Travels with my Donkey

the sanctuary's 2,500 rolling Devonian acres. Three quarters! Yet still sixty full-time sanctuary inspectors roam the land, looking for donkeys in distress, or really just any donkeys at all. Now there's a job. 'Dr Svendsen? Inspector Forty-six here. Listen, I'm at the Savoy tonight... Yes, same story as Claridges, really — loads of people, couple of dogs, no donkeys... Actually, no, that's a very good point. I'll check under the bed right away.'
    It had recently lodged in the back of my mind, and more regrettably at the front of my mouth, that I was about to do something bad to a donkey. When I'd phoned up the sanctuary to book a place on their Basic Donkey Care training course, why hadn't I lied? I could have claimed to be researching a horsefly-on-the-wall TV docu-soap, or said that my vastly rich and terminally ill grandmother had asked for a report on current levels of deserving poignancy in the donkey community. The woman I spoke to didn't approve at all of my intentions as I outlined them on the phone, and it was hard to blame her. Slave-driving a donkey up and down the Pyrenees and onwards for almost 500 miles, with a backload of stuff I couldn't be arsed to carry myself: precisely the type of persecution they'd been set up to eradicate, and here was some bloke asking them to help make it happen. It was as if I'd gone to Help the Aged for advice on tattooing a confused uncle.
    Instead she'd given me the phone number of a husband and wife of their acquaintance who'd recently taken a mule through France. 'Talk to them first, then see if you still think it's a good idea.' Her tone said I certainly would not.
    In fact, Rex Johnson and his wife tried their very best to encourage me when I spoke to them — a shame, as I'd have dearly loved to dismiss almost everything they said as defeatist propaganda. 'A bit nervous, was Sparkle. Bolted a lot. Didn't like forests much — any large trees, really. Or birds.' This revelation caused me to emit a noise which Rex interpreted as implying modest curiosity rather than distraught panic. 'Yes, funny thing. Swans in particular. I think it was the reflection of their wings on the water. I had to sit up with him all night a few times.'
    The terrible red tape at the borders, the importance of teaching the animal to drink from a bottle — it was some time before the Johnsons stopped supplementing the burgeoning stock of equine tribulations I'd already built up. I'd anticipated that saddling up in the morning might prove a mild chore, but by their estimate, leaving at 9 a.m. meant getting up in the dark. Every two hours thereafter you had to take everything off again to let him rest, prior to the early night that ensured what my Internet translator had so engagingly described as 'evenings of grass and of water'. As a result the best they'd ever managed in a day was 16 kilometres, and even averaging that, seven days a week, would mean fifty days from St Jean to Santiago — at least ten too many if I wanted to stay ahead of the summer rush of Spanish student-pilgrims the Confraternity had warned me about.
    The train of thought that all this set in motion was a oneway express to Sod That, and before it scooped me aboard I quickly phoned back the lady at the sanctuary. 'I've never felt more sure about anything,' I boomed, sweeping aside her scepticism more melodramatically than intended. There was a silence, presumably while she contemplated the alternatives: accept me on the course, or let a clueless novice loose with a donkey in a land not known for its enlightened attitude to animal welfare. 'You're not to ride him,' she said at length, in a scolding tone. 'I promise,' I replied: don't tell Jesus, but an adult's weight comfortably exceeds the maximum humane payload for a donkey. Another pause, ended by a sort of defeated sigh. 'We'll see you on April the 8th.'
    So there I was, in a room wallpapered with best-in-show rosettes and a floor space dominated by a four-legged skeleton. Without having yet beheld a living counterpart, I was reminded by the dimensions of this fleshless beast that by being larger than a cat, the donkey fell into that category of animals I was at least slightly scared of.
    My fellow training-course delegates were three schoolgirls, their teacher and a family group that included a pair of pre-teenage boys. The schoolgirls were there, I suppose, because of the peculiar hold that equine beasts exert on young females, and the family because they were hoping