Basil Not Burger

     . . . . Returned the first library book-books I've checked out since the libraries closed in March; looking forward to my next round of request hard covers, which include a biography of the Black Prince, and the most recent Tasha Alexander Lady Emily action-adventure-mystery-in-upper-class-exotic milieus.

Extraordinarily humid, though not that hot, but soaking wet. The last exhalations of now tropical storm Laura?

Among the extreme change from the last Saturday of August in 2019 and the last Saturday of August 2020: nobody is asking me directions in any language, including English; nobody is pulling luggage along looking for their Airbnb.

Still, here, the streets are filled in the West Village, SoHo, the East Viallge and quite a long ways north – because these are endless stretches of restaurant-bars, who have possession on weekends entirely of the sidewalks and streets -- vehicular traffic blocked off -- except for the killer bikers, killers scooters, killer skateboards.

But once away from this extensive strip – complex (meaning I can walk the extent in any of the four directions, reach the end of that direction and walk back home again within an hour and a half) -- well, once away from these stretches, it’s dead fred, retail all boarded up, until hitting another strip-complex given over entirely to the restaurants. People pouring in from all over the city and the country.

From what I see on people's plates -- we poor pedestrians have no choice but to see it all -- nobody is eating anything except burgers and fries, and occasionally red sauce spaghetti. I really am not seeing salads.  What they are doing in reality is drinking a great deal of alcohol, from wine to exotic cocktails. .... The reek of burger and french fry grease is overwhelming throughout. The uncollected garbage and spillage equally so. Why anybody would want to sit in this miasma, especially in daytime with all the ugly unconcealed, I don’t understand.

There is no glamour here or there. It doesn’t just look trashy, it is trashy,  like the most tawdry end-of-summer street fair you ever saw.  How we’ve fallen since the days of first run Sex and the City, when my city turned into Them and Their city. Now those sorts have turned the entire nation into trash.

Tonight our apartment will be perfumed with fresh, clean and delicious basil and tomatoes, grown outside, in the dirt, when el V makes pasta tonight. That is as far away from the grease-reek of the streets outside as one can get.

Publishing and Eating

     . . . . Publishing jam-up at printers -- NY Times paywall link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/books/printing-companies-backlog-book-publishing.html

[....]

...with September approaching, things are far from normal. Books that were bumped from spring and early summer are landing all at once, colliding with long-planned fall releases and making this one of the most crowded fall publishing seasons ever. And now publishers are confronting a new hurdle: how to print all those books.

The two largest printing companies in the United States, Quad and LSC Communications, have been under intense financial strain, a situation that has grown worse during the pandemic. LSC declared bankruptcy in April, and the company’s sales fell nearly 40 percent in the fiscal quarter that ended June 30, a drop that the company attributed partly to the closure of retailers during the pandemic and the steep fall of educational book sales. In September, LSC’s assets will be put up for auction. Quad’s book printing business is also up for sale; this spring, the company had to temporarily shut down its printers at three plants due to the pandemic.

At the same time, there has been a surprising spike in sales for print books, a development that would normally be cause for celebration, but is now forcing publishers to scramble to meet surging demand. Unit sales of print books are up more than 5 percent over last year, and sales have accelerated over the summer. From early June to mid-August, print sales were up more than 12 percent over the previous 10 weeks, according to NPD BookScan. The surge has been driven by several new blockbuster titles, including books by Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, John Bolton and Mary Trump. Publishers have also seen an unexpected demand for older titles, particularly books about race and racism, children’s educational workbooks and fiction.

“The infinite printer capacity hasn’t been there for a while, now enter Covid and a huge surge in demand, and you have an even more complex situation,” said Sue Malone-Barber, senior vice president and director of Publishing Operations for Penguin Random House, which is delaying titles at several of its imprints as a result of the crunch.

The backlog at the printers is creating havoc for authors and publishers. Reprints for books that are selling well, which normally take two weeks, are sometimes taking more than a month. [....]

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Holy Cow! el V's chopping and slicing some Saratoga basil and tomatoes.  The perfume is -- dense.  They may have the same names as what we've been getting here, but they are not the same at all.  Duh.

