Sleep when your [sic] dead

Saturday: to Mansilla de la Mulas
Saturday
Lanced the blisters on my right heal last night and that foot is now pain free. Unfortunately, the pain on the base of my right foot is on the rise.

Although it was wet last night Joanna and Giovanna have done all they can to get pilgrims' clothes dry and they give us a good breakfast and send us out into a beautiful morning. After the rain it is fantastic to see such colours again, and to see the mountains, which suddenly had us surrounded. We were headed to a town about 20 km short of Leon.

Now that the sun was shining everything looks startlingly brilliant. From Boadilla many of the buildings have been made out of red earth and straw, sometimes as bricks, sometimes as render. Set against clear blue skies they are articulately vivid.

The walk today, however, is long, almost 30km. About 5km from our target we come to a brightly painted cafe covered with graffiti to which punters are invited to add. The place is run by a spritely old man who hurries around cheerfully, occasionally singing snatches of Aretha Franklin songs, and making upon the most enormous bocadillo sandwiches. john is sufficiently recovered to tackle one of these. The town seems wonderfully happy: a cat curls itself in Nico's lap, a dog runs excitedly by a car to greet its owner who obligingly rubs its tummy, and small boys creep round corners clutching wooden swords deeply absorbed in their play. The pedant in my is drawn to graffiti, I have to correct the bad grammar above the door.

Eventually we tear ourselves away and soon afterwards we stumble into Mansilla footsore and tired. After dinner Nico does his nightly rounds. He had thought that the problem on my left foot might be an inflammation of the tissue around the bone. Now however, he concedes he was wrong, and that it is a very deep blister which he proposes to syringe. I offer the syringe I was given a week earlier, but he dismisses it as too small. He gets a much bigger needle, tells me to bite something (my sleeping bag liner in its stuff bag) as he will go in on the count of three. I bite, I grip the bedstead and I writhe as if I were having the leg amputated from below the knee. The needle seems to go in forever. Nico says it is the deepest blister that he has seen, and that he has taken out 1.5cm of fluid.