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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 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