Such beautiful stuff.  I wish-wish-wish there were those close enough with whom I could share it out.

Celery!  Herbs like basil and chervil and parsley, onions and unfamiliar varieties of garlic.  Jolly, rotund eggplant. Early  potatoes. Incredible tomatoes. Bushels of corn on the cob. Late August apples, Williams Pride.  Climate change has been good for the state's peaches -- lordessa are they juicy.  S also sent back a buncha of his chicken fricassee sauce. (I have no plans for cooking chicken any time soon, not with all these vegetables, so into the freezer with that.)

Due to the insane traffic of pretend it's post-covid the produce hand-off for pork didn't happen with P, so that portion is here until later. It will be departing though.

S wants us up again in the fall.  I am thinking ... Thanksgiving?

So much wonderful food!  All perfect for meals in the again very hot and humid weather we're having.

Thises & Thatsas Domestika Trivia

     . . . . Been babying the injured sciatic nerve caused by the trip-and-fall that happened 4 Saturdays ago. 

I still have excruciating pain upon getting up if I've sat in the >ergonomic!< desk chair too long and / or not positioned myself exactly right. I still sit far fewer hours than spend stretched on the bed with overbed table -- which is still impossible to perform writing typing upon.  At least the x-rays showed there was no damage to bones, did not break hip or anything. Still haven't heard anything about the MRI I had a week ago.  At least I can still walk the 20 blocks in both directions to the medical complex, and keep working out.  It's sitting to type or do anything for very long I can't do.

Last night my new stupid fone froze up, couldn’t even power it down to reboot, in the middle of a sentence Vaquero was speaking. Such a piece of shyte phone and such a shyte service T-Mobile. We have to get this fixed!

The Horror!  AAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.

My God My God My God WNYC just shoved the Shoggoth First Lady's voice into my ears about how much Shoggothinchief* 'Loves this country and people'. Shutting off the radio rushing to to bathroom to vomit up the horror that is her souless pitch perfect nazi who speaks english inspires. Please replace those wonderful creatures, the elephants, as the entirely inappropriate symbol of the rethugs,  with the entirely accurate and appropriate Lovecraftian creature of horror and hatred of immigrants, Catholics, Jews, African Americans and women. Thrown up. Better.  

Laura is a Cat 4 hurricane now. Going to slam into LA and TX today.  4 million have been told to evacuate.  To where? Our New Orleans Reconnect on-the-ground Captain was laying in supplies last week already.

WBGO is alternating the old timey Blues with New Orleans old timey music, leaning heavily upon the catalogs of Louis Armstrong and Mack Rebbenack (Dr. John).  Huh.  They're going to do a Howlin' Wolf set.

I now get up to find my Howlin' Wolf t-shirt acquired at the Blues Museum in Clarkesdale, Mississippi back in 2012, and which I've never worn.

The St. Cyr novels have never had a blank cover before.

Today's perfect weather was perfect for the library run -- both titles I'd requested when Grab 'n Go started here earlier this month arrived to pick-up at my neighborhood Grab 'n Go branch.  One of them is the latest Sebastian St. Cyr Regency mystery -- I enjoy certain aspects of this series very much, though it has sagged at times.  Other problems: in the first books the protag, Vicount Devlin, is hinted to have some special sort of powers, including being able to see in the dark, but that never went anywhere.  The previous two brought it back to form; hope that continues with this latest installment, #16, What the Devil Knows.The author is a New Orleanian, which somehow provides an extra bit of flava to the content, though I'd be baffled as to say how.  It's not as though New Orleans or North America is ever even mentioned in her novels, which are within the era of the French Wars, generally, and which does provide plot points in more than one of the titles. This latest is set in 1814, the "French War" is finally over, and Europe is being divvied up at the Congress of Vienna ....  They think, the wars are over, anyway (1815 is Waterloo).

