Real life

The doctor eyed me suspiciously as I walked into her consulting room. ‘Ye-es?’ she said, nervously, eyeing me up and down, after I knocked softly and entered apologetically, as I always do. Whenever I go to see her, my GP gives the impression of being taken totally by surprise, and put to astonishing inconvenience, by my seeking her opinion on a medical matter, even though she is advertising herself as a general practitioner and has, I am assuming, various qualifications in this field. ‘Ye-es?’ she said, looking mortified, terrified and outraged on every level as I made my way to the chair by her desk. She never says anything else by way of small talk or introduction, by the way. No ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ or ‘what can I do for you?

Foolishly, I have this wild notion that one day, if the stars align in my favour, I might be able to reduce my Sky subscription. I know, I know. What a crazy, idealistic dreamer I am. But I just feel it ought to be possible to watch television for less than a thousand pounds a year. I seem to remember, in the dark recesses of my brain, that once upon a time, far away in a wonderful utopia where TVs had big fat buttons, there used to be three channels with everything you wanted to see on them and no more bureaucratic or financial a nightmare to access this simple pleasure than paying a licence fee of a few pounds. Now the licence fee — inflated enough in itself — is the least of your worries as the payments to Sky grow bigger and more inexplicable.

Andy the tech guy looked delighted when I told him I had done the stupidest thing ever. He is one of those whizz kids who hungers for interestingly impossible technological problems. The more obscure the devastation I have wrought to a gadget the better he likes it. He was very excited when I blew the brains out of my laptop by opening 27 windows, then slamming the lid down without closing any of them. On that occasion, he ran a programme called a ‘Defraggler’, which I think must be like a defibrillator for laptops. He licked his lips as I sat down in front of him with the smashed BlackBerry. ‘This is hideously ruined, even by my standards,’ I said, placing the apparently dead phone in front of him.

You can’t always get what you want. And you can never get what you want if you want a phone with buttons. I’ve been nursing along an old BlackBerry. Well, I’ve been nursing a drawer full of old BlackBerrys. I began stockpiling them when the company started to nosedive and I realised I would soon be at the mercy of a touchscreen, trying to make my thumbs iPhone compatible. I don’t want to hear anyone tell me it will all become easier when I get used to it. My podgy hands will never reinvent themselves as precision speed-pokers, capable of pinpoint accuracy on a typepad of minute characters of such insane sensitivity that a syringe used to inject sperm into ovaries would have trouble hitting the right letter.

The ‘I’m Voting For Chuka’ posters in my rich neighbours’ front windows pushed me over the edge. There is nothing so likely to galvanise one’s inner Tory than the sight of the biggest, poshest houses in the neighbourhood displaying left-wing conceitedness. ‘Of course they’re voting Labour, they’re the only ones who can afford to,’ said the builder (boy)friend, who had popped round to my house for supper. I know, I know. It’s confusing. But we are always going to be on-off, so everyone is going to just have to deal with it. And he is a beacon of common sense at election time, I can tell you.

In the seemingly endless search for somewhere nice to live in modern Britain, where parking is not subject to martial law, I went house-hunting in the Surrey Hills. I began in the sleepy village of Holmbury St Mary, 15 minutes from where the horses are now kicking their heels up in a lovely livery yard overlooking Dorking. It was a sweet house. But in truth it would only have been practical if one could have built a lift from the roadside through the sheer hillside on which it was built, to cut out the 50 or so steep steps leading to the front door. I should explain that I had arrived with my friend Emily in tow, one of life’s natural born eccentrics. She is about to burst on to our screens in a reality TV show in which she goes missing and has to be hunted down.

