Real life

The toad who lives at the bottom of the garden in the pile of bricks beneath the potting table was very happy with his new plunge pool. I made it on a particularly slow afternoon when I had run out of ideas for things to do. It was either make a toad Jacuzzi or darn socks, so naturally Mr Toad lucked out. Before that, I tidied the cellar, going through all the laundry bags full of horse tackle. I sorted and bagged rugs, cleaned and polished bridles, reorganised my ever-burgeoning collection of multicoloured lead ropes, overreach boots and numnahs, and even sorted out all the saddle soaps and boot polishes. From the back windows of the houses around me drifted the urgent sounds of people working from home, barking instructions such as, ‘Listen, guys, we need to nail this issue!

‘Do you want some of the private stuff from out the back?’ said the butcher to the builder boyfriend, leaning forward over the counter and winking theatrically. The builder b winced a little for this was starting to feel like the terrifying scene in League Of Gentlemen when Mr Briss starts selling a mysterious and highly addictive ‘special’ meat to the residents of Royston Vasey. Thankfully, this butcher was only selling private lamb. He revealed his secret stash to the BB because he took a liking to him. The butcher grinned, revealing big teeth between rosy cheeks, before disappearing out the back and returning with an entire side, which he butchered in front of him, offering him as much as he wanted.

The spaniel curled up in her basket with one of my shoes, one of his socks and a packet of biscuits, as if stockpiling. Every time I give her a treat she rushes outside to dig it into the garden. Tucking some essential treasures into her bed with her, she peeped back at me with soulful eyes. Cydney is sensitive. She knows something is up. The other spaniel, big, bear-like Poppy, is oblivious. She’s happy so long as the routine continues. We don’t see people at the best of times. We go to the field in the morning to feed the horses, come back, mooch about the house and garden. That’s our routine anyway. It’s the number of walkers that has changed. They were pouring in their hundreds along the footpaths and tracks until the authorities told people to stop it.

‘Get me Heygates on the phone! I need that order of pony nuts now, damn it!’ It was like a scene from a disaster movie, only at the country store. The owner’s son was yelling at staff. The car park was a seething mass of battered 4x4s. Men with walkie-talkies were corralling the panicking horse owners. Inside the main hanger of the store, women in jodhpurs were loading up nuts and chaff like there was no tomorrow. And indeed there would be no tomorrow, for a lot of ponies, if they didn’t stop bulk-buying horse feed. I heaved on to a trolley my usual sack of oaty mix, happily still in stock, a sack of the store’s own brand pony nuts from a dwindling pile almost at floor level, and a bag of Alfa-A.

The most exciting place on earth I have ever been to is the village where I live. And I don’t think I’m boasting to say that I’ve been to a lot of exciting places: Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza strip, Egypt, Korea, Crossmaglen, the Somerset Levels at high tide… My favourite dateline is ‘By Melissa Kite in Helmand’. But I’m also proud of the years I spent in a Portakabin at Stormont covering the Good Friday peace talks. I’m just saying, I’ve been posted all over the world so I’ve seen a few interesting places.

The game was up when I put on a pair of size 14 jodhpurs at the country store and they almost fit me. ‘No no no no no no no!’ I said, backing away from the mirror. The builder boyfriend looked over from where he was taking the blonde wig off a mannequin and putting it on his head in an attempt to entertain the other customers, who were not laughing at all. He is the worst shopping companion. I looked back at myself in the mirror. Never have I been bigger than a 10 and now it seems I have passed from 10 to 14 without even pausing at 12 and without so much as a word from my nearest and dearest.

One of the many technological things I don’t understand is, how come I’m paying to watch television? I know why I used to pay. I used to switch on a box in the corner of the room and marvel at the choice of three quite interesting programmes and something slightly racy on Channel 4. It was all reassuringly underwhelming, with everyone doing as well as could be expected given the circumstances. The cardboard sets on a lot of the shows wobbled and we were happier for it, one could argue. There was an obvious balance of earnestly attempted light entertainment and archly presented informative content and I for one didn’t mind paying a fee to the BBC for this arrangement because the BBC was providing precisely 50 per cent of it.