El V and B drove to 5th pod member S's huge rambling house, in which he lives along, with screened in annex, big yard and swimming pool up in Saratoga. We'd been planning this little vacation get-away for months already.  Due to the fall though, I sadly had to relinquish going myself this year, for I couldn't sit on drive, get up and walk again -- and that drive isn't even really long. But one will avoid that excruciating pain if one can! They are bringing local fresh produce such as sweet corn on the cob (which they been gorging on, grilled, already), blueberries and so on. They will hook up with P on the way back down here to exchange of this for the local Connecticut pork he picked up for us earlier this summer. So, we continue to eat, and eat well.

I am trying to figure out how we can do some kind of Thanksgiving this year, for we'll still be isolating as much as possible.  The schools are reopening in few days, from pre-school, through the universities.  We know what happens then will be what has happened everywhere in this country and other ones when students are brought back in physical space with each other -- and they can't stay away from each other either, nor do they want to.

As He Said: "The Past Isn't Even Past"

     . . . . Most of our current crises are connected to this nation's founding history in genocide and African slavery -- economically, politically and socially, even down to emergency natural disaster crews. 

As we all know, the vast majority of our vast incarcerated populations are of color -- and poor. Now many local California politicos and pundits -- and the state fire fighting agency --  are bitterly criticizing the state for giving prisoners early release due to the hotspotting prisons are for outbreaks of covid-19.  Guess what?  The state's fire fighting agency, underfunded by the taxpayers and the politicians, depend instead on what is essentially slave labor -- which for the moment at least it does not have so our homes burn.  How much you want to bet California doesn't make this mistake again?

We all benefited, we benefit even now, from this nation's history of  slavery and perennial racial injustice to African Americans and Native Americans, even if we are more recent immigrants, whether we are white or not. 

We are seeing it so clearly with our dependence upon the poor and of color as the real line of disaster fighting -- and just to get groceries, to get medical care.* Because, you know, we believe don't need to pay them even a living wage.

Really, who believes in their heart that $1 - $2 a day for fighting these wildfires is pay?  particularly for those whose lives and health are at such a high level of risk? Plus, we all know too, these firefighting prisoners are legally prohibited from getting jobs as professional fire fighters because that means paying salaries and benefits. It's so much more practical and tax saving to just refresh the prison population constantly.  Keeping people who have served their sentence from getting real jobs is an effective method of ensuring that constant refreshment.

We all benefit, then and now, who aren't African American, who aren't Native American.

The brilliant light of 19th Century literature in this country couldn't have happened without the resources of slavery.  Longfellow's wife, recall, was vastly wealthy, like all those Boston cultural luminaries were -- allowing them to dedicate their lives to art and culture. There were so many who had that wealth resource that within 3 centuries of first colonization the US there were enough heirs of such wealth to support a leisure class that supports the arts and literature.

Where did much of that wealth of New England and the North, like NY, come from?

As with Longfellow's wife, her father owned the vast wealth creating textile factory complexes such as his Lowell, MA.  Those textiles were produced from the slave-grown cotton.  Much shipping and insurance and banking in so many ways out of slavery -- even after the African slave trade to the the US was abolished, even after slavery itself supposedly was abolished.  

Immediately after the war those wealthy northern and New England movers and shakers headed south** and allied with the great pioneers of neo-slavery, sharecropping, such as the Percys of Greenville, Mississippi (Walker Percy's family -- which was why he could live and write without a job.)

It is nearly impossible to look at even the brilliant light elements of our past and not see it rooted in and shadowed by slavery and genocide -- including the massive removal out of "Dixie" to make that vast territory safe for slavery. 

This morning there's a Marine Dem retweeted on Bill Gibson's Twitter feed, who warns us from where he lives within a huge maga country enclave, that 'they' hate 'us' with almighty passion, they are voting.... it's all about white vs everyone else -- and women. If you can only get it by giving over all power to the insane, and destroying what's left, and dying too, so be it. Long rage the covid-19 hoax! as proclaimed by a relative undergoing chemo for cancer in a rally in a waiting room of fellow unmasked cancer victims.

