celebrity deathylikey of the day

The large number of photographs of Italian footballer Salvatore "Toto" Schillaci on the internet this week, in the aftermath of his death aged 59, prompted me to notice that he looked a bit (to me, as always, just to pre-empt any "no he doesn't" nonsense) like comedian Geoff Norcott.

Schillaci was one of those sportspeople who, rather than having a long and glorious career, flowered briefly and gloriously and then didn't do much else - Bob Massie rather than Glenn McGrath, say, or Vinod Kambli rather than Sachin Tendulkar. Seven of his sixteen international caps, and six of his seven international goals, came during the 1990 World Cup where he won the Golden Boot, although, oddly, it was known as the Golden Shoe at the time. 

Geoff Norcott's USP seems to be that he is a rare "right-wing" comedian in a profession dominated by instinctively left-leaning people. Personally I'm not convinced these terms have a great deal of meaning, and certainly if you watch Norcott's stand-up routines he comes across as a fairly engaging blokey sort of bloke, rather than, say, Hitler. 

the last book I read

The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø.

Meet Harry Hole. He's a maverick cop, who doesn't pay by the - hang on *checks notes* ah, I see we've met him before. You may assume that all the standard checklist items that applied last time - alcoholism, broken personal relationships, constantly on the verge of disciplinary procedures and/or dismissal from the force for general unreliability and, dammit, insufficient deference towards the pompous stuffed shirts at Norway Central, but a semi-mystical ability to sniff out wrongdoing and bring its perpetrators to justice - apply equally well here.

And Harry's mystical Crime Whisperer powers are sorely needed, because after a couple of murders in the central Oslo area it looks like the police might have a serial killer on their hands. Firstly Camilla Loen, shot in the head in her shower and found with one of her fingers removed and a small red five-pointed diamond under one eyelid. Then Lisbeth Barli, gone missing from the flat she shared with her husband, Wilhelm. No body, but the police receive a finger, verifiably hers, wearing a ring with the same five-pointed diamond in. And then Barbara Svendsen, a secretary at a legal firm, executed in the women's toilets at her office, and with the same symptoms (plus diamond, minus finger). 

Harry is assigned to the case, but there's a problem - his partner is Tom Waaler, a senior officer Harry strongly suspects not only of being corrupt but also of being involved in the killing of one of Harry's colleagues on a previous case, possibly in a bid to cover his own shady tracks. And sure enough while Tom and Harry get down to organising their investigation, and Harry gets down to trying to exert a bit of self-discipline and stay off the sauce while the case is in progress, Tom also makes it known that the reason he's swanning around in a fancy sports car while Harry is still running his knackered old Ford Escort is that he and a group of associates are involved with some, hem hem, extra-curricular activities which he'd really like to get Harry involved with, once he's proved his loyalty. Just the usual stuff like rubbing out people that the standard tedious police processes of actually gathering admissible evidence and the like can't touch.

Back on the case, Harry's detectival insights lead him to deduce that the murderer is choosing his murder targets not by their identity but by their location, the sites of the murders drawing out the points of a pentagram, a symbol of much mystical significance. The police's assumptions about where he will strike next turn out to be wrong, though, as it turns out Camilla Loen wasn't his first victim after all. Some further insights reveal that the likely murderer is the son of the occupant of the house at the fifth and final point of the pentagram, a man named Sven Sivertsen.

Sure enough Sivertsen is arrested and taken into custody, and Harry is given his first assignment by Tom Waaler: make sure Sivertsen has a tragic accident while in his cell. Instead, Harry busts Sivertsen out and spirits him away, having had one of those classic WAIT A MINUTE IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE ALL ALONG moments of clarity. And sure enough while Harry leaves Sven handcuffed to a radiator he goes and confronts the actual murderer, who turns out (SPOILER ALERT) to be Wilhelm Barti, wife of the disappeared Lisbeth, the whole satanic serial killer thing being an elaborate bit of hokum to throw the police off the scent of his actual motive - a bit of the old spousal murder, with the added spice of throwing suspicion onto Sven Sivertsen, his wife's secret lover. 

