Real life

Whenever I try to use the NHS I end up feeling like Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense. No one can see me. It is as if I don’t exist. And unlike Dr Malcolm Crowe in the movie, I have not, as I wait in hospital and GP surgery queues, found an ally with a special gift which enables him to see me when no one else can. No one has ever come up to me and whispered: ‘I see sick people!’ Instead, I languish like a ghost in every south London minor injury clinic, A&E and doctor’s surgery. Recently, I received a letter informing me that my local GP surgery was closing and I would have to go elsewhere. While I was impressed that they had at least managed to acknowledge my existence by telling me to bugger off, I felt this was a bit of a cheek.

The builder boyfriend colicked for a week after eating a falafel kebab as he and I sat up all night with the colicking pony. And unlike the colicking pony, who was attended to by the vet and given intravenous Buscopan, the colicking builder boyfriend moaned and groaned in agony, untreated. If he had a GP he couldn’t remember who or where it was. He has not sought any kind of healthcare, nor seen the inside of a hospital, since a gang of thugs broke both his arms when he was a ten-year-old boy growing up on the mean streets of Balham. (That was the real Balham, before the independent hipster cafés came with their nut-milk lattes and sustainable sourdough fritters garnished with locally foraged pea-shoots.

One look at Grace when I went to get her in from the field, and I knew she had eaten herself to the verge of oblivion. Leaving the horses kicking their heels up in the field, while we went to France for a break from them, was always going to have mixed results. This is because, like Jack Sprat and his wife, one eats too much while the other eats too little. While Darcy the thoroughbred picks daintily at the grass, the pony is as greedy as Mr Creosote in Monty Python. I have known Gracie to eat so much she has burped. And horses, it is well known, cannot burp. It is physiologically impossible. I have thought about ringing David Attenborough and telling him I have the world’s only belching pony. He wouldn’t believe it unless he witnessed it.

The colourful banners at the Eurotunnel terminal at Calais spell out the words Treat Shop Relax Refresh Eat. But it would be more truthful if they said Queue Panic Scream Scavenge Fight to the Death. For reasons best known to the French authorities, there is only one restaurant inside the Eurotunnel building at Calais and that is a small Burger King. Now, consider that you have hundreds of hungry travellers arriving in this place, and all of them have either grown used to excellent French food during a holiday, or they are habitually accustomed to it as standard because they are French. Now add to that the fact that, due to heightened security, there are three-hour delays to all departures. Now add to that the fact that there is no air-conditioning, for unexplained reasons.

Market day in Bergerac and the streets are paved with chicken bones. As a spaniel, I am bound to say this is as near to paradise as one can get. From the doorway of every shop there wafts the aroma of happiness. I pull to go inside each doorway as we pass. She pulls me back out. But at the open-air market there is endless opportunity. While she looks at one wicker basket after another, I lick the ground for whatever may be there, which is always something utterly delicious. Tiny morsels of goat’s cheese, bits of salami, globs of duck pâté, and the gizzards — oh the gizzards! The very essence of utopia. I wonder if anyone has thought of this as an advertising campaign. Duck guts — the taste of paradise! I might write to the duck companies.

Bonjour mes amis! Cydney spaniel ici, en France! Well, the Eurotunnel was very nice, although the dog departure lounge could have been grassier. I’m not a fan of AstroTurf. Doesn’t hold a scent very well. No one checked my passport either. Mummy passed it through the window with hers and his as we went through, but the French police laughed and said they didn’t want it. What a cheek. Mummy was cross because it cost over a hundred pounds. Hopefully they will check it on the way back so we can get our money’s worth. The other passengers were friendly. There were a few dachshunds and a Hungarian vizsla in the dog-agility area, stretching their legs before departure. No sarcastic growls about Brexit.

‘Of course, there will be no air quality now,’ said a friend, shaking her head over my support for Brexit. ‘You what?’ ‘Air quality,’ she said. ‘Or green belt. Or Sites of Special Scientific Interest, preserving the countryside and wildlife... All those really good EU regulations have all gone now.’ ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I started to feel exasperated, inwardly thinking, ‘Uh-oh, here goes another friendship...’ ‘All those EU regulations safeguarding everything. All gone. No more air-quality rules. No more SSSIs.’ ‘So you’re saying Brexiteers have ruined the air now, are you? That’s where we are up to with the scaremongering? No more air now we’re out of the EU.

