Travels with my Donkey

Shints up in the grass, hid the tent bag in a bush and went up the big stone stairs in search of a shower. Modernisation here had evidently been pursued with less than the usual enthusiasm, but the aura in consequence was more captivating: this was where they had slept, you felt, and there was where they had eaten, and here was where they had prayed.
    The dormitories were arranged round a cloister, huge peeling halls full of metal beds like a hastily established military hospital. 'Consistently reported as unhygienic,' said the Confraternity guide, and though you could see why it seemed a little churlish. I didn't even mind, not really, when it became apparent that the showers, as well as being wreathed in a miasma of sewery badness, were cold — hard-slap-across-both-cheeks cold. This, after all, was what I'd imagined as the default scenario. This was life at the pilgrim coalface. Loo paper? Pah. Who needs loo paper when you've got... water.
    It wasn't going to be a Camay advert in there, but a shower was no longer optional. Shinto's habit of shitting on his own doorstep, and then pissing through the letter-box above, meant the long night rope was now impregnated with a swoon-inducing putridity that clung to everything it touched. In essence this meant my hands, which I'd often hold out before me in appalled disbelief, like Lady Macbeth, or maybe Ron Weasley. So foul were these spots that a quick splash under the tap was never going to suffice.
    Two young Dutchmen had just stepped out of the cubicles, and even though both were now peeling their sunburnt noses in the mirror I was glad of the company. Communal bathing allowed me to gloatingly display my sumptuous donkey-borne toiletry ensemble while everyone else was coaxing a worm-cast of toothpaste from Superglue-sized tubelets. The downside was the risk that they'd notice I was washing my hair, and my body, and that evening the bramble-shredded clothing stamped underfoot beneath the muscle-cramping torrent of hail, with the contents of the same vast bottle. Let's just put it this way: I was hoping it would be kind to a lot more than just hands.
    The pilgrim hordes had been filing out of mass when I arrived and while shivering out obscenities in the shower I missed another San Juan ritual: Father Alonso's garlic soup, solemnly doled out at the head of a great table. In fact, I never even saw Father Alonso. But this place was a tradition sanctuary, and rubbing life back into my limbs as I came down the stairs again I was presented with another — my debut encounter with a refugio honesty box.
    I'd never warmed to the euro, partly because it seemed to snuff out a little more of the already waning romance and adventure of Continental travel, and partly because I forgot to take those sodding escudos down the bank before it was too late. In consequence, pre-departure I'd imagined cultivating a haughty pride in my status as a euro refusenik, curling a lip at the bland and faceless banknotes, perhaps even slamming a stoutly regal pound coin on to a tapas counter and declaring, 'Now that's money.'
    But I never did. On day one, at Roncesvalles, I'd watched all the Germans and Dutch and Spaniards and French pooling their shrapnel to buy a round from the bar, and immediately felt ashamed and a little silly, a muttering eco-Luddite alone in the corner with a pocketful of groats. The euro was so plainly a giant stride forward in holiday efficiency,- also, Santiago cathedral was on the back of the smaller Spanish coppers. But though one of the small triumphs of previous days was an acquired ability to think meaningfully in kilometres, I'd yet to demonstrate a familiarity with the fiscal denominations.
    Hence the word I now uttered; the word 'buttocks'. Instead of the intended 5 euros I'd just wedged a 20 in the San Juan box, fixed to the limestone in the gloomy entrance hall. Twenty! That was almost two days' budget. I pinched my face up in agonised frustration, but then, in the uncertain light, noticed a tiny corner of blue still sticking out of the slot. Now, if I could just...
    'Eh! Eh! Eh!'
    It was the harridan, elbows out and striding towards me.
    'It's...' I began, whipping the probing hand away.
    'No! Eh! No!' She grabbed my arm in a way that said she wished it was my ear, and led me the short distance to the back of the door. There was a multilingual notice staple-gunned to it, which she nodded at before propping a bony fist on each bony hip. The laminated English page