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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 horn. A labelled line drawing, the sort of thing you might have found in a Haynes manual, betrayed 'withers' as merely a drop in the huge and murky ocean of asinine physiology. Everywhere I looked there were pasterns, croups, crests, polls, coronets. Each hind leg alone incorporated a hock, a gaskin and a stifle. There was even an eel, and not where I expected it.
    'The farrier's got a case of laminitis to show you,' said Judy brightly, 'and I'm hoping to find some seedy toe.' The daily health check required smelling a donkey's breath, snipping waxy bits off the inside of his ears, making a 'mental note' of the temperature of each foot and, in the case of a gelding, 'checking round the sheath and cleaning if necessary'. I was introduced to sweet-itch, which if left untreated swiftly transformed any donkey into a four-legged Homer Simpson: bald and yellow. The only remedy — one that aroused the first suspicions that this whole business had been designed as an elaborate joke at my expense — was an all-in-one donkey romper suit fashioned from stout blankets. The other complaints all sounded rather medieval: rain scald, mud fever, quidding and — ow! — sandcrack. 'Bastard strangles' was down as a lymphatic infection, but looked like half a tabloid headline on my pilgrim shame, the other half being 'lovely donkey'. 'If sinusitis becomes really severe,' intoned Judy sombrely, 'then the only effective treatment is facial trepanning.'
    Even as I read through the less invasive