We fled Balham after the result, having been outed as the only Leave voters in Lambeth. The builder boyfriend and I packed our possessions into the Volvo and headed for the safety of a friends’ house in Hampshire. ‘Come on, quick, leave the bloody third pair of wellies, just bring the essentials,’ said the BB as he lifted the spaniel into the boot. We took bedding and towels and baskets of tinned goods in case we decided it was too risky to return, and that the only option was to keep fleeing. Maybe we would just keep driving until we found a cottage for sale. We might put in an offer and camp until the sale went through, and I would take whatever I could get for the flat and sod the loss of equity.

The cottage in Surrey has fallen through, for the time being at least. Maybe I am going to be a country girl again at some point, but for now it’s looking like I will have to remain a while longer in Bal-ham, gazing longingly towards the south. The owners of the cottage in Ripley pulled out, after I failed to sell my flat quickly enough. To be fair, I had promised I would be under offer within days, because that is how it has always been before. I have had the place on the market twice in the past two years, and both times it was snapped up in a matter of hours at the asking price. On those occasions, I was then not able to negotiate the right price on the property I was trying to buy. So I decided this time to get an offer accepted first, then put my flat on the market.

‘This EU passport is an outrage. I want a British one!’ Not my words, Cydney’s. The spaniel is coming round to my way of thinking on the EU referendum after visiting the vet’s to get the necessary paperwork for her forthcoming trip to the Dordogne — or Dor-DOG-ne, as she prefers to call it. After spending a small fortune on her bed and board at the dogsitter the last time I went away, I decided she would come on holiday with me this summer. As soon as I have cast my Leave vote on 23 June, I shall be packing us into the Volvo and heading for the Eurotunnel and a lovely break in a gite in France. If the result of the referendum is that we are to remain in the EU, I shall be doing a spot of house-hunting while I am there too.

Would you like a Labour party manifesto with your breakfast?’ the tattooed, multi-pierced waitress might as well have asked as she served me the most left-wing breakfast in the world. What on earth is going on when Balham becomes so avant-garde that it negates the very reason a curmudgeon like me moved there — to be as far as possible from the trendy, liberal intelligentsia that rules most of London? If I had wanted my local cafés decked out in reclaimed wood and serving quinoa specially flown in from the Amazon rainforest on Air Hypocrisy, then arranged on a pile of pea shoots according to a recipe by Gwyneth Paltrow, I would have settled in Islington. Instead, I think I’m safe in crumbly old Balham, with its Caribbean market and pound stores.

Turns out you can’t eat grass. A horse does something clever to it in its mouth that humans can’t. Fine, so it was an absolutely ludicrous thing to do. But I blame the ex-builder boyfriend (who is not an ex-builder, he’s an ex-boyfriend, for those who have queried that). He and I were in Tara’s field, assessing whether the retired mare was in danger of laminitis, when the ex-BB said: ‘Trust me, this grass is sweet. Taste it.’ And for reasons I barely understand, I knelt down, plucked a handful of grass, put it in my mouth and chewed. ‘Ooh, it’s delicious!’ I exclaimed, for truly it was tastier than a gourmet salad. I then got carried away and instead of spitting, I swallowed. Oh yes, very funny. I know. The BB laughed and laughed.

After a tense two week stand-off, the Balham Airbnb Crisis has been resolved. My upstairs neighbour and I have drawn back from the brink. He has agreed to let me station bed and breakfast guests in my main bedroom. I have agreed to pay slightly higher building insurance contributions. By the time we signed the new direct debit forms, we had brought Balham to the brink of world war three. The biggest irony is, now it’s all sorted, I’m not so sure I want to do Airbnb. I’m not sure my nerves will stand it. My latest guest, a girl from Taiwan, arrived on Sunday afternoon when I was out doing the horses. I had hidden a key and messaged her to call me when she got there. I talked her through where the key was, and though it took her quite a while, she found it.

