According to the colour supplements and the fashion mags (and all those other mysterious forces that proclaim how we’ll all be wearing 50s tea dresses and lumberjack shirts this season), horses are this year's fashion phenomenon. Apparently, anyone who’s anyone now spends all of his or her spare time mucking out, preferably at his or her parents’ country estate, or at the little place in West Sussex where that nice couple (he’s a cook, she’s a groom) keeps everything ticking over marvellously while the children are in school and mummy and daddy are scraping a living out of commodities.

It’s all tied in with autumn’s fashion swoonfest for jodhpurs and shiny boots and strong shouldered black jackets.  I haven’t heard anyone mention riding crops and velvet hats yet, but I’m sure that’s coming.

This is all well and good, and you know how I love a horse, but I can’t help commenting that as fashion accessories go, your average horse is a lot more expensive to maintain than your average Prada bag.

Still, I’m not complaining.  It’s nice to be on the cutting edge of a lifestyle trend for a change.  Even if it is completely by mistake.