Hector stood for four minutes on Saturday with a four-year-old girl on his back, and did not move a muscle he had not been asked to move. You need both halves of this horse to see why that is worth writing down. The first half is the one people know. Seventeen years a Cavalry Black in the Household Cavalry, the better part of seventeen hands of Irish-bred gelding, trained across all of it to master the single instinct every horse is built around, which is to run. He carried troopers down the Mall in a steel breastplate through massed bands and saluting guns and a hundred thousand people. He walked behind a gun carriage at a state funeral at the slow march, drum beating the step, a nation watching through its tears, and he never put a hoof wrong. The second half is the one his field knows. Hector is undone by a pheasant. A carrier bag on the wind is, to him, a clear and present danger. He will levitate sideways away from a hedge that has done nothing to anybody, and he does this in a quiet Welsh field at twenty-one years of age with a small grey donkey standing four feet away not bothering to look up. Both are true at once. The guns were a job and the job had rules. The hedge has no rules and a pheasant in it, and the flight animal underneath all that training remains, on the matter of pheasants, entirely undefeated. The man who groomed him and rode him through those years still comes, whenever the long drive allows, which is more often than a man of his age has any reason to manage. He brings nothing and asks for nothing. He stands at the rail. Hector knows the engine in the lane before the car is in sight. On Saturday he brought his granddaughter. She is four. She has heard about this horse her entire short life and had, until Saturday, understood him to be roughly the size of the dog. They put the smallest hat in the tack room on her. Her grandfather lifted her up, and the old horse stood, and something switched over behind his eye that nobody in that field had seen in years. He did not doze. He did not rest a hind leg. He came up off the leg he had been resting, squared himself, and held. Ears forward, weight even, the whole enormous machinery of him gone quiet and formal, because a rider had gone up, and a rider going up has only ever meant one thing. He was on duty. Nobody at that rail said a word. There was nothing worth saying over the top of it. They walked twenty metres up the fence line and twenty back, at a walk you could have set a watch by. Her grandfather had one hand on the girl and one on the rein and neither of them was doing anything, because there was nothing to do. The horse knew the job. The horse has never once in his life needed telling what the job was. Then she was lifted down, and the shape went out of him, and he dropped a hip and let his bottom lip go soft and became again an old woolly gelding standing in a wet field in Denbighshire. Nelson watched the entire proceeding from the dry corner with the good hay unguarded behind him, which tells you precisely how much of it he considered worth attending to. On the way back down the lane the girl asked her grandfather whether Hector was famous. He said he used to be. He knew it was the wrong answer before he reached the car, and he has not stopped thinking about it since.

If we can’t afford the triple lock we can’t afford illegals and benefit scroungers @andyburnham

'He's not in a strong position to lecture me' 👀 John Swinney has blasted Andy Burnham's 'lack of knowledge about Scotland' 👇

15 years ago, we made prescriptions free in Scotland - while people south of the border pay £9.90 an item. For as long as the SNP is in government, we will always protect free prescriptions. On May 7th, vote SNP.