When their bodies break down, the mares are shot and knackered into the horsemeat market.
We arrived at the hotel in the early hours of the morning to be met with a slightly shocking brew of strong mint tea, then crawled, grateful and knackered, into bed, and once the caffeine twitching had worn off, slept.
The old ghost in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath is all the more terrifying for looking like a decrepit waxwork (and bears a faint resemblance to Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady), while the creepiest scene in Alejandro Amenábar's The Others is when Nicole Kidman sees her small daughter transformed into a knackered hag.
So here I am, then: well into middle age, far too knackered to be much use as a hooligan, with a still-vague grasp of the players and management of Leicester City, yet in the grip of a terrifying fanatic fever.
The American setting is not as important as the Anglicized suspension in which the fairy tale floats: throughout this seven-hundred-and-seventy-page yarn, Tartt's American characters move through a world of cozy Britishisms, like "they tucked into their food," "you look knackered," "crikey," "skive off," and "gobsmacked".
But when we got into the dressing room, we were knackered.
By the time we drag ourselves into the queue again, we're knackered.
On the way back everyone is knackered and mud-covered and you're all crammed into the same carriage, desperately trying to escape your own hedonism, crashing into each other with gigantic backpacks.
In my day, there weren't a need to fling yer spanky knackers into other folks' faces all jumble-wumble and 'ere's-mine-guv'nor.
Knackered, I slugged on a bottle of duty-free vodka, crept into bed and blew the candles out feeling, it must be said, nonplussed.
The mood even extended to Sky anchor Jeremy Thompson who looked so knackered, so early that I thought he was in danger of falling into the Chicago River.
