Travels with my Donkey

Armada with a relic-pillaging raid, the bones of Santiago were lost once more. A trio of skeletons turned up under the cathedral floorboards in 1884, but even when the Pope hastily confirmed them as those of Jim and his two disciples, no one was really listening. The sacred way that had for long centuries resounded to the shuffle and thump of holy footsteps fell quiet, and much was gradually reclaimed by nature: by the 1950s, anyone intending to follow the route needed a tent, a compass and a machete. An American who walked from St Jean to Santiago in 1982 found herself regularly stumbling about in dark and forested circles, untroubled by human company save the occasional old soldier fulfilling a wartime vow to some heavenly saviour.
    Anywhere else but Spain the whole business might perhaps have been forgotten altogether, and with some relief, as the shaming embodiment of religious extremism and intolerance. But because the Spanish still pelt each other with tomatoes in God's name, and christen their boys Santiago and their girls Camino, it wasn't. Built by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Hostal de Los Reyes Católicos in Santiago's cathedral square might have been converted from the grandest of all pilgrim hospitals to a ponced-up hotel favoured by Julio Iglesias, but by obscure decree the management still fulfilled an ancient obligation. Turn up at its regal reception in your filthy road-clothes with a compostela in your hand, and its management would serve you a complimentary meal, in fact three of them, every day for three days. Whatever they say about free lunches, I could taste them already.
     

Two

     
    I f the Confraternity of St James suggested some sinister Masonic sect, then its Pilgrim Workshop had the ring of enforced labour in an airless peat-fired foundry. Almost a disappointment, then, to walk into a South London church hall one Saturday morning in early March and find it filled not with hooded moaning and the laboured wheeze of heavy bellows, but quilted gilets and Styrofoam cups of Nescafé.
    A few shrewd-eyed, wild-haired academic types, two pairs of doughty bluestockings, a couple of note-scribbling loners and plenty of apple-cheeked, fol-de-ree fleece fanatics: this was the Continental arm of the Ramblers Association. Looking around and finding myself very possibly the youngest delegate, I contemplated the enduring truth that this pilgrimage was a senior pastime. The typical medieval pilgrim wasn't a king or a bishop but a serf, a man who would only have been given permission to set out for Santiago once his master had worked him to the end of his productive life. In those days that would have been about forty-five; we might have raised the retirement bar a little since then but nearly all those around me were still wage slaves granted their belated freedom. On cue, a check-shirted greybeard who'd just walked to Santiago from Canterbury ('Mmm — now that's the way to do it,' came an approving mutter) rose to address the hundred-odd pilgrim wannabees.
    'Hardness of heart and selfishness,' he said, sweeping the room with eyes abruptly aglow. 'These are your stones; leave them at Santiago.'
    Well, that was slightly more like it. It had been proving difficult to square these hearty nodders with the Camino de Santiago's recent spiritual resurgence, a renaissance that saw the number of annual pilgrims soar from 2,500 in 1986 to 154,000 in the 1999 Holy Year. You could certainly imagine them volunteering to rewire a refugio, or to paint yellow arrows on walls and tarmac, the arrows that apparently now waymarked the route with almost overbearing efficiency. But not, I'd felt, participating in the sort of business that I'd recently been reading about in accounts of the contemporary pilgrimage experience.
    Would the small bearded fellow on my right have confided to a Californian anthropologist that whilst on the road to Santiago he had woken every morning with a painfully vast erection? Would that cardiganed librarian on my left have revealed to the same academic that throughout her pilgrimage the sound of church bells had brought her to shuddering orgasm? It was just possible to imagine the current speaker covering the entire route without eating, as I'd read that a German dentist had four years previously, but only just. And of course it was only a matter of time — seconds, perhaps — before I leapt to my feet and manifested a barefoot, filthy Shirley MacLaine, who would urge us all to make