Travels with my Donkey

significance-sapping queue, jostled throughout by nattering, nonchalant tourists, was I granted my swift embrace, clasping those giant golden shoulders from behind as if trying to blag a saintly piggyback. Two impatient schoolkids nudged me onwards, down through the crypt for a quickstep shuffle past the silver casket, inside it the bones that had brought so many millions all this way.
    But then they hadn't really brought me, or in fact more than a handful of us. In the literature, medieval relic worship was consistently paralleled with today's veneration of celebrity memorabilia, and if so then St James wasn't shifting many albums. Shuffling back down the teeming aisle in search of an empty pew I saw occasional religiously overwhelmed pilgrims genuflecting or crossing their chests: they were Jim fans, and in the final analysis, we weren't. All this was certainly spectacular, but wedging myself between two gossiping Hispanics near the back I felt slightly removed, as if watching a grand sporting finale in whose outcome I had no particular interest.
    A squad of sombrely resplendent clerics took their positions in front of the apostle, and when the first took his place at the mike and spoke it all got better immediately. In a Eurovision-judge drone he began to recite the nationalities and their point of pilgrim departure, and when the words ' Valcarlos, Inglaterra ' echoed out of the Tannoy I felt my features tighten. At length a tiny nun took his place, and when she unexpectedly filled the world with soaring, mellifluous hosannas I couldn't restrain a wet blink. Looking ahead I noted the backs of two familiar heads three rows up: Evelyn and Petronella, the latter once more twitching with fluid-faced emotion, but this time by no means alone.
    Incoming tourists squeezed into my pew as the mass trundled on, as we stood, and sat, and kneeled, and stood and sat. The collection plate came round and I clanged down the euro I'd been given in the square outside; a queue began to form for the bread and wine. A sudden exhaustion had pinned me to my seat, and I'm glad it did because as I belatedly sidled towards the exit my attention was drawn to a conspicuous phalanx of robed curates. They staggered to the altar bearing upon their shoulders an arresting burden: an enormous and elaborate silver receptacle, an FA Cup the size of a dustbin. Everyone rushed to the front: this was the botafumeiro, Catholicism's largest dispenser of holy incense, only brought out on days of especial religious import.
    Its contents ignited, this glinting quarter-tonner was laboriously lashed to a rope and hoisted high into the vaulted darkness; then, yanking the cord like tattooed bosuns, the clergymen began a process originally intended to neutralise the stench of a thousand filthy, footsore walkers. Twenty fatarmed heave-hos had the smoke-belching colossus swinging from one side of the distant, vaulted roof to the other, whooshing between the aisles with dreadful momentum: one degree either side and we'd have had a messy strike of pilgrim ninepins. It later transpired that the bishop had authorised this astounding spectacle at the financial behest of a party of visiting Germans; some were outraged, but I figured that the hard-nosed mercenaries who ran the medieval Church could only have approved.
    I emerged overwhelmed and smelling of holy mothballs, exhausted at this unseemly rush of events and experience after all those long weeks of measured toil. It was worse for my poor donkey: back at our table outside the bar I found him enduring the worst excesses of Shintomania, patted and petted by a three-deep throng. Evelyn and Petronella arrived, then Sara, and Barbara and Walther, and Janina and Anna, then Donald, who'd somehow got lost on the run-in and spent half a day circumnavigating the ring road. Simon shooed away the more persistent paparazzi, and as the fearsome clamour subsided we all slumped wordlessly round a big tin table.
    Beers arrived and our weathered, rural faces crumpled in silent joy and wet-faced disbelief: we had made it. We had all done what at various times we all thought we never would. In the eyes of pilgrim history, we had lived through what so many did not. Glasses were raised in triumphant toast, but before mine reached my mouth I rushed inside the bar with Shinto's bowl. 'Tengo un burro,' I rasped emotionally at the barman, wondering if I'd ever hear these words pass my lips again. I realised I would, and quite soon, when