Travels with my Donkey

a large reservoir encircled by picnic areas. Slightly drunk dads took a break from booting footballs at their cowering sons with raucously mimed demands for photos, rides and, at least once, bestial intercourse. For days the gathering profusion of fly-posters had alerted us to a looming general election, and now a canvassing politician lured me towards an accompanying film crew, bending his head to Shinto's cheek with a look of unholy rapture that said, Kissing babies is for pussies — right, voters? And I was stalked for almost three hours by a middle-aged man with a zoom lens whose telescopic capacity was rivalled only by Shinto's.
    If I haven't detailed my donkey's lunch-time performance, it's because I'd almost stopped noticing it. Actually, that isn't even slightly true. You couldn't not notice it. Perhaps it was just that I usually lunched alone, with no one to disturb, repulse or excite except myself.
    As I parked him in the clover for his afternoon graze, Shinto went through a preparatory routine that never changed. First, he would place his rear legs as far back as they would go, tilt forward on tip-hoofs, and let forth a huge gush of piss. This completed, he'd take a couple of steps forward and extrude his suede-look sphincter — stop that — into a neat little dome before squeezing out a couple of dozen warm pellets. The assembly smoothly retracted, utterly unbesmirched, and the first stage, an almost dignified industrial process, was at an end. A faultlessly hygienic one, too, at least until his maddeningly random feeding pattern led him back to that patch of sorrily marinaded grass. Like most sequels, however, stage two was rather a disappointment.
    We all like a good meal. Lunch was invariably a slightly wet or slightly stale baguette stuffed with chorizo and maybe a crudely flattened tomato, but I always looked forward to it. You rarely found a bar that was open for breakfast, and if you did all they could offer was coffee and a poxy roundel of toast. After five hours on the road, I would be anticipating my foot-long sarnie with almost religious fervour.
    But for Shinto it was even more than that. With one clap of the gelding bricks, his hierarchy of needs had been narrowed to an obsessive quest for food. It was his only love, his passion, and at lunch-time he wanted everyone to know how he felt. Everyone usually meant me, but today it meant young families and old ladies, and lots of them.
    'Burrico!' a tricycling tot would squeak, pedalling up eagerly, but that forearm of dark muscle had already parted the sheath and was craning smoothly out and down, and down, and down. Be sure of one thing: here was no ding-a-ling, no winkle, no wiener. Here was the very schlong of Kong.
    Childish joy faltered into shock and awe, and as the unleashed appendage began to firm up a parent would stride over and drag trike and infant brusquely away, fixing me with a glare of furious disgust.
    'It means he likes you!' I could have yelled, but I never did. I understood. It was a terrible spectacle for any eyes, particularly as the evil bollard's blackened outer casing had of late become flaky and roughened, like the surface of an old inner tube. And bluebottles were now congregating hungrily round the blunt, splayed tip, something Hanno had told me to watch out for. 'If you have too many fly here, you must apply the crème.' This was without question the very worst thing I had ever been asked even to think about, and as such I discovered that no matter how many flies there were, it was never quite too many.
    We left behind the frolicking burghers of Logroño — the good, the drunk, the pornographically outraged — and followed a once-more empty camino alongside a new motorway, over an old one and then between an immensity of vineyards. Some were clinically technological, thin green shoots trained down mile-long trellises of stainless steel; others small and ancient, gnarled, arthritic stumps on a bald patch of hill.
    The ruins of a medieval hospice announced the approach to Navarrete, like Viana and so many others an industro-rural mess with a heart of Renaissance gold. The refugio lay happily at the arcaded periphery of the latter, and at 5.45 I'd once again arrived late enough to bag the quieter overspill accommodation on the top floor. My credencial was stamped by another of those slightly overbearing young Christians, a beaming youth in a Brazil shirt, who instructed me to stable Shinto at the Centro Hípico: 'Is