Speaking of drayhorses, as we were yesterday, I could not help but notice that the phrase “Git on drayhorse” is an anagram of “Hooting Yarders”. This has the vexing implication that my average reader or listener is a git mounted on a drayhorse. One pictures a rustic lane along which a great grey drayhorse is plodding, atop which is a git, leafing through a copy of Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags perhaps, or listening to my radio show on a pair of headphones jammed into their gitty ears.

Now I do not wish to think of any Hooting Yard devotee as a git. Perhaps what we have here is akin to that phenomenon where otherwise staid and reasonable persons turn into psychotic maniacs when they get behind the driving wheel of a car. Does the placid and altogether lovely Hooting Yarder become a git at the moment of plopping in to the saddle of their great grey drayhorse? I suppose it is possible.

Anagrammatic determinism being what it is, all I can do is to plead with my readers and listeners to find for themselves an alternative means of pulling their carts along the country lanes. Many of you will, I know, be toiling along those very lanes today, engarbed in peasant rags, transporting your carts piled high with rustic muck from one filthy field to another, or perhaps rolling in to a market square at the centre of a squalid hamlet. And what better way to pass the time, as the wind howls through the branches of larches and pines, than to read a tale from Befuddled By Cormorants or to listen on your iHoot to a morally instructive episode of Hooting Yard On The Air? But doing so need not, must not, make you a git. So eschew your drayhorse, I beg of you, and if you cannot afford a fume-belching tractor, pull the damned cart yourself.