Wilhelm conveniently offs himself by jumping out of the window rather than face trial, and so Harry is free to return to Sven and detach him from the radiator. There is still a problem, though, and it's that Tom Waaler wanted Sven dead not just as a test of Harry's loyalty but also because Sven was involved with some gun-smuggling activities that Tom had a piece of and could potentially incriminate him. Tom then turns up with Harry's on-off girlfriend's son Oleg as a hostage, and a tense stand-off ensues, broken by Harry outwitting Tom and causing him to be sliced in two by a descending lift. 

So all's well that ends well, then: Harry tentatively decides to stay on as a detective, having considered jacking the whole thing in, not to mention flirting with the possibility of just being sacked, and tentatively rekindles his relationship with Rakel, Oleg's mother. That's all lovely, of course, but does illustrate a structural problem with the long-running troubled maverick cop series - it's going to be necessary to have Harry piss that domestic bliss and professional success up the wall by the start of the next book in the series, just so that he can navigate broadly the same narrative arc again there. It's almost as if there are actually twice as many stories in the series, the intervening ones featuring Harry getting back on the sauce and making disastrous professional and domestic decisions, and it's only the ones where the arc goes in the opposite direction that the author has chosen to write about. Same goes for the other rumpled genius types like Rebus and Wallander.

Those observations aside this is probably better than the other book in that series in this series (if you see what I mean), The Redeemer, whose plot turned on a couple of implausibilities that were a bit jarring even for the serial killer/maverick detective genre. That book is actually this one's immediate successor in the Harry Hole series - they are the fifth and sixth in the series respectively, although if Wikipedia is to be believed then The Devil's Star is actually the first of the series to be published in an English translation, in 2005. 

If you're as childish as me you'll be sniggering at Harry's surname, and perhaps at his creator's charmingly naïve failure to consider how that name would be rendered by English-speaking readers. You can imagine the screenwriters of any English-language adaptation having to be careful that they don't include any lines like these:

• you're a hell of a man, Hole
• clean yourself up - you look like a bum, Hole
• the suspect's being a real pain in the arse, Hole

If you're interested there are some tips on pronunciation here - basically imagine saying something like "who left the gas on?" and then stopping just before the "f" in "left". I can't say how they managed with it in the 2017 adaptation of The Snowman (starring Michael Fassbender as Harry), as his name doesn't feature in the trailer.

thomas' hill figures

A couple of further thoughts prompted by having a look through my new (well, new to me, anyway) copy of the Morris Marples book. Firstly, a bit of orientation for those new to the whole chalk hill-figure business: basically the only one of these with any claim to proper antiquity is the White Horse of Uffington, well-established as being at least late Bronze Age or early Iron Age and therefore most likely around 3000 years old. Almost all of the others were created in a spree of enthusiasm for the form lasting about 100 years from mid-18th to mid-19th century. The two giants at Cerne Abbas and Wilmington may have some claim to be older than that, and things like the Whiteleaf Cross and the Watlington White Mark may be Christian sanitisings of earlier pagan symbols (translation: GIANT COCKS) but it's all highly speculative and frankly not particularly convincing. Marples, to his credit, comes to much the same conclusion.

As I said in the previous post, I've visited the Uffington horse a few times, anything up to half-a-dozen or so I would guess. I recall also visiting the Cerne Abbas giant (including its GIANT COCK) during a family holiday when I was a teenager. The only other white horses I recall having actually seen are the Westbury one (which can be seen from the train) and the Cherhill one, which is visible from the A4 and which we stopped at at least once while I was being delivered from Newbury back to Bristol for the start of a university term. We also used to go to a pub on the outskirts of Chippenham (a few miles up the road) for lunch which was called The Lysley Arms at the time and which I see is now called The Pewsham. The food was very nice when we used to go there and looks pretty good now, though I will point out that - now I think about it - I haven't been there for over thirty years. I mean, Christ.

