Riding on a Palomino

I'm really disappointed by Dannii, our latest trainee Druid.

Given she spends most of her life dressed in a squirrel costume, leading worship-lite activities for the Little Pebbles, I thought we'd give her a proper role this Palm Sunday. Reward her for her servant spirit by making her the centre of attention.

But she's quite diminutive - I believe "titchy" has been the victim of Political Correctness. And this year's Grand Parade was looking like being a big deal. So we ditched the pony and got a nice Palomino to raise her up a bit.  And three spare donkeys. Jesus just having the one big one and one small one always feels a bit unambitious.

Even so, as the parade came down the gravel path, preceded by brass bands, elephants, apes, peacocks, and surrounded by Morris Dancers, mimes, king penguins and the First Battalion of Prince Rupert's Dashing Cavaliers (Broxbourne Regiment), it was really quite hard to spot her.

Especially as, to prove how responsible we are, the Beaker Folk had bought the biggest consignment of the largest sustainably-sourced palm fronds in history. Bit of a story there, actually. We ordered so many palms - and were so good at negotiating the price of them down - that they stripped entire palm forests to source them for us. A whole region gone to desert as a result. Just goes to show, there's a price to pay for ethical trade.

Anyway, the fronds were so big that nobody noticed that, in the crowd and the noise, Dannii had slipped off the horse and gone round to the Little Pebbles. We'd left them in the Pebble House, concerned that some of them might be a bit noisy for a serious affair like a Palm Sunday procession.

So a whole hour we spent, cheering, waving and applauding a "donkey" with no "Jesus" on. We realised when we had nobody to carry out the fig-cursing ceremony. Really annoying. We'd brought the weedkiller and everything.

When we caught up with her she was doing finger-painting with some of the smallest Little Pebbles. Drawing donkeys. Very small donkeys, and very blocky Jesuses on them. We told her she'd let us all down, and she pointed to the kid's faces - covered in a mixture of paint and wonder, and a little bit of love for the young woman who decided she'd rather abandon a really important, starring role in the show, to be with them.

Utterly unreliable. Next year Hnaef can be Jesus. He's over six feet tall, so a commanding figure. And he's really good at projecting his humility.