It merges well with Jon Meacham on the history of the revisionist Glorious Lost Cause history of the War of the Rebellion -- which began immediately.*** 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/books/review/lost-cause-meacham.html?

[....]Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending. In our own time, the debates over Confederate memorials and the resistance in many quarters of white America, especially in the South, to address slavery, segregation and systemic racism can in part be understood by encounters with the literature of the Lost Cause and the history of the way many white Americans have chosen to see the Civil War and its aftermath.

To Pollard, the Southern side had fought nobly for noble ends. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” he wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” Pollard declared that a “‘war of ideas,’” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was now unfolding.

And in many ways it unfolds still. The defiance of federal will from Reconstruction to our own day, the insistence on states’ rights in the face of the quest for racial justice and the revanchist reverence for Confederate emblems and figures are illuminated by engaging with the ethos of which Pollard so effectively wrote. He enlarged on his thesis in “The Lost Cause Regained,” published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The issue was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”

The Civil War, then, was to be fought perennially....

We're already fighting our second civil war -- but while they are using their guns and everything else already, we insist on pretending it hasn't happened yet and it won't happen because we are going to win (one) election.  Which latter is in NO WAY assured of happening either. They certainly are doing everything, including shooting, to make sure it doesn't happen.

~~~~~~~~

*  For a breathtaking account of earlier dependence on coerced African American labor  even when slavery supposedly was over, see John M. Barry's Rising Tide (1997) for how the Walkers did it in their Yazoo Delta Kingdom in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

** One of the most well recognized among those even now, is J.P. Morgan.  Not to mention all the racial injustice placating D.C. and presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt did for them, helping make labor laws and court cases go away, as he did for the Walkers with whom he happily went hunting.

***  In truth, though Meacham doesn't mention it, the revisionism began at least as soon as Vicksburg fell, with Davis and others suddenly dropping 'slavery' from their cause for fighting -- though it was top and center in their constitution as a 'nation' and the secessionist state constitutions, and in their many other printed works before and after secession.

Basbanes, Nicolas A. (2020) Cross of Snow: A life Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

     . . . . Basbanes’s book overflows with interest for the literary, material and political historian of the US in the 19^th C. The interest begins right at the start of the Introduction, in which Longfellow’s trajectory and fate are traced within the literary ‘canon’ critical establishment within, and without, academe.  Ten years ago surely, I would never have guessed that Longfellow would be rehabilitated as worthy by serious literature, but he has been.

All lives have tribulations, at least back before the medical advances of the later 20th^t century.  Still, a very few led golden lives, and were also decent human beings, whom it was a joy to know, despite losses of loved ones to disease and childbirth.  Longfellow suffered grief due to losing those he loved, early in their lives, such as his first wife.  But still, like Walter Scott, he lived at time when it was nearly paradise for prosperous white men.

The story begins in Portland, Maine; of which Longfellow was a life-long proud and loyal scion,  presenting a cultural history of New England through his life time. Though not born into it, he joined that generational education-prizing Bostonian wealthy cultural and literary elite, which meant then, the literary elite of the nation. Our first recognized commerical publishers and editors were his friends before they became publishers, like Ticknor and Fields. To have all doors open to one at all times, wealth is very much the key. Longfellow’s father-in-law was the vastly wealthy fellow who pulled off industrial espionage, i.e. theft of propriatory information and design, from the textile factories of England, to institute the factories of Lowell, MA. Marrying into serious money is always a good move that improves life, even when already a popular eligible bachelor, a successful prof at Harvard, and published, prosperous money-making author.

Craigie House, bought by Longfellow's FIL when he married Fanny. Washington bivouacked there. I always have imagined the Lawrence mansion in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women looking exactly like this.

Politically, Longfellow was mildly centerist all his life, which didn’t prevent a close life-long friendship with radical abolitionist-to-be, Charles Sumner. Nor did it prevent him from writing the lines that concluded his very popular, The Building of the Ship (published 1849), that made President Abraham Lincoln weep:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State.