The only other one I think I've seen in the flesh, or in the chalk, if you will, is the Osmington horse which I have this picture of me in the vicinity of looking slightly fat and hungover (though still with a reasonably impressive head of hair) in January 2016. 

Osmington is also, you'll recall, the birthplace of cheese racing, the actual location being the campsite at Osmington Mills a couple of miles down the road from the horse.

Anyway, for no particular reason other than that it amused me to do it, here's the horses in their current form courtesy of Google Maps' aerial photography. 

Don't strain your eyes squinting for the last one, as it's not discernibly there any more (it would have been in the green strip at the bottom of the photo). It is listed in the Marples book as Woolborough but all present-day mapping lists the location as Woolbury. The horse, a small and pretty rough affair made out of flints embedded in the turf, was supposedly still there in the late 1990s after being rediscovered and tidied up a bit but now seems to have subsided beneath the vegetation again.

the last book I read

In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason.

Saigon ... shit. Western Kentucky ... also a bit shit, as it happens, though in different ways. Having been in Saigon, or Vietnam in general, during the war and then ending up in Western Kentucky is probably doubly shit - Sam Hughes hasn't done that as she was born during the war but her uncle Emmett and some of his buddies have. Her father Dwayne did the Vietnam bit but sadly not the coming home bit as he was killed out there at the age of twenty-one. 

There's not a great deal to do in the small town where Emmett and Sam live - Sam does a bit of work at the local burger bar and a bit of desultory casual boning with her boyfriend Lonnie. Sam's mother, Irene, has long since headed off elsewhere in Kentucky with her new boyfriend and has recently provided Sam with a half-sister. Emmett, meanwhile, shows no particular inclination to get a job, living off what remains of his military pension and some handouts from the local veterans' association and seemingly suffering from some physical symptoms which might or might not be after-effects of exposure to Agent Orange and similar noxious stuff (or might just be acne and wind) and some non-physical symptoms which are almost certainly some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sam is in her late teens now and is getting a bit more interested in what happened in Vietnam, both to Emmett and his buddies (who are a bit tight-lipped on the subject) and to Dwayne. Obviously Dwayne isn't around to tell her anything, but Irene has a small stock of letters from Dwayne, sent from Vietnam, and Dwayne's mother has an old diary, delivered back in his personal effects after his death, which she doesn't think contains anything interesting but which she admits she hasn't really read. Sam, however, devours it and finds a harrowing story of young American men dropped into the jungle, crippled by the constant raging shits, terrified at the prospect of being confronted by a mysterious enemy emerging from the jungle at any moment, long periods of boredom interspersed with occasional furious panicked activity, occasionally coming across a decomposed corpse, either friend or foe, and the gradual deadening of affect at witnessing and occasionally perpetrating all the killing.

Sam now has access to a car, albeit a fairly knackered Volkswagen Beetle, purchased from one of Emmett's old war buddies, and decides that she wants to go to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington DC and find her Dad's name among the tens of thousands. Emmett and Dwayne's mother agree to tag along on the road trip (no small commitment as it's about 800 miles) - maybe performing this little ritual can bring Sam and maybe even Emmett some closure? Well, maybe.

I recall seeing the film of In Country as part of a late-night drunken movie marathon in what would probably have been the early- to mid-1990s; it was made in 1989 (the novel was published in 1985) during the brief period when Emily Lloyd (who plays Sam, with a pretty convincing accent, not that I could tell a Kentucky accent from a Texas one) was the next big thing acting-wise. It also stars Bruce Willis as Emmett, trying to break out from the early comedy roles and John McClane into something a bit more serious. I mean, it's OK, but I couldn't absolutely swear I stayed awake for the whole thing, and the book is much better. The film is, to be fair, better than the only other film I remember watching on the same night, which was Sleepwalkers, a film (written by Stephen King) about a small town infiltrated by a family of bizarre incestuous werecats. Not a high bar to clear, to be fair.

