Although horses are extremely adaptable, the last place a horse evolved to live is in a stall, alone, with limited space to move and forage about with others.
"Women still feel that if they go to a bar or a tea stall alone they will be considered loose women".
I went out there one morning, and in my stall alone there were three dead and decaying pigeons, and more faeces than you could shake a stick at.
So what if a vet would never go into a horse's stall alone and never come out and offer to euthanize a horse with a bowed tendon?
In the bijou bastide of Montreal, I counted at least seven varieties (from black prince to green zebra) of gloriously misshapen organic tomatoes on one stall alone.
The cumulative seating capacity was of 987 of which more than 700 for the rear stall alone.
"The stall alone is about $25,000 [£15,390] and that's before you've printed a banner or a leaflet or flown over staff and booked hotels," he says.
In 1926, Loi Ah Koon emigrated from Hainan to Singapore, where he worked as a coffee-stall assistant, then started a stall selling coffee, crackers and toast at Telok Ayer Basin, together with two other immigrants, who later dropped out, leaving him to run the stall alone.
They hand their pay packets over to their wives each week, because they couldn't run a hoopla stall, let alone a home.
"Poor old Michael," they would say condescendingly, "he may be able to make a good speech, but he couldn't run a whelk stall, let alone a department of state".
