Real life

My ponies may be psychic. I think they are communicating with each other telepathically. And before you call me delusional, let me tell you I have witnesses. It has happened three times now. The first time, I had taken Darcy on her first hack alone without Grace. Normally, a friend and I ride the pair of them out together. But on this occasion I had decided to get Darcy used to doing things for herself. I should explain that the two are very closely bonded. Despite being much smaller in stature, Gracie is a mother figure to Darcy because they were turned out in a field together when Darcy was growing up.

Clearly, I am going to have to report my broken mop handle to the authorities. It has been sitting outside my house for seven weeks now and the binmen have made clear their intention never to touch it. I understand there is such a thing as bulky waste. But truly, the mop handle minus its mop head with its business end broken so it cannot be reattached to another mop head refill is not at all bulky. It’s just a broken mop handle. I put it out with my wheelie bin in the hope that common sense might prevail. Naively, idealistically, I thought the binmen, or whatever they prefer to be called nowadays — refuse disposal technicians, waste and recycling coordinators — might take pity on me. Hell, I would go so far as to say I had a dream.

Every accident that happens to a horse is a freak accident. Rule number one. Once you grasp that as a horse-owner you are on your way to understanding the nature of the bind you are in. When Gracie went suddenly lame on a routine hack a few years ago, you may remember, it turned out she had trodden on a piece of old animal bone, which pierced the soft part of her foot. The bone fragment travelled upwards, turned right and sliced into her flexor tendon. The head surgeon at Liphook equine hospital emerged from his operating theatre that night to declare that the chance of an injury like that was ‘many hundreds of millions to one’. Holding the two-inch-long piece of bone fragment in a test tube, he declared himself well and truly impressed.

Draft and save. That is as good a New Year’s resolution as any. Never send an email or letter in anger. Always leave it a few hours. Sleep on it if you can. You know it makes sense. The same goes for notes through doors. I know this because I have been experiencing some intermittent next door neighbour noise. First, it was incessant dog barking. I went out of my house and peered over the wall of my neighbour’s house and, sure enough, sitting on the back of the sofa in the window was a pretty little dog barking his head off. ‘Sshhh! There, there, doggy. Don’t worry,’ I cooed at him, but he went on woofing. And so I shouted, ‘No! Be quiet! You mustn’t! Bad dog!’ He looked at me a little shocked, and stopped barking.

The countryside is all very well so long as you know you can leave it. Funnily enough, exactly the same can be said for the town. I realise I have spent the entire year trying to decide whether to sell up and move from London to the wilds of Surrey. Or stay put in Balham. I’ve spent more evenings on Zoopla than can possibly be healthy. And now I think about it, I guess the reason I have struggled so hard to make a choice is that town and country are dependent on each other to produce their own special magic. I cannot enjoy the country unless I know I can leave the mud, muck and gossip behind and escape to London. And I cannot enjoy London unless I know I can run away from the liberal lefties, abusive cyclists and endless box junctions to find solace in the mud.

After our spectacular season opener, the spaniel and I were on probation. Cydney, you may recall, retrieved a hen bird stuck in a stream but then ran off on a freelance flushing mission between drives. I thought it was rather a success, on balance. But the rest of the shoot begged to differ and judged her performance a net disaster. That said, we decided to give it another try and turned up at 9 a.m. the next week at the barn where all the pickers-up, beaters and guns were having coffee. We were not exactly welcomed with open arms. No one wanted to take us in their 4x4 to the first drive, least of all the head of the picking-up team, whom we normally stand with. He headed straight for his truck, without so much as a good morning.

The ambassador’s receptions are noted in society for their host’s exquisite taste that captivates guests. You know that, I know that. Anyone who enjoyed the cheesier television adverts of the early Nineties will know that. Imagine my excitement, therefore, when I received an invitation to a buffet supper at the real Italian Embassy. The friend who invited me was notified immediately that I accepted, and was very much looking forward to it. ‘See you at Ferrero Rocher House, 6 p.m. sharp!’ I said. ‘Let’s hope he really spoils us!’ And I hummed the old Ferrero Rocher theme tune.

