After they banned horses from the village green and surrounding common land, I set about trying to find out why, for it seemed such a strange thing to do.
Forbidding dark green signs saying ‘No Horse Riding By Order Of The Parish Council’ marked every track running through 30 acres of public land, while the bridleways in the nearby woods were almost permanently blocked with fallen trees.
One day, a girl did ride her horse across the green, leaving a dropping outside our house. We watched amazed as our neighbours, the vegans, came out and photographed it, then, after shovelling it away, they knelt down and used tweezers to pick up the last fragments.
I realised that horses were banned so that the Surrey-ites did not have to confront reality, preferring to buy processed manure in bags from the garden centre.
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