Travels with my Donkey

donkey, and would sell it to me for 800 euros. The second had covered logistical arrangements.
    'But you knew, no? Five year ago I walk from Belgium to Santiago with my family and two donkays.'
    It was him! And he wasn't even French! This was quite something. 'Why will I sell you donkay if not for this reason? I don't sell donkays, but this adventure you make, it's special, and so I like to help.'
    Following Hanno up into his home I felt as if I was being inducted into a benign secret society. Within lay yet more evidence that the people who did this pilgrimage were clearly not as I was. No television, but a computer monitor with a donkey-themed screen saver. A wood-burning stove and a supper-cooking wife, the welcoming, winsome Marie-Christine, chopping home-grown vegetables at a long, slender table. The more youthful of their two daughters breezed about in a headscarf. Her elder sister, evidently at a more challenging stage of young adulthood, had by mutual request been installed in the guest room. This was an old caravan 100 yards uphill, yet still her parents found themselves within the radius of adolescent loathing: asked to find alternative accommodation with friends for the two days of my visit, she had apparently almost smiled.
    We dined by congenial candlelight, Hanno divulging relevant facts as they occurred to him. I'd brought a voice recorder along, and pushed it next to his plate as he listed and described more poisonous plants, and the importance of feeding a donkey — in fact my donkey, wherever he was — a handful of rock-salt every morning, and the need to find shelter if the rain lasted more than two days. He talked of the time a Spanish farmer kidnapped his donkeys in the night and held them for ransom. Had he mentioned the snakes? He had. And the thieves? Well, some of them. 'Oh, c'est pas comme ça,' tutted Marie-Christine at the end of almost every one of his more lurid stories. But every time she did he raised a bushy eyebrow the short distance to his tangled fringe and smiled knowingly.
    Postprandially spread-eagled in an ancient, low-slung armchair with his booted feet steaming against the stove door, Hanno described how the walk to Santiago had changed his life. Seven months it had taken, requiring him to take his two daughters — then six and nine — out of school for a year. Romany meandering by day,- maths and French round the evening campfire. Upon return, his inner nomad out of the box and restless, Hanno flogged the family home and moved down here; a portraitist of startling talent, he now earned his crust depicting from photographs the children of Belgium's aristocrats and industrialists. For him this had become a mechanical chore, but by spreading that crust with donkeys he had made himself an improbably toothsome life sandwich. Drawing children gave this irrepressible trend-bucker the freedom to indulge his passion for hosing crap out of a big shed. In another year Hanno and Marie-Christine, this time alone, would be heading off again, circumnavigating the Iberian peninsula with the same two donkeys.
    Outside it was black and wet. En route to the caravan Hanno and I were joined by two lumbering, long-haired dogs; mindful of the looming festival of contrived hearty petting, I treated the fatter to a couple of manly slaps. Hanno led me through the slick grass towards the first of the electric fences: 'With care here,' he warned as his torch picked out the first electric fence. 'One time I touch with my head and my mouth is frozen for twelve hour.'
    'But I thought these were just run off car batteries. 12 volts?'
    'Sometimes, but here is too many fences. I put it on the, ah, real electricité.'
    'What, 240 volts?'
    He recoiled in bafflement. 'Non, 22,000.'
    I looked at him, my mouth pre-frozen.
    'But with small watts.'
    Once past this appalling forcefield, our menagerie was unsettlingly complemented by half a dozen silhouetted equines. 'They're all men,' I said, playing a torch across their undersides as Hanno fumbled for the caravan key. Almost universal advice to source a more placid and willable female ass coloured my voice with a disappointment that he handsomely failed to detect. 'Yes,' he said, gurning lewdly at a wrist-thick parabola of swarthy love muscle. 'We have an expression — monté comme un âne.' Hanno inhaled loudly and expressed his comic awe with that burnt-my-fingers shake of the hand. 'You know — mounted as a donkay.'
    'Yes, we say something a bit like