the children were able ruminatively to deface the paper tablecloth. The brandy arrived, and was at length drained; an authentic conclusion to my family's first full day on the way of St James. 'El... um... bill,' I called across to the padrone, autographing air in the universally accepted fashion.
    His response was a far more complex gesture, one we were still trying to decode when he appeared beside us bearing a little tumbler of golden liquor. This was laid before me with elaborate ceremony and a hushed flood of reverential words. 'Sorry, but I didn't...' I began, but he waved me quiet and backed away pointing at the distant table accommodating our sole fellow diners, an elderly couple. 'Fine,' I muttered, 'go and see to them first, but if this turns up on the bill I'm not paying for it.'
    'He says it's fifty years old,' whispered Birna, who'd done Spanish at school. I took a sip. Brandy — very good brandy. I'd downed half when the oldsters stooped towards us. 'Good evening,' said the husband, while his wife gazed at the children in happy reverie. 'Excuse me but it is so that your children are... quite angels, as our grandchildren,' he faltered graciously.
    'Well... that's very kind,' said Birna. 'Thank you.' And in truth they had displayed unusual quiescence, as I believe is common with heatstroke and exhaustion. That said, some of the on-table artwork was a little pungent, and a large text box above my dessert spoon proclaimed in an infant hand that Daddy smelt of donkey bottoms.
    We talked for a while: they were pilgrims, and astoundingly had walked all the way from their home in Zurich. 'It's maybe four zouzand kilometres,' said the wife, modestly. I scanned each kind, old face in turn and with all that brandy in me it was impossible not to gawp — neither could possibly have been under seventy.
    'So... thank you,' said the husband, straightening his back and searching for an appropriate valediction. 'Tonight you are our friends... our guests.' I hoisted my ancient cognac. 'And so are you,' I reciprocated chirpily, before brazenly tipping the remainder down my gullet.
    When they'd gone I waved an impatient finger-pen at the padrone. He glided up with a questioning look. 'La cuenta, por favor,' said Birna. His brow furrowed further, and with shaking head he held an explanatory hand to the recently vacated table behind us. For a brief but vivid moment everything in my body stopped working. Then I pressed my palms to my face and stared at Birna through two small gaps in my fingers. They had paid it. They had paid our bill, Fanta and food and vintage brandy and all. They'd tried to tell us and we hadn't even thanked them. I threw back my chair and ran out into the street, but it was dark and empty both ways.
    When the children were asleep Birna and I stood at our window, and through the neon glare of the hotel sign above noticed activity on the edge of Shinto's forest, right beside the bridge. A recorded fanfare blared out, then gave way to a thumpingly medieval cacophony of pipes and tabors. 'They're dancing,' said Birna. 'Loads of them.' And peering carefully I could see dozens and dozens of extravagantly mobile bodies, cavorting in flailed unison by those hallowed arches.
    'There's a festival every July to celebrate that joust,' I mumbled. 'Must be practising.' It was all rather wonderful, possibly even enchanting, yet I couldn't muster any enthusiasm. The more I thought about what had just happened the more it seemed a test of a pilgrim's good grace, a test I had not passed. When I replayed the scene again there was a horrible new detail: after draining that aged liquor I had failed to suppress a belch.
    There was a moral, and this was it: Treat all strangers as if they have just paid for your dinner. Actually, there was another. Don't have that second brandy if you're sleeping within half a mile of a donkey.
     
    The new day brought pain and noise, but it also brought hope. Today we would reach Astorga, finish line of the meseta, the end of my symbolic death, from whence the camino jumped off its symbolic deathbed and climbed steadily up and over the Montes de León. The only slight worry, having consulted the literature, was that the ensuing spiritual resurrection wasn't slated to kick off until the Cruz de Ferro, highest point of those mountains, leaving me 28 kilometres of soulless limbo after Astorga. But as long as the road