Travels with my Donkey

might be, but at Roncesvalles Shinto was welcomed like an old friend — a very old friend, with fearful incontinence. 'No, no — de nada,' smiled an aged monastic functionary, waving a dismissive hand as I fidgeted unenthusiastically around those steaming devil-pebbles. At his beckoning behest I followed him back through the gates and past a dourly four-square ecclesiastical edifice, which by the number of sandaled red-faces slumped listlessly by its entrance I took to be the refugio. At its rear was a field, and beside the field was a patch of uncultivated tussocks. 'Aquí,' beamed my guide, and I beamed back and thanked him as best I could. The changing of the ropes, the finding of the tree, the knot, the salt, the hoofs, the water: as I blundered and fussed about until my shadow stretched taller than Roland's, I could only hope that all this would soon be routine.
    But no amount of practice would ever enable me to cart all my belongings to and from the donkey in one journey, particularly when enhanced by a big fat bag full of Holland. Three trips it took to ferry Shinto's burden to the hallway of the refugio. Backpack pilgrims were still arriving and gawped in bemusement as they stepped around my heap of stuff: What's he got in there? In fact, what did I have in there?
    Stout walking boots, tent, can-opener, plastic poncho — packing for a pilgrimage is in many ways like packing for a normal journey, normal at least for people who've never vomited up chunks of raw shame in the changing room at Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS). But in many ways it isn't: what other holiday packing list would include stones?
    Pilgrims have always carried at least a few pebbles along with them, for some or all of the journey. Once there was a practical purpose: the cathedral at Santiago is held together with cement made from limestone lugged over the mountains in pilgrims' pockets. Today the burden is more symbolic — you drop off stones at cairns along the way in memory of loved ones, or take them all the way from home to signify the weight of accumulated internal sins. In the throes of another alcoholic addition to my sin-pile, on my last night at home I'd found myself melodramatically inspired.
    Assessing one's life in terms of badnesses committed before a tableful of geological shrapnel is an experience I am unlikely to forget — not something I'd be saying had I opened that second bottle of red. In the end, of course, common sense distilled those transgressions into specimen charges. Two quartz pebbles: a couple of hangovers' worth. A slightly larger flint, perhaps somewhere between covetousness and pretending to be Julian Lennon to those Korean exchange students. All three to double up as my three children, whose beachcombed rockery I was currently looting, and a fourth — largest of all, a pitted ovoid of wave-worn house brick — in craven recognition of the fact that I wasn't actually going to carry any of these stones myself. What of it? At least I was doing the walking — more than you can say for all those medieval aristos who bunked off purgatory, with the Church's full blessing, by paying a proxy pilgrim to do the legwork on their behalf. (Having said that, look under all the caravans in the French Pyrenees and you might just find yourself an eroded brick.)
    I dragged and kicked my bags through the refugio entrance and was instantly dumbstruck. Before me, around me, above me, soared and stretched a cavernous, windowless Romanesque chamber, its gloomily uplit rafters as distant as a cathedral's, the sort of edifice you might expect to find littered with corroded weaponry and the cobwebbed skeletons of dwarfish warriors. And instead there were a hundred barrack-room bunk-beds and the echoing, muttered contemplations of sunburnt ramblers, sharing their wonderment at one of Europe's most compellingly peculiar accommodation experiences. In an only slightly different way, I was as awed as any medieval forebear.
    With my mouth charmlessly slackened in wonder I piled half my stuff on one of the last remaining unclaimed bunks — a top one, of course — and heaved all the rest under a huge glass-cased model of the monastery that presided arrestingly over the stairs down to the bathrooms. I'd heard and read almost universally wretched things about refugio facilities, and was consequently taken aback to find myself in the changing rooms of a newly completed Scandinavian leisure centre. It was almost a relief when I hit the