Travels with my Donkey

him up, all of them proffering hunks of bread. An open-faced young German in pebble-specs addressed me with earnest concern: 'And how is your monkey this morning?'
    Beneath more scurrying greyness I set off with Evelyn and Petronella, through almond and walnut orchards, and perhaps once an hour through yet another mysteriously unpeopled ghost town where the barks of unseen dogs echoed harshly off shuttered flanks of wet whitewash. There was no one to see when Shinto besmirched the grassy town square in Obanos, but because he'd targeted the end of a children's slide I thought I ought to shift it. And I would have, probably, had Petronella not rushed to the scene with both hands gloved in plastic bags. Why did she do this? I'm not sure. A donkey made an unlikely babe magnet, and this one was certainly attracting some unlikely babes.
    We crossed a main road and it started raining again. Groups of people passed, a couple of Brazilians, the chocolate policewomen, the monkey lady. And of course many more we'd never seen before and would never see again, resolutely en route from somewhere I'd passed yesterday to somewhere I'd pass tomorrow.
    It was only 7 clicks to Puente la Reina, and singing it to the tune of 'Guantanamera' we got there well before lunch. I thought about going on, but not for long: though my boots were slowly coming round to the idea that they might after all be made for walking, Shinto's right-hand back hoof no longer was. And Puente la Reina was Navarra's pilgrim central, the meeting point of the two great trans-Pyrenean holy routes. Shinto's celebrated unwillingness to cross them meant that I now knew what a 'Puente' was, and I've eaten at Pizza Express often enough to have a pretty good idea that 'Reina' meant queen. And it did, though rather entertainingly no one knows after which queen the long and unavoidably magnificent eleventh-century bridge is named.
    In the absence of rival crossings the bridge made the town, and brought the pilgrims. 'To each and every pilgrim is given sixteen ounces of bread and half a pint of wine,' wrote a seventeenth-century hospitalero at Puente la Reina's main refugio. 'Stew, codfish, eggs and legumes — they are not dismissed until they confess with their mouths full that they have never found such hospitality.' Here was a town with the blood of St James in its veins.
    Though not with the doo of a donk on its feet, as Shinto was brusquely refused at the first place I tried, a peripheral motel with a pilgrim hostel in the basement. Evelyn and Petronella checked in there, and as the sun first pierced then dramatically dispersed the clouds I led my animal down to the more agreeable and handsomely refurbished official refugio. With Shinto tied up in tall grass down the lane, I paid up, checked in, outmanoeuvred a Brazilian to bag the last bottom bunk and with a happy air of achievement retired to the large garden with a fetid armful of wet cotton and canvas.
    As the tent and four days of clothes steamed into a May-coloured sky, I sat with the chocolate policewomen and plumped my jowls with yet another chorizo boccadillo (travel through rural Spain and you'll find it's a lot easier to learn how to say 'sandwich' than 'Why are all the restaurants still closed?'). A stork — the first I'd ever seen — flapped lethargically towards a nest wedged in the mouth of a huge old factory chimney. Behind us, bleached and moss-speckled by 500 years of this contrary climate, rose a domed Baroque church tower. I arched my sandalled toes and closed my eyes.
    This reverie was as pleasant as it was brief, and it was very pleasant. A distant chorus of pre-siesta juvenile revelry, then an older and slightly more strident shout, a harsher shout, in fact a German shout. 'What's he saying?' I mumbled thickly to an adjacent policewoman. 'Leave him at peace,' she said. A much louder shout, translated instantly and with feeling. 'Leave the donkey at peace.'
    My saviour had dispersed the mob when I sandal-flapped breathlessly up to him. 'Boy childrens,' he said, with a gratitude-forestalling shrug. 'You know how is it.' As a tall ginger man in shorts, his ensuing impersonation of a jiggly-limbed donkey teaser was an especial treat. A jeer of unbridled insolence cut the performance short, and we looked for its source: almost every window on the third floor of an institution opposite was open and crowded with contemptuous adolescent faces. Shinto's nostrils flared and contracted, his usual