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

I confess, that in These Times, particularly after watching the Democratic Nominating Convention these last three days and hearing non-insane people speaking to a national audience, the lines make me weep too, as we all hardly even dare for “hopes of future years” in any way that we have known in the past.

Cross of Snow,  like such earlier biographies that have so delighted me, such as The Peabody Sisters:Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall. Sophia Peabody was so much more interesting before she married Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a Bowdoin schoolmate and later friend too, of Longfellow. Or, The Beechers by Milton Rugoff, an examination of the family. These provide the deeply engaging immersion that does a really fine historical family saga, such as that of Winston-Graham’s Poldark Saga.  

These kinds of books are inspiring, antidotes to the gorge of disgust, revulsion and despair about the USA and its history engendered by all these criminals in the news these days. They remind us there is a side of light after all to our past, that shone brilliantly in many locations -- in great opposition to the dark of Slaveocracy and those who made the War of the Rebellion -- and the Slaveocracy's descendents, these monsters from Lovecraft who are about nothing but ugly, hate, murder, pillage and destruction.

Pop Culture vs. the Real

     . . . .Watching the latest progress on one of the Cuban film pieces, location Matanzas.

Him: The lighting may be wonky but these are the baddest brujas in Matanzas.  And the way they play drums!

Me: That means they're baddest brujas in all Cuba. In a confront with Buffy the Vampire's Willow, I wouldn't make book on Willow.

Him: Over their time, how many chickens do you think these ladies have killed ?

Cuban Pygmy Owl
Owls Associate with Brujas in Cuba and West Africa

Andrew Lang: Our Companion for Fairy and Adventure

     . . . .  Andrew Lang, editor of the multi-volume Fairy Tale series, labeled in colors, is the subject of a piece by Michael Dirda in the WaPo (pay wall). 

Why have I never thought of Lang, the person, and his life before, when I grew up with the fairy tale volumes, reading them over and over, in order!  Great Grand Mom had them all from her days as a teacher. She brought all the books they used in her classes at Teachers College on how and what to teach in English and history classes; she bought a lot of books for her country school kids as a library for that one-room school house that had none). 

Lang had a close friendship with H. Rider Haggard. He read King Solomon's Mines in manuscript and got it published. Haggard dedicated She: A History of Adventure, to Lang.

Lang wrote a good natured parody of She, titled He. Additional jump starts to writing careers for which he was responsible were those of Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson.  He championed Mark Twain in Britain, and so very much more.

He seems a great guy with whom to have hung out and whom to have as a friend.

His lecture on advice to would-be , "How To Fail At Literature", can be found full text online and is worth reading today:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2566/2566-h/2566-h.htm

So can be read his "Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody" -- in which Catherine Moreland of Northhanger Abbey meets Jane Eyre:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1991

or 

http://www.fullbooks.com/Old-Friends--Essays-in-Epistolary-Parody1.html

These are joyeous reads.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday was Day 1 of Month 6 of isolation, as far as isolation can be maintained.

Louisiana -- Plus: John M. Barry's The Great Influenza

     . . . . Looks like the Postmambo digital festival-tour,  NOLA Reconnect, is a go -- three weekends in October.  

Interviews with figures such as Jason Berry and John M. Barry, film makers like Lily Keber, Mardi Gras Indians, musicians, live music, cooking lessons from New Orleans's 5 Star chefs, and o so much more.  People know they're stuck at home, and they are desperate to be able to look at other faces, hear other voices and interact with People, both those they already know and people they don't.  (El V frequently mentions how much he misses meeting new people -- he loves meeting people.) 

Some of the Frequent Rumbero Travelers of Postmambo, who paid in for the March tour that had to be canceled have said "Keep the change," as there are costs that don't have to be met, such as lodging and transportation, so they were entitled to a refund.  So Postmambo is going to take the 'change' and use it to fund participation for students who would love to be part of this experience but can't afford it.  A scholarship in New Orleans history, music and culture, so to speak.

People are Zoomed out, so we can't do it that way -- it has to be interactive, so people can interact with each other, even if it is digitally.  Great techs on the ground there in NO who can't wait to make this happen -- who have had quite a bit of experience doing this kind of thing already.  The captain of our ground crew did this with a conference in Havana herself -- she directed it -- from New Orleans!  Technology sometimes can be our friends.  People are really excited about this.

