Travels with my Donkey

the window of the Hostal Montana, finding myself presented by another of those oppressive bars full of droopy-lidded card players flicking nutshells on to the floor and drinking hard spirits at inappropriate times of an inappropriate day. But I didn't, because by now I knew better.
    I knew that the passage to my room would involve the ascent of a grubby and windowless stairwell, its navigation dependent on a big round switch which when depressed procured a brief period of illumination: just enough, in this case, to leave me fumblingly marooned on a half-landing with a donkey saddle over my shoulder. I knew that resolving this situation would involve fear, pain and a fight with a pot plant. I knew that logic demanded that when at length I shouldered open the door to my room I would find the bed filled by a squat and sprawling hairy-back in a string vest, who would slowly roll his red eyes and budge grudgingly up to one side. But I knew also that logic has no place in a Spanish hotelier's lexicon, and that instead I would find myself strutting regally through an air-conditioned realm of gleaming mahogany and vitreous enamel.
    It was a rear-facing room, which gave me peace from the traffic and a view of Shinto, who I'd smuggled round the back and tied up by the kitchen door. I looked down as I was stringing my laundered socks out the window: there he was, gazing wistfully across a broad field of fallowed something or other. I turned the telly on as I wrung out my underwear in the bidet — that election had finally happened and the votes been counted, but I couldn't make any sense of the pie-chart analysis. It was odd to feel so completely out of the geo-political loop. Huge and important things were happening — lawlessness and violence in Iraq, Britain scoring no points in the Eurovision — but somehow I seemed to have dropped out of the world they were happening in. This was what my life had become: a donkey in the yard and a sink full of pants.
    When I returned carrying a wet T-shirt, the sun had made a belated appearance and Shinto was rolling in the dust with unbridled abandon, raising a cloud that showed up the lowangled rays. I guess it would have been about this time that I noted the large green dome to which I had attached my donkey, evidently with impaired vigilance, was a recycling bin. Had we been in almost any other European country I might not have found myself hammering erratically down the stairs and outside, but Spain, like Britain, is still at that stage of environmental awareness where citizens patronise such facilities to recycle old bottles not into new bottles, but into violent noise. The detritus associated with this pastime is predictable, and Shinto was now energetically working it into his flesh.
    He cumbersomely righted himself at my loudly vocal approach, and though agleam with diamante shards, emeralds in the dust, his hide appeared miraculously unpunctured. I brushed Shinto down and led him to the nearest alternative tether point, miles off in the field but otherwise safe. Regardless of their age and experience, my family's impending arrival could only dilute the witless incompetence that still threatened my pilgrimage with a premature and tragic end.
     
    You don't want to linger in a refugio, and indeed can't even if you did, but because this was a hotel, with a telly you could watch from the bath, I didn't get off until well after nine. It was only a dozen clicks to León, but my self-styled 'short day' was off to a poor start.
    The usual suspects who'd stayed in Mansilla were already striding past when the path veered away from the road, and did so in steady profusion as Shinto stopped in his tracks by a large earthen yard enclosed by a tall chain-link fence. Ears at 12 o'clock, head and body taut and immobile: I knew that expression by now, and I knew that it meant we had entered enemy territory.
    I scanned the rising, convex enclosure for some time until I spotted a small head approaching from behind the brow. The head was followed by a long neck, a really very long neck, and then a disproportionately hefty torso. It was an ostrich. Most birds are a little stupid and ostriches famously so, and I was not surprised to see this example strut about randomly, bobbing and stretching at nothing and no one. Shinto obviously felt he knew better, though, and tracked his opponent in unblinking earnest.
    And how right he was to do so, because as I idly surveyed the map the ostrich abruptly