Donkey Mollification

Plectrum Underfloor is probably the best-known Donkey-Mollifier of these times. Thanks to her TV programme, now in its seventh series, we have all come to know and understand as much as anyone could want about the almost-lost art of donkey mollification.

Besides her fame as the country's leading Donkey Mollifier, Underfloor is quite a multi-talented person - surprisingly, she knows how to cook both beans on toast and tinned spaghetti hoops. Surprisingly, however, donkey mollification was never her first choice of career. 'When I was at school,' she recently confessed 'I always wanted to be a political assassin.' But, typical of the hide-bound traditionalist education system of the time, she was severely discouraged by her teachers, who even went as far as banning Underfloor from taking her sniper rifle to school, just because of one unfortunate incident in school assembly with a (ex-)supply history teacher.

Thankfully, due to assiduous campaigning by Underfloor and other media celebrities, in these more enlightened times, a schoolchild is often, these days, more than welcome to attend school with the weapon of his or her choice.

However, frustrated by this thwarting of her first choice of career, Underfloor began to look around at other career opportunities. Spurning the typical career choices taken by the rest of her contemporaries of petty crime, drug addiction or prostitution, or, in the case of the academic high-flyers in her class - all three, Underfloor first began her working life in a cake shop as assistant chocolate éclair resuscitator.

It was the trauma of seeing the damaged éclairs with their cream leaking out, the broken choux pastry, or even the shattered chocolate coating, that first awakened Underfloor's latent desire to, as she said when awarded the OBE in the recent New year's Honours list, 'to simply do some good in this world'.

It was not long after starting work in the cake shop that she first me old Ethelbert Saggypants when he came into her cake shop to buy a re-conditioned éclair. At the time, Saggypants was the last practising Donkey Mollifier in the country. As he watched in fascination as Underfloor coaxed his ailing éclair back to its full straight stiffness, he told her of his old, traditional, way of life and the dark and secret art of donkey mollification.

Inspired, Underfloor left the cake shop that very afternoon, going with Saggypants to his donkey sanctuary. Over Saggypants remaining seven years, before old age and illness finally rendered him incapable of mounting a donkey without medical assistance, he taught Underfloor all he knew, or - at least - had speculated, about donkeys and their mollification.

Until the current energy crisis forced the government's hand, Underfloor's donkey mollification would have remained an arcane rural skill, of interest to those who seem to think something quaint and oldie-worldly is in itself inherently fascinating. But it was the necessity of every home in Britain having its own source of electrical power, and the countrywide introduction of domestic donkey-powered nuclear fusion generators, which made donkeys a household domestic animal throughout the country once again.

Soon, it seemed, the whole country was crying out for donkey mollification some kind. Luckily, Underfloor lived very close to the famous TV producer, Spleen Hobovest who was having mollifying problems with his power-generating donkey. Spleen Hobovest saw that not only was Underfloor an expert donkey mollifier, she also had a presence and personality that would work well on TV.

They began to record a pilot for Underfloor's first TV series only a week later. That first series was an instant success, of course. Since then Plectrum Underfloor's Donkey Mollification Show has gone from strength to strength as it has become almost a fixture on our TV screens and her books constantly hit the top of the bestseller lists as soon as each eagerly-awaited volume is released, while her DVDs outsell their nearest competitor by a ratio of 10 to 1 and her range of donkey-mollifying blankets and mollifying tranklements are in constant high demand.

However, despite all this, it should be remembered that it is thanks to Underfloor and her sensible straightforward donkey mollifying advice that we are all able to afford the luxury of cheap environmentally-friendly electrical power at last.