Travels with my Donkey

worthy of the title would ever consider using this when there was a urinal to block up.
    It was an ambience that, with offspring in mind, precluded my brandy ritual. Or should have. The mother of all Veteranos meant the pilgrims beat us to bed; below our family garret, twenty-four of them squeaked and sighed and snuffled themselves towards evasive slumber. Petronella had sought assurances on my children's nocturnal equability, and as a proud father I'd been happy to lie on their behalf; yet even as Valdis belatedly slumped across the fine but well-defended line that separates empurpled, valley-filling hysteria from drained unconsciousness, I knew that was not the end of it.
    Shinto's yard was a good quarter-click up the road, but with the last infant shriek still echoing away down the hillsides his first orphaned ululation of the night honked poignantly in through our attic skylight. In the previous week he'd grown far more vocally lonesome, and I thought again how dislocating all this was for a beast whose previous world had been as small and familiar as a medieval peasant's. Then I twisted in my earplugs and slammed the skylight shut.
     

Twelve

    A fter weeks when each kilometre was a fierce and often brutal conquest, thick droves of them were now passing by almost unnoticed. Following an unusually hearty breakfast of deep-fried tuna-filled rolls, Lilja, Shints and I fairly steamed into the long descent, scrabbling down a gully of slated scree with such impulsive glee that we skidded and butted our way past a dozen alarmed walkers.
    For the first time I'd begun to believe I would actually make it to Santiago, and I wasn't alone. Regularly now people were leaving little notes for that special pilgrim they'd met and passed along the way, leaving an email address or a phone number in the realisation that this had become a good thing, and so like all such entities would come to an end. You'd find the notes alone, speared through a fence barb, or in a fluttering forest, weighed down under pebbles. Between us, Lilja and I read them all that morning. Bereaved Thomas from weeks back seemed to have found a lady friend, and the jilted exhortations to New Mexico Joe suggested that love will always find a way, even around nasal incontinence and graphically public urination. Most of the many notes addressed for his attention seemed to be missing something, principally the words 'you' and 'bastard': 'I waited in El Burgo Ranero for two days!' 'Return Burgos but no Joe. Soon Hotmail please.' 'Didn't we agree to meet in León?'
    Over the next few days I counted messages to him in at least five different hands: he could have walked home across the Atlantic on a crazy-paved pontoon of broken hearts. You could only feel for the man. A certain type of pilgrim does the camino in confident expectation of meeting their mystical soulmate en route, and if they were female and under thirty Joe was the only show in town. All I can say is thank Christ he didn't have a donkey — it would have been like a 774-kilometre Benny Hill title sequence.
    Through more resurrected villages almost disconcertingly vibrant with human life and well-tended colour,- past the terrible beauty of a broom hare fixing us with a huge, bright eye as it lay crippled and dying at the roadside. We arrived at the familial meet-point well ahead of schedule, but Shinto landed on his hooves, lunching on the very lushest alfalfa in the front garden of a mothballed villa. When the rest turned up we watched him from the restaurant across the road, our boccadillos brought over by an apple-cheeked cook done up like Mrs White in Clue.
    The road flattened and we distantly circled a nuclear power station, pausing to wonder if Valdis should be plundering the cherry trees whose fruit dangled so temptingly as she sat up there in the saddle. Then paint-sprayed marshalling yards, piss-sprayed back alleys and into the last major town before Santiago. Kristjan had been building up to this moment for days, and burst into song as he saw confirmation on a passing municipal dustcart: 'Hello Mudder, hello Farder, here I am in Ponferrada!'
    In pilgrimage terms, Ponferrada is most notable as the home of the Knights Templar, whose enormous castle HQ reared splendidly up before us as we followed the yellow arrows out of a tight and neglected thoroughfare. Some castles have the forbidding look of a building you'd enter and never leave alive, but Ponferrada isn't one of them. It was somehow