Travels with my Donkey

age, and at the end found myself dumbfounded before an almost overbearingly vast baroque arch, fulsomely embellished with crests and statuary and dwarfing the delivery vans passing beneath it. Amongst the foot-dragging schoolkids and mini-marts, its domineering presence was as out of place and scale as a dreadnought in a boating pond. Further perambulations laid bare further contrasts: a straw-chewing, straw-hatted shepherd ushering his grubby, bell-necked flock past some formless ecclesiastical substructure, a wall and half a Romanesque window flush up against a strip-lit discount supermarket.
    The brandy club dined opposite the refugio, then adjourned to a bar in the oblong piazza. We were half a treble Veterano to the good when a man with the leathered, weathered face of an expat appeared behind me. 'Please tell me to piss off if you want,' he said, 'but I'd really like to talk English.' Rob was his name, and he wasn't an expat at all, but a cyclist. Apart from the odd on-the-road donkey discourse I never talked to the cyclo-pilgrims. No one did — they were a breed apart, travelling 90 clicks a day and too far down the authenticity scale to bag a bunk in most refugios. 'Decaff pilgrims' someone had called them back at Roncesvalles, in withering belittle-ment of their watered-down pilgrimage; I cringe to recall my subsequent claim that by that token, Shinto made mine a treble-espresso camino. German Barbara and her husband Walther had done the camino on bikes ten years previously, and claimed they'd found it harder than walking — largely due to the absence of companionship. Such at least was Rob's apparent ailment.
    The poor man had a lot of pent-up conversation to get out, and so in a long, unpunctuated sentence we learnt that he was thirty-four, from Derby, and had engineered his own dismissal as a museum designer to make this trip; he'd enjoyed comprehensive sexual congress with a rather plain German girl in Logroño, and was going to set fire to his tent the next morning because he'd been drinking since lunch-time and camping was shit. He elaborated on these themes and others for some time, and when next he paused to draw breath I quietly reminded everyone that it was five minutes to curfew. Rob necked his vino, then looked across at two footballing infants with a ruddy fervour. 'Does anyone know how the name of this town is correctly pronounced?' he said slowly, enunciating with the elaborate precision of the very drunk. We didn't. Sahagún seemed so tantalisingly homophonous to 'shogun' that many pilgrims couldn't be bothered to clutter their skulls with the extra word. 'It's all on the last syllable, the emphasis is.' This latter couplet proved troublesome. 'SahaGOON. I got that from a priest I drank with earlier. SahaGOON.'
    We heard him at it as we walked back through the promenading families. 'SahaGOON! SahaGOON! Will you DO THE FANDANGO?' Everyone else cringed, but I smiled. It was what Shinto would have wanted.
     
    The drunk fireman wasn't there when I turned up at 8 a.m. outside the Plaza de Toros as arranged. Or rather he was, but this time as a drunk road sweeper. Same shirt, same blithe befuddlement, same crazy-veined eyeballs, but now in charge of a broom and a trolley. The civic multi-tasking never failed to endear: more than once we'd finished our meal, ambled to a distant bar and had our brandy served up by the very waiter who'd taken away our half-finished flans.
    After a great wrenching clank and a kick and a tirade of latch-directed abuse my grizzled associate heaved the iron gate ajar, then, breathing heavily, snatched out a pen from his top pocket and handed it to me. 'Souvenir, souvenir,' he said, effacingly. Three weeks before I'd have spurned it in suspicion, but I'd been a pilgrim long enough to recognise a humble and heartfelt offering. It was a genuinely affecting moment. And a nice pen: it's still the pick of that carefully marshalled jar by the phone.
    I found Shinto hiding behind a sheaf of rusty no-left-turn signs with a mouthful of wild roses, and after a shoulder-clutching goodbye with the drunk fireman we headed out of town through the Saturday-morning market. The preponderance of accessible produce made this a poor choice of route, though the pace certainly picked up after the guy from the cucumber stall went at Shinto with a pallet. Waiting at a red light we were caught by a large group of photographically inexhaustible Swiss pilgrims, and then, on the dull roadside haul