Fishing and Shooting: Parting ways with a donkey

I have sad news. Danny the Donkey is no more. It’s all come as a horrid shock but there you go. One evening he was grazing happily with his companion Beauty, a 27-year-old pony, the next morning he was dead.

We do not really know why. It may have been one of those digestive things that plague equines, especially as the weather had suddenly had one of its startling changes when the temperature soars briefly to 12C, the birds start singing as if it’s June, and there is an imperceptible flush or change in the grass. (Ask a horsey woman, she will explain).

Danny came as near as dammit last year to ending up as donkey sausage. He was an habitual escapee, obstinate beyond belief, roamed through neighbours’ crops and elected to canter round the countryside in the middle of the Wills and Kate wedding, which meant I missed most of it while everyone else ate eggs Benedict and drank champagne in the squalor of our back sitting room (the big telly is in there).

I wondered aloud in this column, to much approbation from donkey doters, if a .243 calibre would do the trick.

But we became fond of Danny whom I had felt moved to buy after he spent all winter in the snow with terrible feet and no food, in a field behind us which belonged to the church. Thus we ended up with a £250 male Irish-born donkey with lice and rotten feet which were sorted just in time by a donkey foot specialist.

I sold him in pretty good health at a loss to a local marchioness who needed a companion for Beauty, a pony of Thelwell proportions who had started life black, as in Black Beauty, and had turned completely white in old age.

They were blissfully happy and I was a bit worried that Danny, who was what is known in the donkey world as “entire”, would get his leg over Beauty. But the marchioness just giggled and we said no more. I think we both secretly thought (not very hard) that a mule out of Beauty, if she was up to it, might have been quite amusing.

So in the space of a generation Danny had effortlessly risen from an Irish bog to the ranks of the Scottish aristocracy, grazing on the very best of grass and the sweetest of hay. One night, after a party very late in midsummer we went and visited him to see if he remembered us, which he didn’t and instead set up an incessant braying and woke half the county. The marchioness wept when she rang to tell us of his demise and I was pretty choked up too. But that, as they say, is the way of it.