Travels with my Donkey

there, and in another the one with four legs had somehow sniffed out a sack of grain. Still addressing himself to his dwindling fag end the mechanic palmed out a scoop and let Shinto snuffle it up from his hand. Then a young chap in a red cagoule held a tentative hand out into the open, morphed it into a thumbs-up and in a moment we were all waving our gruff protector farewell.
    The pocket storm was merely the first of a sequence that in three swift stages formed a perfect microcosm of every alarum of the previous six weeks, every phobia nurtured by Shinto in those 770 clicks gone slowly by. We'd been on the wet pavement less than a minute when it fell away down a hefty flight of stairs. The backtracking detour was moderate by the standards of many endured, but at its conclusion lay a busy, narrow road bridge whose bolt-on pedestrian portion was assembled from wooden planks. For the last time I saw Shinto assess the middle distance with that look of mildly perplexed helplessness, as if a direct causal link existed between this obstacle and the sudden inactivity of his limbs, as if it wasn't a bridge but a force field. Look, said his eyes, I can assure you that this is just as frustrating for me as it is for you.
    These days I almost agreed. As our marriage had matured so those stand-up rows had mellowed into gentle bickering, and I squeezed the three of us on to the tarmac, between guard rail and elbow-flicking wing mirrors, with an air of fond indulgence. My affection for Shinto had now reached a level where it seemed a poignant tragedy that those splendid genes lay nowhere but his own ageing body (though given a good innings, that body had every chance of outlasting mine). He was Shinto the First, and Shinto the Last. My passage through the pilgrimage literature had been regularly enlivened by the descriptive appellations of medieval monarchs: Sancho the Fat, 'the hunchbacked Orduno IV the Evil'. It was all a question of spin: with bad PR you were Henry the Impotent, with good PR Alfonso the Chaste. So here, before me, was King Shinto the... Beige.
    The bridge proved the last of the morning's To-be-a-Pilgrim trinity of trials, and our approach thereafter was not one designed to nurture tearful portent. A construction site halfstaffed with idle donk-baiters, receding batteries of slightly scabby housing estates, waiting for the little green man with my little grey donkey: had it not been for the tiny and diminishing digits on those camino marker posts and an unusually jaded citizenry, this could just have been another of those surreal and stressful trans-metropolitan experiences.
    We drew breath for the final assault with just one more of those inadequate bar breakfasts of cake and café con leche, then headed across our last dual carriageway and into the cloistered alleys of the old town. Walls narrowed and houses rose, shielding the cathedral towers from view and making every rounded corner a mouth-drying, spine-fizzing anticlimax: this was surely it, and if not then this, and if not then this. The last yellow arrow led us down a flagstoned hill, and sensing that this really was it Simon respectfully melted forward into the morning shoppers. I contemplated the rope in my calloused hands and what it led to, and in doing so felt pride abruptly tempered by a gauche self-consciousness, like a boy wearing school uniform for the first time, a reprise of the sensation that had for so long dominated my every moment at Shinto's side.
    Tightening my grip on the rope and breathing hard I felt rather than saw a moss-stoned ecclesiastical structure looming up to our left; but as the street ahead passed down towards it and beneath a grand archway so it devolved into a stairway. A final, numb-limbed diversion round a circling, anti-clockwise road to the right, a road which a minute later ejected me into the bottom right-hand corner of a belittling cobbled sea, a great, broad square sparsely populated by tiny mortals and imperiously dominated by the lichened, mildewed, florid might of my destination.
    With my overborne faculties condensed into a reedy, whistling tinnitus and the sensation of wet heat on my cheeks I apparently continued walking, distantly aware of the swelling crowd
    I was dragging across the grey stones. At any rate there I soon found myself, in the shadow of that swoon-inducing façade, at the foot of the weighty double staircase that accessed its lofty entrance. 'Photo, photo!' piped a shrill voice in my ear,