Travels with my Donkey

chrysalis husks in an abandoned butterfly farm. A lone Frenchman was next to ask the trigger question, and in wide-eyed silence heard of Bjorn's rescue from the grim warehouse where he was due to fight two swans for the entertainment and speculative advantage of Copenhagen's underworld. 'Hugh is one of the lucky ones,' I heard myself telling a plump Dutch cyclist. 'Thirty work donkeys drown every day in Portugal's lobster hatcheries.' After overstepping the mark with the tragedy of little Geraldo, found licking pine sap off his dead mother, I began to cobble together a grand finale.
    'Canasta?' repeated a curious husband of Mediterranean origin an hour up the road.
    'Card game,' I replied, casting a flinty gaze towards the middle distance, 'and when the Belgians play it, a terrible, drunken one.'
    His wife eyed me uncertainly. 'OK, so you win burro in dis game,' she began, her brim-shaded brow furrowed, 'but why he eat only paper?'
    An indulgent chortle. 'That's the thing, you see. Every time they finished an old pack they'd throw it out the window, and he was tied up in the yard down there...' I laid a hand on a hot grey haunch. 'Still loves thin cardboard, but I've got him on to newsprint now.' A wink. 'Isn't that right, Steve?'
    Nájera was my destination, and despite the heat I strode towards it with unusual determination. This was a town with a swimming pool you could get into free with a pilgrim passport, and many of whose episcopal forefathers had been convicted of simony — easily my favourite charge of ecclesiastical improbity. And the refugio was next to a church I simply had to see: the choir-stall carvings included mermaids seducing monks, crossed circumcision knives and syphilitic beggars baring their bepoxed buttocks. A ruby looted from its statue of the Virgin now adorns the Queen's crown. That's the Queen of England, QE2.
    It should have been under five hours to Nájera, but confrontation with a certain sort of river crossing near a cement works just outside town made it over six, incorporating a detour across a sticky acre of poisoned industrial leachate that the coroner at my inquest might want to be aware of. I'd been alone on the camino for a broiled age when red earth finally evolved to pavement; having endured a further foot-dragging, alley-shambling eternity I found myself cruelly finished off by the old one-two.
    Thwack! Church closed for hours. Smack! Refugio already full. From behind a huge desk the bearded hospitalero shook his head in apology and despair. He was French, and spoke in damning terms of the ' contre-la-montre' walkers who yomped in before lunch-time and yomped out again before dawn. His disposition suggested that with a little wheedling I could have bagged myself a space on the floor, but when I mentioned Shinto the shutters came down.
    It was absurdly hot now, easily the hottest yet. I tramped out to the lamp-post I'd tied Shinto to, gave him a weary pat on the jugular groove and got the books out. It was bad. The next town was Azofra, 6 parched and lonely clicks away.
    I stooped to pull the snake back out of the well, and as I did so noticed a small, weeded yard, right next to the refugio and contained by a rusty gate. I stumbled over: it was locked. So I ran back inside, and blatheringly endeavoured to describe this little garden with some grass for a donkey. The beard rose and fell, but the eyebrows above it sloped down in sympathetic dismay. 'Oui, je comprends,' he said when I'd finished sounding stupid. If the garden was his, of course... but it wasn't, and the owners would never allow it. Who were the owners? 'Les Franciscans.'
    It wasn't until I was almost back out the door that I assimilated this information. The disciples of Francis of Assisi, the ideological descendants of Christianity's Mr Animal, every beast's two-legged friend and a man who had done this entire sodding pilgrimage in 1214 on a pigging donkey...? Oh, how my hot blood boiled. A thick gobbet of righteous, visceral outrage began to fill my chest and throat, and it might even have come out had not a man with a towel round his waist then appeared at the top of a distant staircase. He saw me and his fearfully familiar face lit up. 'Please! I have some nice thing for Steeeve!'
    A donkey isn't the ideal getaway vehicle, but I have to say Shinto did a pretty good job. It was almost as if he didn't want to be force-fed El Mundo.
     
    We were packing up after a very late lunch, Shinto still snout down in a