Real life

One thing Lorraine Kelly does not say in the Wayfair advert is: ‘What if I fancy getting my money back for an item that hasn’t arrived?’ I guess they’ve only got 30 seconds, and it’s a wee bit complicated. This is a shame because I’ve always rather enjoyed myself on Wayfair. When the wrong bed arrived, they set about despatching so many beds to me that I ran out of storage space until the right one randomly materialised. So when it came to ordering a new mattress for another bed I returned for more, thinking that if it went wrong I might get deluged in the EU mattress mountain. The mattress didn’t appear, reliably enough, and I got an email a few days later saying it had not been despatched from the supplier.

The travellers were blamed for fly-tipping when all that was left on the common after they went back up north were some neat piles of mulched bark and branches. Of course, they should not have left anything, ideally. But I’m not convinced they didn’t cut back the overgrowth to get their caravans parked, improving a meadow which was hideously unkempt after years of neglect by the local authorities. All travellers are not the same, any more than all ‘insert racial group’ are all the same. You wouldn’t get away with labelling any other community as all bad, therefore when travelling people behave well it should be celebrated. Instead, the authorities did their best to paint them as antisocial. The notice cancelling the fête was left up for weeks.

The village fête had to be cancelled because of what they called an ‘incursion’ on to the green. The way the local paper told it, an ‘unauthorised encampment’ put an end to the annual summer event that would have raised money for charity. Actually, as I watched from my bedroom window, what happened was that the organisers of the fête arrived the day before to set up, unlocked the padlock on the gate leading onto the green, and left it open. Our visitors then simply followed them in. The police were called, arriving with amazing speed in lavish numbers, and the new arrivals agreed to move to the back meadow and park their caravans there so the fête could go ahead. But the notice went up anyway: ‘Fête cancelled.

‘Ah well, it can’t be helped,’ said the builder boyfriend. I call people who talk like that civilians. Nut jobs like me can’t process misfortune in such a way. He shouted and screamed for two days about the accident and then he just got over it. ‘Ah well, it can’t be helped,’ he said, after telling me his insurance company was accepting liability. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘Before you take the blame for the whole thing, you did tell them a police car drove the wrong way down the street, the car in front of you slammed on its brakes and you went into the back of them? You did tell them you have witnesses who saw the patrol car, never mind what the police are saying about it never having been there?

For a while, it seemed as if the only words my beloved would ever say again were ‘chicken Kievs’. Two hours of operating a strimmer to clear the undergrowth from the electric fencing around my field had left the builder boyfriend either deaf or so hungry he could only think about his favourite meal. Every question I asked elicited the same two words, until I thought the best thing was to get him home and feed him chicken Kievs. So I hurried to the One Stop and swept every pack they had off the shelves. He sat down at the table looking peculiar and ate his way through four breaded chicken breasts laced with garlic butter, one after the other. Then he looked up and started to converse normally.

Not going to the osteopath worked a treat. Walking out of that surgery after hearing the crunching coming from inside the consulting room while another patient was being done proved to be just the cure I needed. Now, I want to make absolutely clear before we go any further that I am not about to insult osteopaths. General Osteopathic Council, stand down. Individual enraged osteopaths, replace your receivers. Do not start dialling the switchboard. Do not begin composing emails beginning: ‘Dear Sir, I wish to express in the strongest possible terms…’ Relax. There is no need to complain. Let me say for the record: I support practitioners of alternative medicine; I couldn’t be more complimentary about complementary cures. I applaud osteopaths.

Either the osteopath is a psychopath or he is the second coming. I see no other possibility. I turned up on the doorstep of his surgery feeling demented from the pain that has been gnawing at the base of my skull relentlessly for two weeks. All I had done was to duck under the tape of my horses’ field, a movement I have performed a thousand times. But this time, as I turned my head momentarily upside down, something pinged and my skull exploded into the worst headache ever. It was so bad I wrapped my head in a coat and became, like Tchaikovsky, possessed by the theory that it was going to fall off. Holding on tight with both hands, I made the builder boyfriend drive me to the GP surgery. The doctor was supremely unimpressed.

Remainers don’t like borders, I get that. But I had always assumed this was a preference confined to geopolitics. I had assumed that when these people got home they barricaded themselves in their houses and let no one over the threshold they didn’t completely trust like the rest of us. But perhaps they are not such hypocrites after all. For as the builder boyfriend found out when he was on a job the other day, it seems the eccentric dislike of borders permeates some people’s everyday lives. ‘Please leave the gap in the fence,’ was the instruction given to him by a well-to-do Londoner who had secured his services to put a new fence in her garden. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. I’ve got one more panel to put in.

‘Take a seat,’ said the prospective lodger as we stood in my dining room. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sit down while we discuss things,’ he said, producing a folder which he waved at me. Something was wrong here, even I could work that out. ‘Discuss things? What things?’ I asked, backing up a bit because he was a big fella — 6ft something, lanky, with long unkempt hair that made him look like a premiership footballer after a bad night out. He advanced towards me with his folder. I backed into the dining-room table. The builder boyfriend was going to go mad. He had told me not to do viewings when he wasn’t there.

When is planning permission for four loft windows actually planning permission for two? Or simultaneously vice versa? It’s a very tricky question. After spending a week in the nine circles of hell that constitute local authority planning, I have narrowed my loft conversion problems down to two possible options. Either I’d got planning permission for four windows and it was revised down to two, or I’d got planning for two windows and it was revised up to four. Half the planning department at the local council think it was the former and half the latter. Building Control, meanwhile, said they always bow to planning. In other words, they think it’s two and four. It all started with a note from my architect when the permission came through two years ago.