Anyway, it's an engaging read without doing anything very startling. The Vietnam war is of course a rich source of inspiration for artistic works (films probably more than books); books on this list that feature it (generally a bit more tangentially than In Country does) include The Human Stain, The Overstory, Fiskadoro, Bluesman, Sweet Caress and Watchmen. There's also The Quiet American, although while it's set in Vietnam strictly speaking the action there happens before the American involvement in the war kicks off. 

talking at cross purposes

A few things of note from our camping trip to Buckinghamshire last week. Firstly, yes, all right, I am forced to concede that Buckinghamshire clearly does actually exist, despite my suggestions here that it doesn't. Secondly, we stayed at Home Farm, near Radnage, about five miles north-west of High Wycombe. 

You might ask at this point: of all the marvellous places to go in this glorious country, why would you go camping in the vicinity of High Wycombe, with all due respect to the fine people who live there? Well, mainly because it is roughly equidistant between where we live and where our friends live up near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. Wait a minute there, you'll be saying, a straight line between South Wales and Leicestershire doesn't go through the Chilterns, you crazy mofo. Well, yes, you're right, halfway on a direct line would put us somewhere in the vicinity of Bromsgrove. But - and no disrespect intended to Bromsgrove - who wants to go on holiday in Bromsgrove? I mean, apart from those with an overriding historical interest in the nail-making industry, of course. So we pulled the line south-east a bit and ended up in the Chilterns, a place I know very slightly, mainly because I know a few people who grew up there, rather than because I've been there many times.

One of the things I do know about the Chilterns, and was reminded of on looking at some maps of the area surrounding Radnage, is that there are a few chalk hill figures in the vicinity, most notably the Whiteleaf Cross in the vicinity of Princes Risborough and the Watlington White Mark near, erm, Watlington. I know these things because I grew up in (among many other places) Newbury and went a few times to see the White Horse of Uffington, about 20 miles away to the north-west, often combined with a look at the nearby Uffington Castle hillfort and maybe even a stroll of a mile or so along the Ridgeway to Wayland's Smithy. Hang on, you'll be saying, that's away from the Chilterns, and moreover, away from, I'd venture to suggest, the point. Well, the point, if you'll allow me, is that my parents had a book called White Horses And Other Hill Figures by a chap called Morris Marples which had a very interesting chapter in it about the Uffington horse, but also many other chapters describing other horses, the vast majority of them concentrated into a fairly small area in Wiltshire. It's not just horses, either - there are a couple of giant human figures at Wilmington and Cerne Abbas, and various other things of different shapes and sizes including the figures at Whiteleaf and Watlington as mentioned above, and another which we'll come to in a minute.

Anyway, my parents seem to have lost or got rid of their copy of the Marples book - which was first published in 1949 but was still in print into the 1980s - but fortunately the internet exists and I was able to get hold of quite a handy second-hand copy from the excellent people at World of Books for a very reasonable six quid. The reason I did this, just to finally get to the point after several paragraphs of discursive waffle, is that I'd spotted the village of Bledlow very close to Radnage and had remembered that there was another cross listed in the Marples book on a nearby hill, generally known as the Bledlow Cross.

If you look at a present-day OS map of the area you'll see that the Bledlow Cross is still marked. The map on the right here is the current one; the one on the left is earlier (1960s at the latest) and has an actual cross marked in roughly the right orientation. 

I was going to go on to say: good luck finding it via Google Maps' aerial photography, though, because there's absolutely fuck all evidence of it and it's all just trees. I would have said this despite my knowledge of some clearing work having been done in the last couple of years (more on this later), having examined the aerial views before we went on holiday (I mean, I am not an idiot). Having just this minute looked again, though, I can see a clearing and a faint cross. It's not exactly clear (the green-on-green colour scheme doesn't help) but it's definitely there. I can only assume the satellite imagery has been updated at some point in the last few weeks. 