Nice of the NHS to send an advisory text about coronavirus, because I was wondering. Is it possible to have a touch of coronavirus? If so, the builder boyfriend and I suspect we may have had it, and fought it off. Out of nowhere, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t get any air into my lungs. The sensation was very like altitude sickness, as if someone was holding my shoulders down. This went on for several days until one night I threatened to take myself to casualty with a suspected heart attack. Being a committed hypochondriac, I got no sympathy at all from the BB, who told me not to be so stupid. I went off to the spare room in a huff and put myself to bed to die alone, telling him he’d be sorry when he woke up to find there was no one to wash and cook for him.

Mr Benn has been in touch because he wants a right of reply to an article I wrote about my horse insurance. Yes, I am aware that sentence makes no sense, but this is the world we live in. You may remember I was surprised to receive my insurance documents for Darcy the thoroughbred with a covering letter from the 1970s children’s TV character. For reasons I could not make out, my insurers had gone from being a reassuringly serious-looking outfit called Equine and Livestock to being called the Insurance Emporium in big loopy letters with a logo that was a bowler-hatted, waving Mr Benn. All things considered, the incongruity seemed fair game. So I cracked a few jokes about it in the pursuit of happiness.

Being told I am now both short-sighted and long-sighted feels like someone is playing a very bad joke on me. I would say I’ve always been as blind as a bat but I don’t want the Bat Society to complain. Lately, every time I go to the optician a different practitioner has what feels like a wild stab in the dark at changing my contact lens prescription so I can see near and far. Nothing works. And multifocal lenses produce the worst result of all, blurring everything no matter where I focus. I’ve had so many eye tests that when they put the Clockwork Orange headgear on me and start barking ‘Top line… middle line…’ I just recite the darn chart from memory. Which isn’t helping. So I had to admit I was doing that.

The builder boyfriend fell off a roof. He didn’t tell me until he could no longer leave unexplained why he was staggering about the house groaning, crawling up the annoyingly steep cottage stairs we have not been able to alter, and sleeping on the floor beside the bed clutching a packet of anti-inflammatories, as the spaniels slept happily in his space. His shoulder must be bad, because he allowed me to place an ice pack on it. For him, this was a humiliating foray into the realms of ‘making a fuss’, the sort of thing he fears a bearded hipster might do. The builder boyfriend likes to think he is invincible. And while he claims he would be happy to go, he says this is unlikely as he has it on good authority that he is going to live for a very long time.

Some might say it was a typical over-reaction on my part to erect hidden cameras at the horses’ field. First the theft from the barn of some broken old horse rugs, then the stolen feed, then a load of fly-tipping in the gateway, making it impossible to get in or out until the council came and cleared it… Some would have shrugged and said, ‘Well, these things happen.’ I nearly did that, by the way. Oh yes, I often try to think the best of the world, as an exercise, to balance out my instinctive cynicism. But on this occasion, after three incursions in the dead of night, I thought, ‘Hell, I’m gonna catch me some field intruders!

‘Time to begin your adventure with Mr Benn!’ said the letter that came through my door, in a big loopy red font, beneath a picture of a smiling, waving, bowler-hatted Mr Benn. And this would have been fine had I been a five-year-old whose mother had sent off for a box-set of classic Mr Benn, or tickets to Mr Benn World of Adventures. As it was, I stared at the letter trying to work out how this could be my new horse insurance policy. Quite aside from it mistakenly addressing me as if I was a toddler, what had the 1970s children’s TV character to do with horses? I couldn’t work it out. But there was Mr Benn on the top right-hand corner of my policy documents. And the letter began ‘Hello Ms Melissa Kite and Darcy.’ Yeah, Darcy can’t read.

My tech guy Andy appeared on the doorstep in a puff of smoke. I had just texted him to ask if he was still coming and as I typed the words I heard his footsteps outside. I raced to the door and opened it to find him standing, wizard like, amid a cloud of vapour. I sniffed. Mmm. Blackcurrant. He sucked a big guzzle of it in before stepping inside. He knows to stock up on nicotine ahead of an evening with me. He is having to service the surveillance cameras I have fixed in the trees at my horses’ field after two burglaries. You may remember the first was a truly baffling affair in which some broken old horse rugs were wheeled away from the barn in an ancient wheelbarrow with a flat tyre.