~~~~~~~~~~~

     . . . . I read John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2004), plus later editions up to 2018) in about 5 days..  Each section of the book is fascinating and filled with pertinent information. I anticipated returning to it at my evening reading time throughout, despite how very painful and gruesome so much of it was.  Infuriating too, as we're experiencing all the same issues with our own pandemic a century later, except for not SEEING it, the way people of every class back a century ago saw the Great Influenza. Indeed, nobody could escape seeing and experiencing.

 

Barry never disappoints.  As I began reading the first section of biographical background to the heroes of The Great Influenza,

This is the edition in which I read Arrowsmith the first time -- A Signet PB.

I immediately flashed on how much of the trajectory was familiar to me from reading Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) -- which gratified me so much reading it the first time in my farmgirl's bedroom, because it began in North Dakota.  So I looked, and there the book is, in the index. It was part of the  context of discussing the institutes and universities the Great Influenza's hero medical scientists who founded such institutions as Johns Hopkins (which back then was referred to by all and sundry as "the Hopkins").  He has a small sub-section too, concerning how little writing and reference was committed either during or after to the Great Influenza; not by regular people or by writers like Hemingway, whose father was a doctor, or Faulkner.

I can think of only Katherine Anne Porter, in her short novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939 collection, 3 novellas)  tells the story of a couple caught by it. Pale Horse is one of the few works I've of hers I have read though.  Porter herself said that the title story was about the pale rider, Death, who takes away an entire era, as illustrated in the ironic last line: "Now there would be time for everything."* 

Chaucer and contemporaries didn’t write about the Great Mortality either.

This time around, as with 9/11, and now c19 writers were dedicating their their fingers from the gitgo to describe in dreary irrelevant detail every nuance of their own precious sensations, emotions, actions and non-actions, in their lovely summer retreats, second homes, surrounded by green and water, where they take walks in Nature and never see another person.  They don't see Covid-19 and those it sickens and kills either.

Nor does anyone else, in the USA at least, unless poor and of color, or working in the hospitals, morgues, nursing homes / assisted living and ambulances, actually SEEN anyone sick with c19, whether they recover or they don't. Back with the Influenza nobody could hide from it and what it wreaked. It was in everybody's house -- and in many places everyone who lived in that house died and there was nobody to move the bodies. And when it was over, who was left had to deal with them in however the region was dealing, whether in Philadelphia or a 3 house village in Alaska. But the yahoos out there now, rich and whatever -- they haven't seen and they know they aren't going to, so they are utterly unaffected. It's their life and they'll lead it as they choose.

Were writers of all sorts exhausted from 3 years of pandemic, the Great Influenza's indescribable gruesomeness that millions and millions experienced up close and personal, for themselves. and in company with everyone else around them? So very different from c19 -- so far -- but then the Great Influenza rolled for 3 years -- 1917-1920, with successive waves. Though generally, not always in every spot, it became rather milder and didn't outright kill as many -- it still killed in large numbers. So people had to get on with making life again, and also just wanted to forget this?

A lot of the literary writers were in the war one way and another.  Then came the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition (1920), followed by the Great Depression, followed by another great mobilization, WWII.  Maybe there wasn’t time to work all this horror out into words?

Something else too ... ithe Influenza, like c19, creates hallucinations and changes in the brain, which sometimes never changed back (people think this happened with Woodrow Wilson at the Peace Conference when it got it).  Flashbacks, even, sometimes to things that never happened. It sure does sound like the descriptions of Shell Shock.  So those poor saps got shell shocked from this incredible stupid war -- and they got this on top of that, along side of that.  No wonder so many people were lost after that stupid war ... the Lost Generation.

*  Katherine Ann Porter provided me with little of interest in that time of my life when I read her work, though I am hard-pressed to say why that was the case. I think it’s because horse was in the title and I was still young enough to be hopeful when ‘horse’ was in a title, inside there would be a ‘real’ horse.