Travels with my Donkey

was my first experience of the treble-decker — I knew we'd have trouble from the far corner.
    Everyone had earplugs but not everyone could tolerate using them. Certainly one's first time is uncomfortable: a head-filling canal stretcher that I wish I hadn't described in pilgrim public as the cranial equivalent of being fisted. Furthermore, as Shirley MacLaine has noted, earplugs 'obstruct the meridians to the kidneys'. But practice makes perfect, and as a bad father it's now many years since I substituted irksome nocturnal hysteria for the soothing, womb-like whoosh of my own circulation.
    Foam technology has come a long way from the ineffectual hole-blockers that distorted rather than dampened, so that 'I think I heard someone downstairs' came through as 'A dingo herdsman's trousers', and 'Daddy! Daddy-daddy-daddy-daddy! DADDY!' as 'Mummy?' Today's earplugs are engineered to filter out everything quieter than a child finding a headless owl on his pillow, but that was many decibels shy of Herr Corner's most troubled inhalations. Was snoring the least appealing human function? So I began to conclude as those obstructed respirations rent the air of a crowded room in which their provider alone slept. With more notorious antisocial excretions there was a personal price for the culprit to pay, a legacy of stench and stain. But the snorer, by definition, slept on and slept well, unaware of the unfolding outrage.
    When Herr Corner breathed out, people tutted and swore so bitterly that soon even I could hear them, but when he breathed in, and that great belly rose in the moonlit gloaming, they threw things. Shoes mainly, but also a book. This phase was short-lived, however: the brief hiatus of calm engendered by a direct hit was immediately preceded by a huge orgasmic snuffle, perhaps the very worst noise in the world and as such too high a price to pay. Surrender was the only option for many — the German girls went down and slept on the kitchen floor. When I bleared downstairs in the morning they'd gone. To Barcelona.
     
    I'd been seeing 'Fabricación Logroño' on manhole covers for days, which at least had the effect of managing expectations. It wasn't that bad, but even allowing for the Sunday factor Logroño had the air of a city that never quite got going. A bridge that was long without being grand, a workmanlike cathedral, a main shopping drag whose unavoidably provincial ambience was encapsulated in a fly-carpeted window wherein a largely felled army of Mutant Ninja Turtles laid ineffective siege to a dusty crystal stag at bay. It wasn't hard to see why of the five cities the camino passes through, Logroño was the only one I'd never heard of.
    Through the inevitable half-built suburbs — one development floridly announcing itself in Gothic script as the Residencial Camino de Santiago — and out into a big park newly laid out on a brownfield site by the marshalling yards, and now abundantly littered with the detritus of impromptu Saturday-night gatherings. I punted a pizza box off the Way of St James and looked at Shinto. Was that it? We'd just walked straight through a city the size of — well, all right, the size of Richmond — without even noticing.
    That wasn't it, not quite. Presently the camino was joined by other footpaths of recent construction, and on these footpaths were a few people, and then a few more, and soon we were engulfed by promenading families, shifty juvenile shamblers, charmingly love-struck pensioners and a bloke on a big white horse. On a path so populous, the rival presence of this latter pairing should have been towards the fatal end of the awkward scale: when Greek meets Greek, as the proverbial prediction of impending explosive conflict has it, though as a contest this was more a case of when Greek meets Greenfly.
    In fact, despite a little low-level bridling feistiness as the towering charger clopped past, Shinto rose to the bait rather than being it. When an acceptable buffer zone had opened up, he began to trot after the horse at a safe distance, mane tossed and nostrils occasionally flared in what I can only interpret as a face-saving expression of defiance. It was rather sweet: I thought of myself and a couple of classmates flicking gleeful V-signs at those taunting skinheads after they'd got off the train and the doors hissed shut. And then what happened after they hissed back open again.
    The pacemaker lost us as we approached the climax of everyone else's walk if not ours,