Big Brown Horse.

My father is a cavalry man. I was raised with horses and learnt to ride in a rigorous school which had us jumping over obstacles with our hands held out horizontally. It taught you balance - it taught you how to get off too when you found yourself going round the arena underneath the horse. I will never forget the wonder I felt when he got on my unruly pony and took her round the field jumping jumps perfectly...with no stirrups or reins.

 I saw the trailer for this film and loved the look of it. The lead horse is a big animal, with a bit of Percheron or cart horse in him...the sort that carried the knights of old. Not that I think he was the only horse because he seemed to have shrunk at times but he is an attractive type to me. 'Warhorse' is a beautiful film made more so by Steven Spielberg's great animal direction and graced throughout by a marvelous English cast. The wonderful Benedict Cumberbatch of Sherlock Holmes fame - who says you can't have a name like Cumberbatch or Hackforth-Jones as an actor? is a convincing cavalry man who leads a charge so beautifully shot you feel the officers of the day would have approved.

 And yet, and yet it's sad. So many of my relatives were there and so many of their friends. The terrible charnel house of WW1 France is a horribly familiar thing. There are rays of light and wonderfully comic interludes and 'Warhorse' leaves you on an upswing but so much died on those battle fields and so many that it is hard to feel this arena of blood and terror is safely in the past. So as a baby boomer I told my father of the film and as a cavalry man he said."There were no black horses". Yes there were I said, there was a brown one and a black. "No" he said "There was no such thing as a black horse in the cavalry". They were there all right but they called them 'brown'. So now you know.