Travels with my Donkey

comely scattering of rustic structures, now sturdily restored, set in sheep-nibbled lawns that sloped down to a chuckling stream. The French hospitalero was almost overwhelmed by Shinto's presence, patting and petting and posing with an effusiveness that had the happy benefit of distraction — Simon was now travelling under a credencial I'd picked up for a laugh in Sahagún, and which identified the bearer as a nine-year-old donkey.
    We made the hospitalero happy, but he sadly wasn't able to reciprocate. It was the busiest night of the year to date, apparently, and having installed Shinto in a field across the way we swiftly accepted that with every bunk taken it was going to be the flagstoned refectory floor for us. And yet I watched Simon unpack and unwind with an air of fond nostalgia, recalling my own debut travails on the nursery slopes of Mount Pilgrim: the speculative prodding of nascent blisters, that first harrowing encounter with the oppressive nudity of bulbous strangers, the gradual discovery that happiness was a prize simply won out here on the Way of St James — a hot shower, a green field, and a monstrous vat of wine. And, that night at Bar Mañuel back up the hill, a sassily bucolic waitress, a real innkeeper's daughter, who kept the vat brimming and called us both Chico.
    Flanned and brandied we decamped to the outside tables, largely replete with weary young Spaniards watching the dying sun cast an Antipodean burnish across the euc-topped ridge ahead. Out came all my maps and books, and for once I surveyed them not with awe at what lay ahead but at what lay behind. Every four days or so I'd crossed a fold in my Michelin map of northern Spain, and now we were on the last, the one with the sea at the end, the one that told us we'd entered the camino's seventh and final province: A Coruña, La Coruña, depending on who you were trying to offend. For so long appended on road signs by the kind of comically hypothetical distance seen after Sydney or Osaka on a novelty tourist finger-post, Santiago was now a local destination on local roads, the town where that waitress probably went to get a haircut or a CD.
    'He's saying goodnight,' said Simon as a stentorian blare rose up out of the day's fading crimson conclusion, permitting himself a paternal smile. Though actually he was saying, as the unusually muffled denouement should have suggested, 'I've improbably found my way out of the field and on to the bridge, and now find myself lodged neck-first in a noose of my own making.' When we went back down an elderly Scottish couple were effecting his complex release. 'It's the second time he's done it in an hour,' said the wife, that smile wavering as our effusive thanks clouded her in vaporised intoxicants.
    As relief stoked a sense of melodramatic fuddlement, the dining hall seemed rather a grand dormitory, with its high-beamed, rough-hewn, open-fired Tolkienesquery. I can say that a little of this mead-bearded mystique was eroded when the rude reveille I'd warned Simon was inevitable announced itself in a ringing, rustling lights-on stomp at — squint, groan, xenophobically blaspheme — 4.30 a.m.
    What breakfasteering agents of Satan were these who clanged cup to oak and spoon to bowl with such clumsy relish at such a monstrous hour? Four sodding thirty — and here we were, less than 2 score clicks from the end. One of them began to hum, and when some of his many table mates put that hum to words, I found myself pondering just how tragic it would be if, so close to their goal, even one of these people — heaven forbid every last man jack of them — should find their love parts nail-gunned to the fireplace. A heavy boot compressed my sleeping-bagged ankle, and suddenly these ponderings were given pungent vocal life. 'You swear and he doesn't,' had been Petronella's preliminary verdict after the Moore Bros Spanish première. Glancing over to see Simon sigh benignly at the dark and distant rafters, the mild offence with which I'd greeted this assessment had never seemed more starkly misplaced.
    'Wankers,' I spat, not for the first time, as the last of them coughed and banged out the door. I creaked myself aloft and scanned the table. 'And look how they've left the place!'
    Oranges, bread, yogurt, cheese... I saw waste and chaos, but then I saw lunch. 'Right.'
    I'd filled half a plastic bag with rolls when the door opened again and there stood the last man out, returning with a large plastic box in his