I’ve been up at odd hours thinking about Simon’s voice in the book chapters I am working on. This is a tricky thing, because a donkey speaking is fiction and my book is non-fiction. The donkey would be speaking the truth but thinking about Simon’s character has been fascinating for me. A creative challenge. I see Simon as a creature who loves life. He loves people and attention. He seems to me to live for food, sex and his companions, Lulu and Fanny. He is very wise about people, reads them easily. I think of all the animals I have known, he is the most intuitive the most wired into human emotion. He reads me in a way that is so thorough it is almost eerie. If I am in a bad mood, he vanishes. If I have something in my pocket, he knows it before I get out to see him.

I think Simon is a healer, he taps into pain and sorrow. He is trusting, but also seems to accept the donkey ethos – of all the animals in the world, they work the hardest and suffer the most. They know humans well, especially their many foibles and contradictions. Animals know better than any living things the cruel, fickle and aberrant nature of humans, possessing great reservoirs of love, cruelty and brutality. I see donkeys as spiritual creatures, mystics. The voice of the donkeys is sad, knowing, wise. They see into our souls, help us to see ourselves, to open. I have to figure out if this fits into a book, and how.