The truth about Surrey’s obsession with horse masks

A saloon car pulled up opposite our fields and a man sat there looking at the horses with a bewildered expression.

I had noticed this car meandering along the farm track, driving between the horse fields and stopping every time he came alongside a horse, sitting there for minutes on end.

Then he would start driving again. Then he would stop alongside another horse. For quite a while he was parked by the grazing fields above where the builder boyfriend and I have a smallholding, and was stopped staring at our friends’ horses, I realised.

When he got to our fields, he pulled up again and began peering into our paddocks, looking over to where the builder b’s cobs were standing in the stable yard munching hay.

What fresh madness is this? I thought. So I walked across our front paddock to the fence line next to where his car was stopped and I waved at the man through the window, saying: ‘Are you lost?’

He was a person of colour, and from his heavily accented voice, when he replied, I would have guessed he was quite recently here from Africa.

The horse-rugging craze is getting so ludicrous there are people putting horses in onesies

He said he had just dropped his daughter off to play with the children of his friend, referring to a new neighbour of ours in one of the houses at the top of the track.