‘I suppose,’ said my dad philosophically, ‘I could always vote Green.’ ‘Oh, for goodness sake! Not you as well!’ I screamed, as the entire restaurant looked round to see what manner of family crisis was brewing at our table. ‘Look, dad, it’s very simple. Do you agree with 60 per cent income tax?’ ‘Of course not,’ said dad, a look of deep concern on his face. ‘Well then. Enough of this “ooh, the Greens are harmless, aren’t they? They like animals and trees and they don’t have any particular views about anything important one way or the other so they wouldn’t make much difference.”’ Stop! The Greens are harmless the way Stalin was harmless.

As a wise person once said (or if they didn’t, they should have), there is only one thing worse than being wrong and that is being right. I always get peevish when I win. After being told I had triumphed in my three-year phantom car crash battle, I started to feel survivor guilt. It was all very well for me, embroiling myself in a gargantuan struggle for justice following a low-velocity car prang. I factor time into my schedule to wage war on the world. I complain about life for a living, so far as anyone can. But what about all those other poor motorists who are well adjusted people and don’t have the psychological flaws and deep-seated emotional problems to make them fight, and fight, and fight, until the vein stands out on the side of their head?

By and large, I’m not really sure the world is ready for me to join the steering committee of a community project in Lambeth seeking Lottery funding. It sounds like I might end up punching someone who is left-wing in an argument over how to spend public money. That said, I was mildly inspired when a disused cricket pavilion in my local park went up for tender and some stalwarts of the community started to have worthy ideas for its future use. They approached me to help and so I am considering how I could safely (for all concerned) become involved. I should explain, unless you happen to remember, that the last time I dabbled in activism in my south London neighbourhood, I almost ended up getting lynched.

After I phoned the Aviva call centre for the ten thousandth time, a girl called Adele had to sort it in the end. If she hadn’t, I would have climbed on to the roof of the House of Commons in an outfit made of Lycra, waving a banner bearing the legend ‘Drivers For Justice!’ The poor thing wasn’t too impressed with my hysteria at first. ‘Help me, please!’ I squawked into the phone. ‘I’ve been fighting these people who claimed I injured them when I hadn’t for three and a half years and this week the statute ran out on their claim — not just ran out, really ran out.

Farewell then, Cobham. You were the place I ran to when the metropolis became too much, and urban life overwhelmed me. You were to me a shining beacon of blandness in an otherwise frighteningly exotic world. I loved you and held you in mythical esteem. In times of disappointment, I yearned for you every bit as much as Margo Leadbetter did. ‘Cydney! We’re moving to Cobham!’ I would shout at the spaniel whenever Lambeth Council did something Marxist, which was often. We didn’t ever quite move to Cobham, but we kept the horses there. For nearly 15 years, this gave us a bolthole down the A3 to escape to, from Balham.

The builder boyfriend has a new girlfriend. I suppose he was bound to move on eventually. I just never thought he would move on this quickly. From the day I told him, in the traditional female way, that it really wasn’t working and never would work because of things that were entirely his fault, to the moment I heard he had a new squeeze, I would say it was three weeks tops. She’s nearly ten years younger than me. And, by the sound of it, a deal better off. Good for him. If I could have traded him in for a younger, richer model I might have. But we’ll never know, because I don’t have that option.

Darcy was obviously listening to every word I said. After we got back from the ride from hell, in which she threw the mother of all tantrums, she was very subdued. She stood in her box all afternoon looking sheepish, according to the groom. ‘We haven’t had a peep out of her,’ she said, when I arrived the next day. ‘She looked like she was in a state of shock.’ She was in a state of shock? Holy Moses. What about us? My friend Karl, as I explained last week, had agreed to swap horses with me mid-hack when Darcy starting playing up. I’m not easily scared but instead of going forwards as we started to canter she began rocking on the spot, as if threatening to unleash the most tremendous buck.

All was going suspiciously well with the thoroughbred. I suppose it had to be the calm before the storm. I bought Darcy as a yearling, you may remember, from the builder boyfriend’s mother, who has an eye for a horse and had picked her up in a sale. One day when visiting her yard I saw the little filly peeping over a stable door and got ‘a feeling’. Oh lord, please save me from feelings. After I took her home, she promptly jumped out of her field and landed on a fence post. We had to carry her on to the horse lorry to get her to Liphook equine hospital because she wouldn’t walk a step. Of course, once you have carried a horse on to a lorry to save its life you are bonded to the animal indefinitely.

