Travels with my Donkey

the barman pushed the bowl slightly further down his counter and carefully placed a large cigar beside it.
    Simon was gathering up his belongings when I at last emerged with Shinto's aquatic reward. I looked at my watch: he had less than an hour to get to the airport.
    'A million steps,' he said, shouldering that vast rucksack.
    'Sorry?'
    'I worked it out last night. That's what you've done. A man's pace is around 75 centimetres, and you've done just over 750 kilometres.' I tried to look intelligent. 'So that's a million.'
    'If they told you that at the start,' piped up Donald, already on beer two, 'you'd turn round and go straight home.' I just nodded blankly, then looked down at Shinto, hosing up the last dregs by my feet. A million for me, and double for him. One small step for a man was two for his donkey. In fact more like eight, the way mine had been going.
     
    I found a room for myself, overlooking an alley filled by day with the entreating cries of souvenir hawkers and by night with the unhinged revelry of exam-ending students. With rather more difficulty I found a field for Shinto, up in a covert corner of the Monte de Gozo grounds. Back over that bridge, back round those stairs.
    If the sun was up I was generally to be found walking from my place to his, or vice versa, a two-hour round trip I did twice a day. When the moon took its place I met my pilgrim friends and we ate octopus and drank brandy and blurted the odd belated confession: you might as well know now that my wife's left me; I probably never mentioned before that I was a Buddhist; did anyone see me catching that bus from Ponferrada? Then I went back to my bed, kept awake not by phlegm-throated bed noises but book-hurling bacchanalia. And when that finally subsided, by the hollowing contemplation that for the first time since we'd met, I was out of audible reach of even his most desperately plaintive bray.
    On the third morning, along with nine fellow compostela-brandishers, I went for my free meal, ushered briskly through the quadrangled magnificence of the Hostal de Los Reyes Católicos and into the staff canteen. Sitting there in a prim whitewashed cell, trays of breakfast leftovers on our knees and a mighty magnum of local red passing from hand to hand, we seemed appropriate keepers of the pilgrim flame. Two hours and nine farewells later, on schedule with the last of many telephonic arrangements, I was hugging a bearded Belgian on a hot hillside.
    'Ah, Tim?' began Hanno, extricating himself from my embrace. 'I cannot find him. Shinto.'
    A slight hesitancy in his manner echoed the poorly veiled astonishment with which Hanno, three days earlier, had greeted news of my safe arrival. Don't tell me, said those furrows on that great long face, please don't tell me that this Anglo-buffoon is mad as well as silly, that he's mislaid a large animal weeks ago and can't admit it even to himself.
    'He's right down in the corner, under those trees,' I said, raising a finger and bullying forth a smile. I could understand his suspicions. Everyone who knew me had predicted this whole thing ending in tears, but certainly not the sort it was about to. 'I thought I should kind of hide him.'
    Hanno set off across the heat-hazed meadow with loose-limbed bounds, and I scuttled behind in his wake. In my hand was a plastic bag that had accompanied me throughout, originally containing my blister kit, but home since day three to Shinto's brushes, rock-salt and cock cream. 'Boots' it read; then, only faintly legible now, 'Ideas for Life'.
    So, here we were, back where it had all begun. Was my life different now, or did I at least have any new ideas? Well, I had learnt to be more patient and less fastidious, to cope when many of the basic decencies of modern life were absent, to relish them when they weren't. I had made sense of a complex world by appreciating the humble solidarities of the past; learnt the true value of water; acquired a Dark Ages lexicon of livestock feed and disease. I had learnt to accept, even befriend people I'd have previously dismissed with a cheap and ugly laugh: brittle-spirited mystics, policewomen, Austrians.
    An Englishman following a Belgian across Spanish fields towards their French donkey, I could hardly avoid contemplating our collective past as Europeans, the past of that multinational medieval parade into Santiago, the past that some of us at least seem to have subsequently forgotten. I was more of a world citizen, and somehow more