Anyway, intrigued by its apparent disappearance I put "Bledlow Cross" into YouTube to see if I could find anything and came across this rather splendid video of these two tweedy chaps going on a quest to find it. They do mention that some clearance work (presumably including felling some trees) was done as recently as February 2024 and when they eventually find the cross it is reasonably free of vegetation, though not particularly white. 

Time for a photo gallery before we get to the bit where we go on an actual quest to find it ourselves. Here's a picture from probably the first couple of decades of the 20th century showing the cross on a tree-free hillside, a photo from the Marples book which is probably from the 1940s, a photo from Mark Hows' splendid website which I would guess is maybe 1980s, a still from the video mentioned above and a drone shot resulting from the scouting expedition described here. 

So, anyway, the upshot of all this is that I persuaded all nine people in our party that we should go for a walk in the general area, including a couple of sections of the Ridgeway and the Icknield Way and a bit of geocaching, but also incorporating a quick bit of off-path scrambling about to see if we could find the cross. The couple of rope swings (one of which features in the video) were very handy here both as a navigational aid and also a distraction for those less inclined than the hardcore adventurers (me, Jim and Nia) to plough through brambles and nettles to get to what's basically a couple of medium-sized ditches. 

Anyway, the update I can give you from August 9th 2024, which is the date we visited, is that a substantial amount of regrowth has happened since the clearance work and the initial rush of YouTubers visiting to make videos. It's only grass and general weeds but it does substantially obscure the cross, and if the people involved don't want their excellent work to be in vain then a more regular programme of clearance looks like it'll be essential. Here's a few photos - Jim at the cross's lower extremity, a view looking up to the top of the cross and Nia at the cross's rough midpoint with its eastern side-arm behind her.

The map below shows the (anticlockwise) route of the walk; almost exactly six kilometres in total, although that includes some aimless thrashing about trying to find the cross and later a couple of seemingly non-existent geocaches. If you just did the walk like a sensible human being it's probably not much more than five. 

A quick footnote: the other major site of interest we visited was the Hellfire Caves in West Wycombe, which are well worth a look, and whose creator (he didn't do the actual digging, he got some plebs in to do that) Sir Francis Dashwood seems to have been a hell of a guy. We also did the walk up the hill to see his mausoleum and the church which he had a giant golden ball built on top of just so he and his mates could sit in it drinking port and chewing the fat.

We also did a bit of parkrun tourism at Wycombe Rye on Saturday and had an unexpected celebrity encounter with Vernon Kay, though we disappointingly didn't manage to sneak into any of the photographs (I think we're somewhere behind his head in the first one). We then went to the lido at the start/finish line afterwards for a dip. Swimming pools in general aren't really my thing, let alone outdoor ones on a slightly overcast day, and I haven't been in an outdoor pool in Britain since occasional visits to the one at the Northcroft Centre in Newbury as a child. That one seems to have had a substantial spruce-up and refurbishment lately; it's safe to say the Wycombe Rye one has not and could perhaps do with one. 

So, did we have a nice week? Yes we did. Am I going to prioritise a return trip for another holiday? Eh, probably not, although I am going to keep an eye on further developments with the Bledlow Cross to see if anything exciting happens. If it disappears beneath a sea of grass and bracken again then I'm going to be a bit - no, wait for it - cross. 

the last book I read

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Patrick Bateman has it pretty good, all things considered - lucrative job doing something mysterious in finance in New York, spiffy business cards, a nice apartment, a whole wardrobe full of designer suits and ties, a highly eligible girlfriend, at least one other woman on the side, regular dinner reservations at exclusive eateries with his group of acquaintances, all of whom do pretty much the same job as him. So he's pretty happening. He's also - and it's hard to characterise this in an acceptable way in these days of acceptance and understanding of mental health issues - properly and utterly bananas.