Some people call their house Dun Roamin’ to sum up their state of mind. After ten weeks ministering to my horse’s tendon strain, I’m thinking of putting up a sign outside my house saying Dun Bandagin’. Wrapping Darcy’s front legs painstakingly morning and night for several months has been an interesting experience. In a way I shall miss it because it has taken me out of my own worries, apart from the main one, which is sinking into horse-induced poverty after attempting to train Darcy for the racetrack. I’ve said it before, or if I haven’t I ought to have: a thoroughbred is like a Porsche 911 — when it’s going well you think it’s the only car in the world it makes any sense to own.

Hello, Cydney spaniel here. She’s lying in a darkened room so I’m to tell you what happened. To cut a long and very shaggy dog story short, the car failed its MOT. And we had to use public transport. I’ve been telling her that Volvo is shaking like no doggy’s business when she brakes, but will she listen? Turns out the suspension is shot to pieces. So she leaves the car with a mechanic in the country, near where the horses are, and tells me we’re getting a ‘train’ home. My best mate, the gamekeeper, drives us to the station where we walk up and down a lot of steps. There is a sign by the steps saying ‘Proud to be working with the RSPB to give nature a home at this station.’ This seems a bit silly to me.

Buffy Sainte-Marie said it best. ‘The lights of town are at my back, my heart is full of stars./ And I’m gonna be a country girl again.’ At least, I hope I am. But if I do manage to pull off this long-awaited move to the country, it will all be thanks to a Spectator reader. It was years ago now, I had a very nice letter from a gentleman who lived in the Surrey village of Ripley, about ten minutes from Cobham, who recommended that I move there. That must have been stored away in the annals of my brain, but deep in the annals, because, after scouring Cobham and finding nothing I could afford, it still didn’t occur to me. I went way down the A3 and looked for land around Farnham and found a cottage with no central heating and one acre for £720,000.

The gloves are off in my battle with the two brothers who live in the flat upstairs. They have just socked me a brutal left hook. And so no more am I going to be the neurotic, menopausal fruitcake downstairs. From now on I am going to unleash my difficult side. It’s a shame, because when they first moved in I thought they were going to be the neighbours I had always dreamed of: handsome and polite, with a look of dread in their eyes whenever I banged on their door. When I explained that the wheelie bin must be put out at right angles to the kerb at 8 p.m. sharp on Wednesday night, they did it. When I told them they had better not clank about in high heels they said they wouldn’t.

The cottage of my dreams (or possibly worst nightmares) proved rather difficult to purchase, not least because the agent selling it did not want to sell it. You may remember he showed me round by plodding dolefully between the cramped rooms in his long dark overcoat like an undertaker, shaking his head at the water-damaged walls and lack of central heating. When I asked about sanitation, he brightened up momentarily: ‘It’s on a CESS!’ Usually these people finesse it with some tasteful euphemism about tanks, but he was determined to make the place sound as hideous as he could. When I said it was just what I was looking for, he recoiled, as if I had actually opened the ‘CESS!

I am becoming the Basil Fawlty of Airbnb. Almost everything that tormented Basil has tormented me since I started taking in guests. I am thinking of nailing up a sign saying Kitey Towers, with the ‘y’ askew. If you don’t know what Airbnb is: some whizz-kid in America hit upon the idea of charging people to sleep on an airbed in his New York apartment. He started a website. You register your home, put up photos, and choose guests you think you will get on with. I’ve had customers from Australia, New Zealand, America, Spain. But while they are usually delightful, I have often felt myself bristling like Fawlty at the sheer cheek of the paying public.

My adventures in penury land me with two job applications on my screen, one for MI6, one for Sainsbury’s. Do I become a spy, or stack shelves in a supermarket? The vacancies are on a recruitment site called Indeed, one after the other: Counter Assistant, Sainsbury’s. Intelligence Officer, London. Just like that. I began googling jobs in a panic because embarrassing things started to happen. For example, a friend who runs a tack shop gave me a broken bag of feed for the horses, saying, ‘Please, take it, I can’t sell it. Really, you’d be doing me a favour.