Emotional scenes at the badminton. And let's face it, it's not every day you get to say that. But Gail Emms and Nathan Robertson were blown off court in the quarter-finals by a talented but (if you don't mind me saying) extremely shouty South Korea couple and, asked in the immediate aftermath to confirm her retirement, Emms was overcome by tears and unable to speak.

We'll take that as a “yes”, though. See what you've done, Lee and Lee, with your devious low serves and your shouting?

“Thank you for the memories,” David Mercer said, in a thick-voiced, elegiac mode in the commentary box. “There are so many of them.” Absolutely. Emms and Robertson have done more than any pair alive to grab British badminton by the shuttlecock and drag it out of the back garden. And maybe they never quite reached the front gate with it, let alone got as far as the main road, but you can hardly accuse them of not trying.

The BBC man also ruefully noted how quickly the South Korea pair had taken the knife to Great Britain's dreams of mixed doubles glory. “Thirty-seven minutes it took to break British hearts,” he said.

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Heartbroken? You know what, I think I'm going to be OK, actually, David. I thought briefly about going up to my room and refusing to come down, but in the end, sad though it was, this didn't quite seem to be the occasion. Call me a cold fish if you must, but I suppose I'm saving that particular reaction for something that really sets me off, such as, perhaps, a British upset in the dressage.

Have you made the trip to Hong Kong for the eventing yet? I can recommend it, if you haven't. The judges have been housed beside the sand in a series of flowery pagodas and altogether the arena resembles an extremely well-manicured garden centre - albeit one in which horses, rendered so shiny that you could brush your hair in them, are performing “regular extensions”' and “half-passes with flying changes”.

The word to use, wherever possible, about any horse hopping from foot to foot in the encouraged manner is “expressive”. But what, exactly, are they expressing? I've got a couple of solid hours of dressage-watching experience under my Beijing belt now and I'm still no nearer a solution to this one.

Also, I don't see why the competition should be restricted to horses. Isn't there an elitism at the heart of that decision that the Olympics are intended to move beyond? In any case, horses are notoriously a soft touch in this regard, relatively speaking. If someone could get, say, an alpaca to move around like that, then surely we would know we were watching something. All-animal dressage: it's an idea for 2012, maybe.

Other significant televised developments on day six: Adrian Moorhouse spotted a female swimmer in an ordinary costume. (Remember those? With a hole at the back and no legs or arms? It was like switching on to find the Water Cube gas-lit.) Kosuke Kitajima, of Japan, won the 200 metres breaststroke, meaning that he can, after all, go home. (Kitajima had vowed that he would not return without two medals and we were worried for him that Beijing might not be quite so much fun when the Games ended and the factories reopened.) Roger Federer went out of the tennis and everyone did their best to maintain that it had serious repercussions for the rest of his professional career. And Barry Davies rose to ever-more imperious form in his dual role as British women's hockey's biggest fan and most exasperated critic. (“Again, nobody making a run. I do find that a bother.”)

Meanwhile, swimming records continue to tumble like share prices - three times in the same heat at one point yesterday. We're beginning to wonder whether some of the competitors aren't simply holding on to that green “world record line” that appears on our screens at critical moments and getting a tow off it before hopping over the top at the last moment. This may be worth investigating.