My request to see my medical notes was granted in the end. I honestly don’t know why I wanted to see them, really. I’m just one of those people who suspects the worst of the state, and other large organisations, so if I get the chance to have a peek into what they’ve been up to behind my back I take it. This was my second Subject Access Request. The first was of the RSPCA, who I got a tad suspicious about after writing several critical articles and attracting weirdly sour-sounding complaints from them in which they claimed I was only criticising them because I was a supporter of hunting. That put my back up slightly. So I demanded to see everything in their possession that mentioned me.

My request to see my medical notes has sparked all-out panic at the GP surgery. ‘What do you mean?’ said the receptionist who answered the phone when I called to ask. She sounded even more furious than the time I rang to ask if I could possibly have an appointment to see the doctor. On that occasion, she affected her best Lady Bracknell impression, ‘The doctor? You want to see the doctor?’ ‘Well, yes if it isn’t too much trouble,’ I spluttered, as she audibly bashed her keyboard in ill-disguised rage at my impertinence. On this occasion, she was horribly icy. ‘I mean,’ I stammered, ‘I want to see my medical notes, as the law entitles me.’ ‘The law?’ she said. A haaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaand-bag!

Never add up your insurance premiums. I just did and the annual cost of all of them came to more than the cost of most man-made or natural disasters. That means there really isn’t any point to any of them, statistically speaking. The problem is I’m an insurance junkie. I’m a born cynic, a pessimist, a worrier. Someone only has to ask if I have ever thought what would happen if... (insert improbable but horrendous mishap: the dog ingesting a rare kind of lungworm, Russian separatists misfiring a rocket at eastern Ukraine that lands on my roof) ...and I’m ready to sign on the dotted line of any kind of lunacy. I’m a sucker for the promise of safety, security ‘and the peace of mind of knowing that in an emergency you and your loved ones...

‘Hello, Vodafone customer s..., can I h...you?’ This is typical, I thought. I’m ringing to complain about them charging me £137.08 for one phone call to directory inquiries and I can’t even hear them properly because the mobile reception they provide me with is so rubbish. ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’ ‘Y... I can h... you fine!’ ‘Well, I can’t hear you very well. Wait a minute...’ I got up from my desk and went to the front of the house, near the street. ‘That might be better. Can you still hear me?’ ‘Yes, I c... ... you fine!’ ‘Oh, never mind. Look, I want to ask you again about this phone call to 118 000 you’ve charged me £137.08 for.

‘Orange 1-1-8 thousand how may I help you?’ said the cheerful voice. Carefree as you like, I asked for the number for Sky customer services to report my parents’ broken digibox. This was back on Christmas eve morning. I had been walking the dog around Kenilworth Castle when my dad rang in a panic saying the Sky box had broken, and, well, we had rather hoped to watch some television over Christmas. So I took it upon myself to sit in my car and make a phone call to sort it out. But when I searched Sky’s website on my iPhone I could not find a number for customer services. I found numbers for all sorts of other things including ‘Report a deceased account holder’, but nothing at all for living account holders with deceased Sky boxes.

My iPad is dead, that’s what’s wrong with it. The plumage don’t enter into it. But since the blasted thing fell off its perch last November, it has somehow run up crippling excess data charges. At first, I could think of only two possible explanations: either my iPad was pretending to be dead, while secretly downloading movies it personally fancied watching, or the phone company was overcharging me. All I could say with any certainty was that the iPad had been lying on a shelf, insensible, unchargable, un-switch-on-able throughout December, and then I got a bill showing that during this period of total inactivity it had apparently racked up more charges than it had done in the entire two years I was using it.