Travels with my Donkey

were plenty of bare bottoms on show in the bushes, but only doing what I'd seen them do a hundred times before. For the contemporary pilgrim the sight of the finish line inspired not a frenzied venting of pent-up licentiousness but brooding introspection: our road-hardened bodies had now acquired resistance to pain and fatigue, and emotional strains came to the fore.
    Many had come here to be left alone with their thoughts, but some looked as though they'd been locked up with them in a wardrobe for a month. Those who'd come to get away from something would soon have to go back and face it. For anyone expecting cosmic insights, or miracles, or spontaneous orgasms, impatience had been upgraded from disappointment to spirit-wringing anguish — particularly as it seemed the mystical rewards had been granted only to those who'd come with no such expectation. There were few pilgrims more doughtily sensible than Evelyn, but here she was cheerfully discussing her conversations with St James, typically held in the after-math of those testing nose-to-the-tarmac moments, and asking if anyone else had found themselves walking with dead friends and relatives.
    And yet the enforced meditation had unravelled lives more tangled and complex than the preposterous night knot that now attached Shinto. Souls had been searched for six weeks, and the figurative fugitives brought to book. A marriage would be ended, another salvaged. A new career, a new child, a new therapist. That afternoon I stopped stock-still: I hadn't given my father a birthday present for three years. Well, it was something.
     
    Almost 150 pilgrims left Portomarín by Donald's reckoning, and by mine a good two-thirds of those were Spanish Jaime-come-latelies in jeans and fancy trainers. 'Buen camino!' trilled each one in passing; perhaps the old me would have cracked a vainglorious sneer at this belated embrace of camino etiquette. (Though the old me came to the fore when a party of parvenu pilgrims buzzed by on matching mopeds. See you on Judgement Day, iron donkeys.) They passed as we wound through villages, where the dark faces now tracking us belonged to cows in barns rather than men in bars. They passed as a headscarfed young Bo Peep led a panicked bleater across the path, as a cow-dog rounded up an errant Friesian with an udder bag like a tandem Hippity Hop, as his master unleashed a rolling, resonant exhortation that precisely echoed the Hanno-noise I had so conspicuously failed to reproduce.
    But pass they all did, and having rejoiced that I'd never again find myself hung out to dry and broil alone in a torpid afternoon, once Evelyn and Petronella succumbed to the need for speed and pressed on ahead, there I was doing just that. I sloped past the 77-kilometre-to-go post and suddenly it didn't seem that near: that was still 10 per cent, still the distance from Valcarlos, where I'd started, to Windmill Hill, where I'd almost finished.
    I lunched late, watching Shinto graze and doze and then roll with bareback, lascivious abandon in the sunny grass: my Braymate of the Month. Yes, I had kissed him now, and inveigled a probing digit deep into those ears, and begun to savour the almost sensual suedeness of that soft area around his nostrils. It seemed so wrong, and yet it felt so right.
    'Does he like that?' called out one of the fun-run Brits when she'd seen me dreamily tracing a knuckle through Shinto's erogenous head zones.
    'Dunno,' I drawled back, thickly, 'but I do.'
    When I saw them all later outside a bar their greetings seemed oddly muted.
    If last week had been Wales with lizards and yesterday England with hard cows, then today, into the pines and with bald-topped moorland hillocks backed by mist-wreathed peaks, was Scotland with cabbage trees. That's right: along with a corn crib, a small allotment of spindle-trunked, 10-foot berza was a Galician farmyard staple. The prized foliage is harvested for the much vaunted regional broth I had sampled in Barbadelo, and which I can commend as a heady tribute to the culinary possibilities presented by hot water and leaves.
    Simon had tentatively arranged to meet me at Palas de Rei, but as I sidestepped the rat-playground wheelie bins that announced the town's imminence there'd been no call and his phone wasn't ringing. It was a stubbornly dreary town, cleaved in two by the N547, a road whose auspicious terminus screamed momentously from every signpost. The grubby hotels fostered an air of downbeat transience, and