Let's join Patrick for a typical day, shall we? Up at dawn for a visit to the gym, then home to apply an extensive range of moisturising products and primp his fabulous hairdo, pick out one of his expensive Valentino suits, then off to the office for a day of seemingly not doing very much while getting his secretary Jean to screen his calls and cancel all his appointments. Maybe there'll be time to fit in a game of squash with a colleague, and then after work a few drinks with other colleagues, all identically clad in sharp suits, braces and glasses, then on to the latest achingly hip restaurant (via a bit of competition to see who can do the impossible job of getting a reservation) for some of the latest creations in Burmese-Ecuadorian fusion or something, and so to bed, probably with some tight little thing from the gym or a nightclub, or the waitress from the restaurant. And then, refreshed, exactly the same thing, perhaps with minor variations in restaurant choice, the following day.

There are a few clouds on the horizon of this otherwise sunny existence: everyone, including Patrick, is constantly being mistaken for someone else; in Patrick's case this is usually Marcus Halberstam, who he perceives to be beneath him by virtue of having a slightly inferior hairstyle. Conversely Patrick perceives Paul Owen to be slightly above him in the hierarchy for similar reasons (slightly better haircut, a slightly more fashionable shade of off-white on his business cards, the ability to get restaurant reservations at prohibitively trendy Dorsia) and hatches a bold and unusual plan to get back at him for this perceived slight: murder him frenziedly with an axe and then dispose of the corpse. I mean, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

Having done this, and emboldened by no-one seemingly giving the most tepid of fucks as to Owen's whereabouts, Patrick embarks on a spree of further murders (mostly using Owen's apartment as a venue), pretty much all of these involving women and increasingly brutal and sexual in nature. Those are the ones Patrick really takes some trouble over; others are quicker and more impulsive: stabbing a child at the zoo, shooting a homeless guy in the street, that sort of thing. That last murder attracts the attention of the police and is the catalyst for a pursuit across Manhattan (and a few more killings) which ends with Patrick taking refuge in his office building and leaving a breathless confession on his lawyer's answering machine.

The plot thickens at this point, though: not only does the lawyer not take Patrick's confession seriously (indeed he has trouble recognising who Patrick is), he says that Owen can't be dead because he had dinner with him only a few nights ago. Moreover, when Patrick re-visits Owen's apartment, expecting to find it festooned with entrails and with severed heads in the fridge, he instead finds it clean and with a real estate agent showing prospective tenants around.

So what's going on? Clearly Patrick is a massively unreliable narrator, but are we to assume that the murders never happened? Has the whole thing been a fantasy? Well, those reading the book will have to make up their own minds as it's left slightly ambiguous, but you do have to wonder about the noise and the smell, not to mention the logistics of disposing of several corpses without being rumbled. Then again it wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing had gone apparently unnoticed by the neighbours.

Whatever the reader might conclude about the likelihood of the murders described having actually happened, they will almost certainly have some idea of what point the book is trying to make. Clearly there's some black satire on consumerism, 1980s greed, the emptiness of Patrick and his cronies' day-to-day activities, the implicit sexism and racism involved in it. There are lots of very funny sections - the early chapters where Patrick describes in excruciating detail the designer clothes he and his dinner companions are wearing, the braying banality of Harvard and Yale types hailing each other by their surnames across a crowded restaurant, Patrick's gradual mental disintegration throughout the course of the book - but there's no getting away from the brutality and graphicness of the descriptions of the murders of the several women that Patrick dispatches. It was this stuff that got the book into trouble when it was originally published in 1991 and it remains (slightly bizarrely) banned in the Australian state of Queensland. 

To be honest, as open as I am to experimental and transgressive fiction, I did find the extensive descriptions of torture and murder of women a bit hard to stomach. I suppose this is part of the point of the book, though: some of whose themes are (or seem to me to be) to do with what JG Ballard called "the death of affect", i.e. the flattening out of emotion in response to an increasingly overwhelming rush of stimuli, and a corresponding need for more and more extreme input in order to provoke feeling.

