Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag. A huge carcass of a story about contaminated meat only gives rise – like steam from a horse on the run – to pure farce. Hence the UK Environment Secretary who is shocked, ‘absolutely shocked’ (soon to be revealed: the Horror, the Horror of his spotty underpants). Hence medallion man with mutton chop sideburns, name of Peter Boddy (you couldn’t…), shut down by the Food Standards Agency for piling the horses high in his Todmorden, West Yorkshire abattoir – though that’s exactly what he is licensed to do. Absolute mare-der over Lancashire school kids eating stable pie instead of cottage. Better than letting them eat cake, I say, which will surely lead to obesity. Banging on about anti-inflammatory horse pills which may now have entered the human food chain. But this last Shock! Horror! is not even new – never mind headline news. Bute was long ago passed to humans, since doctors occasionally give it to arthritis sufferers, i.e. people not horses; and you’d have to eat 500 eight ounce Shergar-burgers a day, to ingest the full, human dosage. Supermarkets nag, nag, nagged into eternal vigilance. On a laid-back Sunday morning (‘feels like Sunday mo-or-ning’), when one, ruffle-haired spokesman feels like re-la-axing enough to admit they didn’t test for horsemeat – ‘why would we? We don’t test for hedgehog either’ – the television interviewer immediately wants to know how food safety can be assured. Your response was not carefully coiffed, please spray the airwaves with your mounting concern. Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag. Nagging doubts about the way we live transposed to a gnawing problem with horsemeat. In the process, all semblance of substance slaughtered.