Last year my producer persuaded me to make a radio programme called Taking the piss out of London. Not only did it win an award, it was so popular that he has come up with something even more tasteless – Flogging a dead horse (Radio 4 xxx, yyy).

My daughter-in-law, who lives in Paris, tells me that in smart restaurants there if you order steak tartare you may well get a slab of raw horsemeat with a raw egg on top, possibly garnished with raw capers and onions – ‘très fort’, she says – very strong. Even though I enjoy experimental eating I think I’ll give that a miss, but I have probably fed my cats on horsemeat – I am always suspicious when the label says ‘juicy lumps with duck and chicken’ – what are the lumps made of?

Horses have long been regarded as noble animals, devoted to human  service, and they have carried messengers, soldiers, and hunters for centuries, if not millennia. But our ancestors seem to have found them at least as useful dead as alive, and turned horse-recycling into several  industries. Horsehair from mane and tail is tough and strong, and has been used not only for stuffing furniture but also for fishing lines and emergency sutures. Horse hide was fashioned into carriage roofs, and into riding breeches for German cavalry officers. It has also been used to make the business end of whips, which seems rather tough on the live animals.

The bones are immensely versatile. Ground up dry they form bone-meal fertiliser. Boiled down with the hoofs they can be turned into glue – I remember the pungent smell from a glue factory I used to cycle past on the road into Dewsbury. Some bones were carved into buttons. Whole leg bones were apparently lashed underneath shoes and used as ice skates. Perhaps most bizarre of all, horse skeletons and especially skulls were often buried under the floor in churches, including St Botolph’s in Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’) and Llandaff Cathedral. This may have been of purely ritual significance, but there is also a theory that the skull, placed beneath the floor of the chancel, acted as a resonator to improve the acoustics. This sounds unlikely, but perhaps I should try the experiment to see whether it works. I have space under my floorboards; has anyone got a spare horse skull?