Travels with my Donkey

the original pilgrims,' said a sturdy woman with a face like a toby jug. 'A hat, a coat and a stick.' Here were people seriously debating whether to cut their toothbrushes in half; whether to take just one pair of socks; whether not to wear any underpants. 'Did that last year,' blurted a man in army shorts with fearfully misplaced smugness. 'Went commando. You know: nothing on under these.' Either Cleanliness didn't fancy the trip, or Godliness just sneaked off without telling him. As a vague but familiar sense of inadequacy settled upon me, an epiphany presented itself, a sudden understanding of an important truth about myself as a pilgrim: buggered if I'm carrying a rucksack.
    Ignoring the fact that I would have to join these people, I didn't see why I was obliged to beat them. Cut your pants in half and floss with a bootlace and you'd still be shouldering 8 kilos — the bare feasible minimum, yet nonetheless equivalent to piggy backing a set of fat new twins for 500 miles. And in any case there was something desperately dispiriting about rucksacks: put one on and the visual perception of your humourless inanity is boosted by as much as 24 per cent. People with rucksacks on don't have fun, or if they do it's the sort that involves a Thermos flask and brass rubbing.
    There were about eighty walkers in our group, and, in a separate huddle on the other side of the hall, perhaps fifteen cyclists. Panniers, trailers, baskets... the weight seemed to be lifting from my shoulders. I was half out of my seat en route to their ranks when a whispered comment from the barrel-chested sobersides three chairs down caught my ear. 'I'm thinking about taking a mule.'
    'Not a mule,' someone I couldn't see replied. 'Terrible animals in inexperienced hands. Wilful. Everything they say about them is true. I live near the Army's Mule Pack Transport Troop in Melton Mowbray, and even they've switched to ponies.'
    I sat back down and listened.
    'Not a horse neither. I did it last year and on day two we saw a woman in tears with this big mare. Couldn't cope with it.'
    'Fussy eaters.'
    'Hypochondriacs. '
    'If I could find one, I'd take a donkey,' said the anti-mulist. 'They eat anything and they're incredibly resilient.'
    A distant but determined smile annexed half my face, and it was still there when I walked out into the spring wind half an hour later.
     
    In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson went to the South of France, bought a canvas sleeping bag and set about finding himself a holiday runabout. 'What I required was something cheap and small and hardy,' he wrote in the subsequent journal, 'and all these prerequisites pointed to a donkey.' In my mind, of course, they pointed to a Fiat Panda, but a résumé of Stevenson's adventures with Modestine provided heady inspiration. For 65 francs and a glass of brandy, he had bagged himself a slow but steady beast of burden, and one — as I could not stop reminding myself — with a uniquely authentic pilgrim heritage.
    In recent years there has been some theological debate, mostly fought out on bumper stickers in America's more rural states, as to how the Son of God might sort out his transportation during any second coming. A derivative of the 'What Would Jesus Do?' mantra of youth-oriented evangelism, 'What Would Jesus Drive?' has inspired entertaining reinterpretation of the Scriptures. Chiefly to the benefit of Honda: it's well known that Jesus endured three Civic trials, and clearly dissatisfied with these test drives bagged himself something a little bigger — we learn in the Book of Acts that 'the disciples were in one Accord'.
    Reluctantly discarding this tempting solution to the mysterious origins of that central initial in Jesus H. Christ, the more pertinent question should surely be: What Did Jesus Ride? And here we have an answer beyond speculation — from foetus to saviour, the Son of God was carried about on the back of a donkey. As I've said before, albeit only in regard to long hair and immortality, if it's good enough for him...
    'A donkey?.' blurted my family as one. For a moment it didn't seem they'd ever be able to list all the reasons that made this so entertainingly ludicrous. Almost at random, my seven-year-old daughter Lilja alighted on just one. 'He'll... stamp on your toes.' And then she laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
    There was to be a lot of this in the weeks ahead, and I soon honed the gently beatific smile that was my response: forgive them, Lord, for they know