I can't say I absolutely loved American Psycho, but it works pretty effectively as an extreme blackly comic satire of its targets. I was already familiar with its 2000 movie adaptation (though I don't think I've ever seen the whole thing), which is mainly notable for a remarkable and career-reviving central performance from Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman. Obviously the film does tone down some of the old ultraviolence a bit, though it's still pretty graphic, and is more explicitly comic than the book. It also features Jared Leto playing much the same part as he does in Fight Club, i.e. a pretty rival and target of resentment whose main plot role is to be ritually brutalised (to death, in this case) by the protagonist. American Psycho is the third novel on this list to be adapted into a film starring Christian Bale, the other two being Empire Of The Sun and Metroland. 

sorry, I'm feeling a little horse

I was entertained for a couple of hours on Twitter (on X, if you musk, I mean must) yesterday by some increasingly lurid speculation about what a woman named Charlotte Dujardin had done to a horse in a video that had been submitted to, and was under investigation by, some central authority governing equestrian sport and moreover was of a serious enough nature for her to immediately withdraw from the upcoming Paris Olympics.

A bit of background for the non-horse-adjacent such as myself: Charlotte Dujardin is a prominent equestrian sportswoman in the somewhat esoteric field of dressage who also happens to be the joint-most-bemedalled British female Olympian of all time. You might, as I very definitely already have done, make a relative value judgment about the lung-busting athletic prowess of cyclist Laura Kenny (the other joint record-holder) and someone making a horse walk sideways and do a bit of skipping, but that's what the record books show.

Anyway, the incriminating video, despite what internet speculation might have had you believe (i.e. some sort of Catherine the Great thing), contains some footage of Dujardin getting a bit enthusiastic with a whip while training a horse in an indoor training ring. No doubt there are acceptable guidelines for how hard and often you're allowed to hit a horse with a whip, both in official competition and elsewhere, and I have no reason not to believe those who say Dujardin is exceeding them here, but I do also wonder how people think horses get trained to do the weird stylised movements that dressage requires. I mean, it'd be lovely if you could get them into a meeting room and go through all this stuff on a whiteboard as if you were discussing football tactics, but horses are - and I'm aware there might be people outraged at this statement - EXTREMELY DIM and you've got to do things in a more basic way.

I was reminded here of the furore in 2021 around the widely-circulated photograph of Irish racehorse trainer Gordon Elliott sitting on a dead horse while making a phone call. I could have understood a degree of outrage if he had subsequently been revealed to have strangled the horse to death with his bare hands, but no, it had just (as far as I can gather) dropped dead while out on a training gallop. Again, those seemingly outraged that the death of horses might be seen as a relatively normal day-to-day thing in the multi-million-pound horse-racing industry seemed to be ignoring some fairly obvious realities which I had a go at articulating at the time.

Back to the current controversy - you will be unsurprised to learn that someone has already been and made sure that Dujardin's Wikipedia page has been updated with a sober and objective summary of the current situation.

Some of the material that made its way onto the internet during the initial excitement contained some links to Horse & Hound, the publication of choice for the Barbour-jacket and shooting-stick set. While I was there I was offered a couple of other links, one of which was to this story:

Just to be clear, in the equestrian community "sheath" is the euphemism of choice for "cock", so this, just to be even clearer, is an interview with a woman whose job it is to prise lumps of hardened knobcheese out of the ends of horses' cocks. I mean, someone's got to do it, I suppose. Nothing I could say here will be better than just letting the article speak for itself, so here you go:

This is just about perfect; my only complaint is that Horse & Hound weren't tempted to borrow the Daily Mail's usage habits and make occasional references to HIS ENORMOUS HORSEHOOD or something similar.

Note also that specialist horse knob cleaning products are available, including this one which tries (unsuccessfully) to put a slightly cutesy spin on the whole business.