Travels with my Donkey

Timothy, slicing through one ear and then the other... He was still blundering desperately around the field, blood flowing down his eyes, when the unsuspecting owner arrived with his evening carrot.'
    It was gratifying, therefore, to turn to this more junior namesake and find him fighting fit, fully eared and displaying his Fifth Advantage in the form I believe is known as a 'lazy lob'. As we watched, this already majestic appendage developed further still, inspiring him to engage Mimosa in an activity described by Judy, with the junior delegates in mind, as 'playing wheelbarrows'.
    That wasn't strictly speaking good news, but it was as good as it got. Even a small donkey, I was told, could drag a 20-stone man around a field. Wrap the leading rope absent-mindedly round a digit and if the animal bolted you might — and in two reported cases actually would — find yourself thumb-hunting in the hedgerows.
    I couldn't begin to master the crucial knot used to attach the donkey to anything: the simple loop Judy held in her fingers was, by some innocuous flick of the wrist, magicked into a multi-whorled, Gordian worm-cast. George bit a hole in my new coat. Asked to indicate Sam's 'withers', I inaugurated another round of jolly guffaws by displaying the anatomical competence of a blindfolded child in a party hat.
    All this, of course, was before I'd actually touched one. I'd noticed while watching the video that the more donkeys I saw the bigger they seemed, and as Judy eased me towards Sam's shoulders I felt hopelessly overawed. It wasn't just the size, or even the strength. I'd become accustomed to assuming executive control for all my personal transportation needs: you pressed one foot on a pedal and you got somewhere fast, or both feet on two pedals and got there more slowly. But here the boot was on the other hoof. I was not in charge. Finally, displaying the tactile relish of a man compelled to operate a humming light switch with wet hands, I jabbed a finger into Sam's offside haunch. It yielded and he flinched slightly. I had poked my first donkey.
    As new dawns go, few have proved falser. I put the head collar on the wrong way round, was butted indecorously throughout the parade section, and spent so long worrying about how to inspect the back hoofs without having them forcefully applied to my throat that Sam actually fell asleep on his feet. (I'm particularly ashamed to admit it would be over a month before I accepted this as the default stance for a dormant ass.) 'Use your shoulder,' urged Judy. 'Lean into him and he'll let you take his foot up.' Everyone else, even the small boys, had long since dealt with their animals and now inevitably gathered round to watch. I applied my weight to Sam's heated bulk, and gradually, in a procedure that had less in common with veterinary best practice than an attritional arm-wrestling contest, pivoted his knee backwards and brought a foot hoof-side up into my lap. Then I dropped it in disgust and jumped upright. Where once had rung chortles now startled silence reigned. 'What?' I said indignantly, challenging the frozen faces around. 'Come on, it was all full of bits of crap and stuff.'
    I did in the end manage a quick couple of scrapes, but neither of us enjoyed the experience. 'To them it's just like having their nails cut,' said Judy bracingly as Sam lashed out once again.
    'Pulled out, more like,' I muttered.
    Sam needed to be appeased, and Judy showed me how to do it. 'In fact, why don't you all give this a try,' she said, happily plunging her hand into a nearby donkey's cavernous ear and rasping the oiled contours of its internal landscape with an extended knuckle. The hearty delight that warmed the crisp air suggested that for everyone else this was a fully mutual pleasure, but as I eased up to my watch-strap in Sam's nearside waxen head tube and watched him dribble and quiver in response I felt dirty, as if coerced into an obscure act of wrongness. Here I was, in the dark corner of a West Country stable-yard, fisting my donk.
     
    I barely slept in my cosy little b.& b. up the road, beset with misgivings of the most fundamental sort: the day had impressed upon me that what I didn't know about donkeys you could write in an enormous empty book entitled The Donkey. I'd hoped day two might fill in at least some of the gaps, but in fact it just added in more blank pages. This was Basic Donkey Health Care, and back in the lecture room we were soon in the realm of perioplic