Travels with my Donkey

the floor with a very different excretion.
    For the last few days we'd been working our way through the salad-less bean-and-pulse belt, which didn't do much for the vitamin and mineral situation but opened up a new world of multilingual menu entertainment, principally because the Spanish for beans was judías. As soon as I spotted 'Jews With Ham' on the English bill of fare at the restaurant over the road I knew it had been a mistake to share a table with Total Shithouse. Sure enough, he very nearly swallowed his tongue.
    Mrs TS nobly endeavoured to curb her husband's ribald excesses, but with a bottle of wine a head thrown in as part of the meal-deal it was an uphill battle. 'I read that El Burgo Ranero was named either after frogs or wheat,' she said brightly as the flans arrived.
    Her husband briefly scanned the frogless world of grain on display beyond the window. 'Well, that's bloody stupid,' he barked in disdain. 'That's like saying Melbourne is named either after an old Prime Minister or a... cow's arse!'
    There was a brief but profound silence, one interrupted by a defeated voice from Baroness von Munchausen's distant table: 'Ja, but that is faster I think than the vurld record.' It was almost a shame that our paths were never to cross again. The last reported sighting had the Baroness dramatically brandishing a small canister containing her mother's ashes. In the one before that, she'd been seen putting her earplugs in it.
    A dripping shower and a tiled floor were effective discouragements to restful slumber, and the sky was full of constellations when I reluctantly rustled myself upright. But yawning at the window, a new day nudging the next horizon, I saw Shinto as I would like to remember him: nobly silhouetted against an orange dawn, head bent down to the grass. 'Beautiful,' whispered a backpacked Frenchman, en route to the exit across a floorful of rustling snufflers. And as we watched together, Shinto raised his tail to the fading stars and flopped out a big wet sack of crap.
    It was another day across the void, another day of prairie madness, seeing a town taking shape at the edge of my world, and knowing that in the half a day or more it would be before I walked amongst its spires and telegraph poles and pantiled roofs I would know and loathe them all with a contempt born of familiarity. Here the barley was hip high and its ears crisping gold, but after showing its face at dawn the sun responsible was soon just a light patch above the swift, low clouds, like a torch in fog. Yesterday's side wind had shifted and now swept snidely into our faces, carrying the smell of farms and flowers and the occasional knockout whiff of fox piss. For the first time since the big rain it was cold, and I found myself warming my hands on a donkey's hot neck.
    It was always good to bolster the perception of Shinto's utility with an additional function. Whenever we stopped he would rotate his anus to face the prevailing wind: the weather-vane feature. If my laundry hadn't dried and the sun was out, with a string round the panniers and a couple of pegs he was a clothes-horse as literal as any you'll find. And at Carrión I'd purchased and blended the ingredients of a titanic reserve of vinaigrette dressing, guaranteed to moisten and revitalise even the most wizened boccadillo; this conspicuous addition to Shinto's burden, along with a burgeoning fruit store, certainly warranted the honorary title of mobile canteen.
    Since I'd discarded the Devil's Barley his behaviour had been no worse than truculent, but weather and outlook were both dispiriting and by mid-morning Shinto's locomotive rhythm was down from 'We are the Champions' to 'Michelle'. The marker-post dragging had proved only sporadically effective, but was granted a new lease of life when teamed to the 20-foot length of chevroned hazard tape I'd found flapping, uselessly I decided, from a roadside pylon. One end of the tape round a saddle horn, the other distantly anchored to the trailing post, and the whole wildly animated by the elements: the first big gust filled Shinto's peripheral vision with multicoloured danger and sent him clattering off for a good quarter-click. So too the second, and to an extent the third, but within an hour he was once again demonstrating that any fear created by his master, in contrast to those thrown up by Mother Nature or indeed anyone else, could with time be rationalised and thus conquered. Despite my early start I was soon once