Travels with my Donkey

clothes on the beach and ran nude into the crashing Atlantic. These, in fact, were my people, and one of them was up before me now, talking of inner transformation, of repaid kindnesses.
    'When you get up to the altar and hug St James,' concluded the check-shirt in an air of sermonising drama, 'you're bonding old and new friends into the new you.'
    I looked around the room: the new him, the new her, the new them... the new me. Was I really ready for this, or the slightly overbearing eye contact that seemed to go with it? 'I guess I'm hoping it will change me,' whispered the little man beside me in a matching voice as we rose for our coffee break. 'I don't know if that's scary or not.' One thing was certain: doing this walk never made anyone less weird.
    Blowing steam off my Nescafé I mingled uncertainly with proto-pilgrims motivated by unhappiness, perhaps even a slice of spiritual desperation: people who didn't like themselves, and wanted to do something about it. 'Religion is for those who are scared of hell,' I now remembered reading. 'Spirituality is for those who have been there.' This wasn't just a long hike — somehow, though with a twenty-first-century twist, it remained a transcendental, life-altering experience. 'It's a kind of catharsis for tremendous grief or personal shame,' said someone behind me, and I almost retched with foreboding. 'The real camino only starts after you get back,' announced the veteran of a recent pilgrimage, a woman whose intense features seemed at odds with the mellowness of her words. 'These days I think about why I'm doing something, and the consequences when I've done it.' People were talking about solitude and solidarity, about finding 'a whole new set of things to learn'. Could I handle that? A tall order, certainly, for a brain that's been steadily leaking facts and knowledge since about 1982. Learning curves have become learning cliffs. Three years I've had that Volvo, and I'm still indicating an intention to turn right by squirting foam all over the rear window.
    It was a relief to take my seat once more for the technical workshop, to shift from chicken soup for the soul to Deep Heat for the feet. No sooner had we all settled than a red-faced woman leapt from her chair and, with a savage rip of parted Velcro, violently severed her trouser legs at the knee. 'Two pairs in one,' she barked. 'Now, who wants to see my self-inflating mattress?'
    For a middle-aged Englishman this was safe ground, home territory, and I wasn't the only one happy to find myself there. Those around me oohed over a rucksack with integral water hood, championed the multifunctional utility of the safety pin, argued keenly over poncho designs. 'Can we talk blisters?' someone piped up, eliciting a hall-wide chorus of pent-up enthusiasm.
    In its way, this particular debate proved more unsettling than the transcendental module. Prevention was all well and good — wear synthetic socks, soak your feet in surgical spirit — but oh, how much more rewardingly hard core, more medievally authentic, was the cure. 'Obviously if there's fluid under it you'll just jab that out with a needle and stitch it up,' intoned a weather-beaten three-timer. Obviously? Just? 'But what a lot of people forget is to leave the thread under the skin,' and here he fixed his hard, candid eyes on my saucered counterparts, 'to wick away the badness.'
    Of course, there were so many other ways the camino could ravage the mortal physique. The red cover of the Confraternity's Pilgrim Guide to the Camino Frances was ominously laminated against inevitably brutal elements; within I read of temperatures that carelessly roamed the centigrade scale – from 2 degrees to 42, sometimes within a day, in my chosen departure month of April. One man stood to describe a storm so violent he'd had to link arms with four others while they dodged wind-borne farm machinery: 'That was the day after two pilgrims ahead of us had been killed in a blizzard crossing the Pyrenees.' There were still wolves in some of the lonelier forests, and bears had been reintroduced by someone with his heart in the right place and a desire to see mine in the serrated, slavering wrong one. And only the month before, fourteen pilgrims had been throttled in their sleep by hobgoblins.
    The discussion turned to packing and minimum human payloads, and as it did the voices around were sharpened with the boastful harshness of competition, perhaps even obsession. 'I take my lead from