“Well?” he yelled from his spot on the village green (In truth more of a village brown, carpeted with crisped grass and churned mud). “Is it a crime? To be a horse? To be a horse head on a stick in a bin? Is it?”

No one listened. No one wanted to listen, no one had any more time for the slurred diatribe of the horse’s head on a stick in a bin that had appeared on the village brown a year ago and turned it into a short-lived tourist spot. It was a novelty then, and crowds hung on the words of the seemingly magical phenomenon.

As time wore on, it became obvious that the horse’s head on a stick in a bin had nothing to say. It appeared drunk , somehow, most days. Its speech vacillated between self-pitying howls and vile abuse of anyone who caught its blank plastic eye. If it hadn’t appeared in a bin, it would certainly have been dumped there by now.

Any attempt to remove the horse’s head on a stick from the bin failed. Even the military had – in a half-hearted, what’s-the-point sort of way – made an effort to destroy it with explosives. It remained when the dust cleared, bellowing that the soldiers were all “c***s”.

So it sat in its bin, shouting all day and night – “Hey you! F***face! Get me out! I’ll make you king!” – and no one knew where it came from or how to send it back.