Travels with my Donkey

press-button shower tap and felt my scalp shrivel beneath a mighty and relentless frozen torrent.
    This experience, perhaps coupled with the belated onset of malnourished, sunstroked fatigue, seemed to convince parts of my brain that I had died, because the events that immediately followed are imbued with a strangely ethereal quality. I attended the pilgrim mass in the Real Colegiata, but can only recall being vacantly transfixed by some Reynolds Wrapped Madonna above the altar.
    'Ssshhh,' hissed a voice beside me, 'you're humming.'
    'Sorry,' I hummed.
    A minute later an elbow in the kidney jerked me to attention. 'And now you're swaying.'
    All rather a shame, as I learnt later that during my trance the presiding padre had rounded things off with a personal blessing to every new pilgrim by nationality. Then it was all out — there must have been over 100 of us — and into the café restaurant for our pilgrim supper, a no-choice three-courser of thin soup, fat stew and yoghurt, doled out by the meaty forearms of a kitchen mama who gave all the men double portions.
    It was four to a table, and I shared mine with Petronella, a silver-haired Californian art historian by the name of Thomas and a shy smiler who didn't speak English and so was rather unkindly ignored. Male or female? I can't even remember. This was my debut tête-à-tête with fellow pilgrims, and I didn't want it descending into a stilted exchange of gesture-heavy pleasantries. No matter how funny I felt — and with rather more than my share of our table's complimentary bottle of red inside me it had just got a lot funnier — I was determined to talk pilgrim.
    Thomas was here for the ecclesiastical art stuff, and though he claimed to have ticked only the culture box, the fact that he'd been planning this for ten years suggested there was something else he didn't want to tell us. Petronella was more forthcoming. My mountain-top discourse with her had been limited to donkey-loading practicalities, but now she gently outlined the inner journey that had led her here. The usual mid-life doubts — career, family, friendships — had coagulated malignantly into what she called a burn-out and what I suppose we'd call a breakdown. Off sick and in therapy for months, she now wanted to think things through and hopefully come to some conclusions. (How very Dutch of her to work for a wind-turbine manufacturer, and how very Dutch of them to grant paid leave for a lengthy spiritual pilgrimage.) But that clearly wasn't the whole story.
    'Did you read this book by Shirley MacLaine?'
    'Yes,' I said, in an unconventional tone that discouraged expansion upon this theme, but at least forestalled enquiries into my own motivation. In the state I was in I might have said anything. I might have said 'Eeeeeuuuwwww!'
    The food fixed my head just before we were eased out to make way for the tourist diners. At 9.30 it wasn't yet dark, but the near stampede towards the refugio reminded me that in half an hour its doors would be locked and its lights extinguished. And so at ten to ten, after a quick jog round the back to verify that Shinto wasn't loose or on fire or anything, there I was on my back staring up at the five distant roof arches in the painterly gloom of those uplighters. At the end of my bed a moon-faced man was having ointment slapped into his lushly hirsute back by a youth I dearly hoped was a relative, and from the bunk below and almost every other echoed the first tentative bunk creaks and sinus snuffles. I half-smothered an epic sigh, largely one of fatigued contentment: it was good to be here with all these people, to rediscover the skill of communal coexistence in a trust-nobody age of social exclusion, to be living how man had lived for all but a tiny fraction of his time on earth. Then the lights clicked off, and after a single cataclysmic sneeze about ten beds down, the first steady snores rumbled into life.
    Shirley MacLaine had a dream at Roncesvalles, and so did I. Hers was a kaleidoscopic montage involving every man she had ever known. Mine was a sparser affair involving every donkey salesman I had ever known. Her men described the baggage they had brought into the relationship. Mine kept making me tie knots round the red-hot leg of a wood-burning stove.
    Harsh and mocking dreamland laughter segued seamlessly into a real-world phlegmy hack: I slowly opened an eye and beheld the hairy-backed man expectorating into the sleeve of his T-shirt. Almost everyone