Jilly Cooper says she now finds it "difficult" to write sex scenes, even though she used to bash them out with the joyous snuffling of a Laura-Ashley-yellow Labrador finding a chocolate button under a sofa. In fact, Cooper may abandon the sex-near-horses genre entirely, and try to impersonate Margaret Drabble instead. "I'd like to write a good book, a proper good book," she says, being entirely ignorant of my opinion that her murder-mystery Score! is a masterpiece. What is this? How can a woman who once compared an orgasm to the machinations of a washing machine abandon us to the sexless wastelands of more literary writers, when the experience of reading them is like watching Ian McEwan doing a handstand?
Could the memory of a passage from Riders, Cooper's other masterpiece, remind her of what she has lost and what may come again? This scene features the psychotic show-jumper Rupert Campbell-Black, who is based on Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, copulating with Amanda Hamilton, the wife of the foreign secretary. So, if you are very literal, you are about to imagine Andrew Parker Bowles and Ffion Hague in bed.