Travels with my Donkey

to adopt a pair of Sidmouth donkeys as living-room toutous — sorry, as cheerful additions to their weekend farm in Hampshire. 'It's no longer clear what donkeys are for,' I'd read in a newspaper critique of the sanctuary's success. Well, I was putting that right, I thought, bolstered by the pronouncement on the Donkey Breed Society's website that 'a busy donkey is a happy donkey'. At the time this seemed a pilgrim's charter, but looking from face to kind and earnest face as Judy, our tutor for the day, doled out the information packs, it tolled out in my mind as the slogan beneath which I'd have driven through the sanctuary gates had Dr Goebbels been in charge.
    A scent of manure wafted in through the lecture-room windows along with the springtime Devonian sun. Two girls in sanctuary sweatshirts popped their heads round the door to announce they were 'taking the donkeys out into the woods for a bit of a jolly', and I looked in vain for someone to share a ribald smirk with.
    We kicked off with a video. The donkey, I learnt, evolved in Africa and first came to Britain with the Romans: jackass beat Jesus to our shores, but — by happy historical coincidence — only just. Being biologically designed to roam arid landscapes in search of food, the modern British-based domestic donkey's chief enemies were over-feeding, lack of exercise and moisture-related fungal conditions. Everyone else scribbled frantically; for once I smiled and folded my arms. (This was perhaps two weeks before the twin discoveries that Galicia's meteorological reputation has earned it the nickname 'the urinal of Spain', and that I would be starting my pilgrimage at the end of the month known colloquially as 'water thousand'.)
    'What you're seeing here,' said Judy, as on the screen two pony-tailed girls chaperoned an unenthusiastic long-ear across what was probably a paddock, 'is a pretty outdated method of leading a donkey. We don't teach that now.' I couldn't begin to see what rendered their approach so shamefully démodé, but the prospect of being tutored in state-of-the-art leading techniques was one that quietly excited. I saw myself being fêted by grateful locals as Don Burro del Futuro, the man who brought Castilian donkey handling into the twenty-first century.
    I'd smelt the donkeys, and I'd heard them — an extraordinary, painful noise, not so much a hee-haw as someone trying to push-start a seized-up traction-engine. After lunch I finally got to see some. We were led into a small, cobbled courtyard, and there before us stood half a dozen examples of the beast known to the rosy-cheeked and exclusively female Training Centre staff as 'donks'. They'd seemed big enough on the screen. Now, here, around me, they were huge. Huge and stubborn and indomitable.
    Judy informed us that Coco, a feisty male dedicated to the detection and ruthless humiliation of 'donkophobic' visitors, had been locked away. This still, however, left my asinine virginity in the hands of one animal who routinely battered visitors about the chest and legs with the business end of a jaw-gripped traffic cone, and another who specialised in the removal of jewellery by dental means.
    'Oh, Mimosa's a sweetie,' I heard someone say. And: 'George — he's a terrible tinker.' I'd been told that the dearth of published donkey-handling guides was down to the impossibility of generalising usefully on such individual animals, but this lot seemed almost identical to me: idling about the courtyard with expressions of bleary bemusement, like big-eared ponies with hangovers. These were show donkeys, yet they looked, and indeed felt, as if they'd been stitched together from old doormats. The girl next to me patted one and a great brown dust-cloud rose up into the sun.
    One of them shared my name, a fact regrettably divulged only after I had entertained the courtyard with a panicked response to the command 'Shift your bum, Tim, you daft lummox!' He wasn't the only one, in fact: I'd found another in the index of Elisabeth Svendsen's A Passion For Donkeys (not a book, I've discovered, you'll want to keep spine out on a prominent shelf). 'Some six years ago,' began the relevant page, 'Timothy was a happy, normal gelding in his early thirties.' A personally memorable introduction to an unforgettable tale of friendship, of jealousy, but above all of almost continuous Timothy-directed mutilation. The final episode was recounted with lurid relish: 'Armed with a carving knife, the gang attacked