Travels with my Donkey

blithely over the tomb of the man who stole my epitaph by riding out of the gates of history and into legend.
    Burgos is known as the City of El Cid, stamping ground of the eleventh-century Castilian noble played so memorably, or so some muttering loon at a pub quiz once told me, by Charlton Heston in the eponymous 1961 bio-pic.
    I've always liked El Cid, largely on account of his name. It was almost a shame to discover it derives from the Arabic for lord, but I perked up at the revelation that he was christened Rodrigo, because El Rod is even better. Other than that, and not even having seen the film, I knew absolutely nothing about the man.
    It was an education, the very best sort in fact, to discover that there was almost nothing to know. Yes, El Cid fought in battle before he was a teenager — show me an eleventh-century European who didn't. A heartless mercenary who sold his services to the Moors — is that good? — and ripped off the Jewish moneylenders of Burgos by selling them a treasure chest filled with sand. Brilliant, and truly heroic. 'He could write, though his spelling was awful... he ruled Valencia from 1094 to 1099.' You can imagine Charlton thumbing through the script with a furrow across that great bronzed brow: When do I get to the good bit? And the bad news, Chazza, is that you don't. Or rather that when you do, you're a fortnight-old corpse strapped to a horse, leading troops posthumously into battle.
    Outside was better. In the square just below the cathedral a transvestite stag party was press-ganging female tourists into acts of photographic tomfoolery, and just beyond I discovered a representation in bronze of a seated pilgrim nude, almost proudly displaying the symptoms of advanced leprosy. I was prodding his most intimate lesions when a cry of welcome turned my head: seated outside a proximate bar were Evelyn, Petronella, two auburn-haired British Columbians whose names I've forgotten and an as-yet-unencountered Australian couple in their fifties. The wife, as I soon learnt, had done her knee in on day two, but they weren't giving in: he walked on, she took the bus and they met up each evening. Every pilgrimage needs at least a couple of Australians. How novel it was, and how refreshing, to hear an irksome stretch of road recalled with feeling and volume as 'total shithouse'.
    We all went off to find somewhere to eat, and suddenly there were pilgrims everywhere. You'd walk past a bar and hear someone saying, 'You can see the linguistic connection between Jacob and Iago, but how do you get from there to James?' With a keen ear I could even spot the Spanish ones: ' anti-inflammatoria' was a certain give-away. And in the restaurant we ended up in — like every other devoid of local custom until after our curfew — our sole fellow diners were a couple of German greybeards we knew well enough to nod at. 'As a pilgrim I feel almost guilty to enjoy food,' one called over earnestly as the starters arrived.
    'What, even when it's so bloody cheap?' Total Shithouse bellowed back.
    Though in fact that night it wasn't: we'd all gone for Saturday specials like langoustines and rib-eye, and somehow it just didn't work. I'd have been so much happier with my standard pilgrim meal-deal — mixed salad, lomo and chips, and 'flan'. Lomo was pork escalope, and flan wasn't flan. Flan was crème caramel, and came in two varieties: a viscous and slightly acrid magnolia discharge, or foiled and potted butterscotch tofu straight from the supermarket chill cabinet. But I always had it, simply to reward the alarming way they barked the word out as an upper-case exclamation. 'FLAN!' — a blunt, nasal syllable, a wedge of Yorkshire amongst all that hacking, hissing Latin.
    Since Santo Domingo we'd been in the lisp belt, and all of us agreed how much more fun it was saying 'grathias', so much so that it usually became 'grathiath'. In fact, I'd been nurturing an enthusiasm for the Spanish language ever since it was explained to me that Don Mueble, regularly encountered writ large on the hangar-sized flanks of an out-of-town commercial concern, meant Sir Furniture. I'm not quite certain why I loved that so much. All I know is that at least twice a day, more if there wasn't much to look at, I'd bend my head to Shinto's ear, and in a low, bandito rasp demand that he bring me the head of Don Mueble.
    Smart but extremely young children were still finger-painting in their own breath on the designer-store windows when we