Travels with my Donkey

else but he may have access to them. He also kisses lasciviously the vulva of mules.' One imagines St Francis of Assisi, who walked to Santiago in 1214, entering a darkened Navarrese barn with a rueful cough and a raised finger: 'Um... Listen, chaps, that isn't quite what I had in mind.' The translator of my edition of the LSJ, a Professor of Medieval Studies at Syracuse, adds in a startling footnote: 'Mutually gratifying erotic liaison between master and his or her pets or domestic animals is widely practiced to our own day.' Put those burning torches down, common-human-decency fans — he died in 1995. 'Cock-a-doodle-don't!' quipped the coroner at an inquest I just made up.)
    Too late now to have Shinto measured for a chastity belt.
    The night before, sitting round the map with Hanno, I'd been faced with the full scale of my geographical ignorance: mountain ranges were long as well as high, and St Jean Pied-de-Port was right down the other end of the Pyrenees. A good 250 kilometres away, indeed, which at horse trailer speeds warranted setting off at dawn, or rather 9.30 a.m. once the three of us had wrestled a furiously unyielding Shinto into the back. Poor little sod, I thought, watching his ears swivel about in trepidation above the trailer's side walls. Was this sympathy? Well, it was a start.
    Marie-Christine and her daughter wept to see their fourlegged friend thus dispatched, which didn't do much for my confidence, and may explain why my normally competent map reading badly let us down. So badly that by the time St Jean's stout city walls rose up before us, we'd already contravened EU regulations on the movement of animals. Six hours Shinto had been in the back, seven by the time we'd eaten a very late lunch. Eight when we'd stocked up at a hypermarket with coat brushes, donkey salt and a washing-up-cum-drinking bowl, and a round ten when, having failed to find field or stabling in St Jean, we finally unloaded our — my — blinking, sweaty donkey outside a hillside guesthouse in Valcarlos, 10 kilometres up the road on the Spanish side of the border.
    Not starting in France comprised a reasonably profound fuck-up, but even as I dusted myself down on the wrong side of this metaphorical first fence I found I didn't care. Yes, yes, so I wouldn't quite be doing the full 774 kilometres. And yes, unless I got really badly lost I'd never now experience the rare thrill of walking a donkey across an international frontier. But these were of little import beside the imminent apocalyptic awfulness.
     
    'So,' said Hanno, tying Shinto's 12-foot 'night rope' to a tree in the corner of the guest house's front garden, a steeply pitched realm rich in mint and thistles and soilable playground equipment. We'd run through all we could think of. Which saddle straps to adjust and attach, and which to leave well alone. A trial run with the packing procedure, looping and lashing panniers and waterproof bags through brass rings and round plastic saddle horns until the two sides hung in balanced harmony. Last-minute supply essentials: a tube of stinking multi-purpose donk-ointment, a kind of stout screwdriver for scraping out Shinto's feet, and Hanno's own chunkily ethnic pullover for conditions I'd forgotten to prepare for. I'd had him do his 'Eeeuuuwwww' into the Dictaphone so I could practise at nights — one way of emptying the bunk above, if nothing else. And again and again and again that sodding knot. He eventually distilled those whorls and twists into terms a drugged Cub Scout could have grasped: the snake comes up through the well, round the tree, and back down the well.
    'So,' he repeated. This was it: the hot, hard slap to the face that said I was about to be left alone, in sole charge of a sizeable farmyard being, with a trans-Iberian journey of nearly 500 miles — a journey indeed of biblical proportions — ahead of me.
    'Just a minute,' I blurted, stalling desperately. 'We haven't talked about the punishment beatings.'
    'Beatings?'
    'Yes — I mean I'm not going to hit him, but how hard should I if I was going to?'
    'No,' said Hanno, with a look bravely purged of despair. 'Not to punish. Just to make some autorité. And not in fact hitting.'
    He opened the Landcruiser's heavy, battered driver's door and planted a filthy boot on the sill. 'No!' I squeaked. Then, in a slightly better voice: 'The crap. Do I have to pick up his crap? I really don't want to.'
    Hanno nodded as kindly as he felt able to. 'By the finish