Travels with my Donkey

innard-withering dismay on hearing a daughter tell two visiting classmates not to put their cup in that rack of the dishwasher, as her dad was very particular about how it should be stacked. 'Was that really all I'd taught my children?' he asked himself in anguish. 'How to stack the fucking dishwasher?'
    For this unkempt firebrand is describing a discipline in which I give quarter to no man, and outside that warm, white door it only gets worse. Has Bob browbeaten his family into ensuring that every Bic in the jar by the phone is correctly placed nib down? Does he press-gang and dispatch a junior litter patrol into the foot wells after a long journey? Are the perishable contents of his fridge arranged in order of sell-by date from the top shelf to— Oh, make it stop.
     
    The medieval pilgrims did what they did because they believed. As a cop-out cynic, what did I believe in? I couldn't even start the relevant sentence without finding myself sniggering through a Celine Dion chorus. Despite the fact that we had named our eldest son Christian Holy (well, in Icelandic), my exposure to the Scriptures has been limited to the Lord's Prayer and The Omen. My solitary religious pursuit was at best metaphorical, the scrupulous quest for precision regarding the time within my house and the meteorological conditions without. I don't mean to boast, but I apparently do mean to reveal myself as a career dullard: even my oven clock is synchronised to Ceefax Mean Time, and I have the outside temperature projected on to my bedroom ceiling in insomniasized red numerals.
    Sixty-one per cent of Americans agree with the statement 'Life is meaningful only because God exists'; in Britain, you'd only match that figure by sticking 'alcoholic fermentation' in there instead. Empirical knowledge, understanding the world through observable fact and experiment, might have killed off traditional religious belief as a mass phenomenon in twenty-first-century Europe. But without pledging myself to Hare Krishna or L. Ron Hubbard, it might be nice to imbue life with a little more... depth.
    Per's seed was beginning to crack and swell, but it took two newspaper features to force that frail stem up through the crust of shrugging inertia to unfurl majestically before a new dawn. The first was a poll in USA Today, which listed Santiago at number six in its top ten 'great places to rejuvenate your soul'. I can't remember where I read the second, but let its topic and salient revelation never be forgotten: prominent amongst the world's cheapest holidays was walking the camino, the pilgrim road across north-west Spain.
    I found myself tentatively introducing Santiago into conversation, testing the holy water, and discovered a popularity in excess of all expectation. People would say, 'Oh, I know someone who did that.' Usually it was their yoga teacher, but not always. A bloke who painted my parents' house had walked the camino to get over a divorce, encountering en route the young French girl who was now his wife. I learnt that a friend of ours, Nicky Chambers, had cycled to Santiago six summers before with an unconventional fellow thrice her years, in search of something spiritual; serenaded by a choir as she slept in a pilgrims' dormitory above a church, she had found it. 'A died-and-gone-to-heaven experience,' was the conclusion when I quizzed her on the phone, and despite the explosion of derisive merriment which thereafter assailed my left ear I found myself impressed.
    If a common theme was emerging to these crusades, then it was the search for something beyond the typical tourist routine, an antidote to the vacuous consumerism of contemporary travel. A trip to the moral high ground — I hear the view's excellent from up there. 'Pilgrimage', even more so than 'sabbatical' and 'retreat', added an instant gloss of worthy righteousness to what on the face of it was just a very long holiday. Plus, three years on from the monstrous bike ride round France that represented my last proper workout, I was at the stage of my athletic career where triumph meant successfully returning the big Le Creuset to that shelf above the fridge-freezer. A physical service was long overdue, and this one came with a spiritual overhaul thrown in.
    A structured rationale was taking shape in my mind's eye, and I liked what I saw. A trip purged of the empty decadence that characterised most foreign trips, yet still demanded alcoholic indulgence in the name of historical