Box

This morning I decided to give the women of Hertford a treat. Accordingly, I sat at a table outside Le Café Rouge, where they could all watch me, and had breakfast. The meal (and very nice it was, too) consisted of scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, toast and marmalade, and a large pot of Colombian coffee. Anyway, as I was eating, a vehicle stopped outside. It was emblazoned with the legend “Horse Box”. Once I'd finished breakfast, I got up, walked over, and peeked inside. There was indeed one single horse within.

How wasteful of packaging and resources, I thought. If properly stacked and surrounded by those polystyrene blobs, there was room there for at least six horses. The situation was therefore akin to Kelloggs selling you a Cornflakes box containing just the one cornflake, and fitting it with a motor to allow it to drive itself from the supermarket to your home. Overkill in every way.

In my opinion, if you want to package a single horse, you should use a horse bag or a horse sachet. Or better (because few people are going to manage a whole horse at a single sitting), you should put it in a tube as horse purée. Then you can squeeze out as much or as little as you require, and keep it in the fridge for subsequent usage.

In fact, on reflection, perhaps someone could develop Pot Horse, where you just open the container, add boiling water, and enjoy. However, just as you have to beware of small bones when eating fish, I imagine you’d have to look out for the occasional horseshoe and stirrup when eating the rehydrated article.