Before I go any further, I would like to make clear that no animals were harmed in the making of this column. You might think that goes without saying, but I don’t take anything for granted when a woman I know has just been censured by the RSPCA for not providing her horses with a ‘comfortable’ place to lie down in their field. ‘What is she meant to do, give them four-poster beds?’ the builder boyfriend asks me when I tell him. Possibly. Or mattresses inside bespoke tents, like a Glastonbury VIP area. Never mind that horses don’t like enclosed spaces and prefer to sleep in the open. Even if you give them a shelter they often won’t go in it. Never mind that it is normal horse behaviour to lock their knees and sleep standing up.

Just before Cydney ran off and disgraced me on the first day of the shooting season, she covered herself in glory. This seems to be the way of things with spaniels. They are a bit like children in the sense that, so far as their public performances are concerned, they either fill you with pride or plunge you into an abyss of mortification. Before she decided to drop me right in it, the little dog performed a really difficult retrieve from a fast-flowing stream. A hen bird was wedged between some fallen branches underneath the current. The head of the picking-up team — who also happens to be the guy who bred Cydney and helped me train her — sent all three of his dogs in, one by one, but none of them could get it out.

What is the point of the Dangerous Dogs Act when there is a man marauding with an illegal pit bull in south London and the police are not arresting him? My friend rang me in hysterics recently after the beast all but savaged his little Patterdale terrier in Kennington Park. The pit bull picked him up in his mouth and started shaking him. When my friend slapped the pit bull with his umbrella, it let go of his dog, ran over to an old man, grabbed his Shitzu and shook that like a rag doll until it was pouring with blood. The old man fell over as he tried to save his dog and the pit bull owner screamed at him as he lay in the mud. My friend called the police, the guy grabbed his dangerous dog and ran off. When my friend next spotted them in the park he called the police again.

After four hours of driving, we should have been in the middle of Dartmoor. And yet we were not. We were pulled over in a lay-by and the infernal devil that is the iPhone satnav was wiping the floor with us. The iPhone has been stuck in groundhog day since we took it to Cornwall in the summer. Specifically, it is obsessed with Liskeard. Ever since we drove through there on the way to a holiday cottage it has been gripped by a strange determination to get itself back there that can only be described as psychotic. So strong is its neurosis that whenever I program it to take me somewhere in London, I set off from my house in Balham with the iPhone announcing: ‘Four hours and 46 minutes to arrival at… Liskeard!

My London flat now has so little space in it I’ve begun storing stuff at the dry cleaners. Back in May, I checked a huge winter quilt in at Viking’s and left it there until the weather turned colder. There just wasn’t anywhere, not a single spare nook or cranny, to put it and quite frankly I balk at renting a £100 a month lock-up at the Big Yellow Storage so I can keep a spare winter duvet. The man at the dry cleaners was quite cross when I turned up this week to claim it, pleading forgetfulness. He had a look that said he knew full well I had intended for my quilt to summer in the back of his shop. When he couldn’t find it he allowed me to come around the counter to look myself and there I found rack upon rack of duvets and quilts snuggly vacationing on his shelves.

As the maître d’ ushered me into the packed restaurant, I leaned in close and intoned softly, so as not to be heard by the elegant lady sitting nearby who was obviously my date, ‘I’m here to meet...’. And I nodded towards her as I said the name of my New York publisher. Yes, that’s right. New York. I’ve had fancy conference calls and everything. A lot of very bright Americans say a lot of lovely things to me down a phone line with a two second delay and I say ‘um’, and ‘oh, right’. And they sound confused that I don’t sound more excited by the prospect of a book of mine being published in the States. I am excited. But in a British way. Added to which reserve you have to factor in my unique brand of chaos.

A letter arrives from the lawyers handling my defence in the phantom whiplash injury claim. It is now coming up to three years since a singularly rough-hewn couple alleged I had incapacitated them by shunting my little convertible in a slow moving traffic queue into the back of their people carrier. I haven’t heard much from them since I appointed legal counsel and notified them of my intention to fight their claim all the way to the highest court in the land. They went a bit quiet after that, failing to submit all the necessary details setting out how and when they want to see me in court.

A crazy woman is living inside my head. It’s not just the normal crazy woman who camps out there from time to time and argues about parking tickets. It’s a new crazy woman who thinks she can avoid parking tickets by fighting men in the street. Physically, with her bare hands. Is this what they mean by ‘empowerment’? You will feel wonderfully empowered, they keep telling me. They being women who have been through the change of life before me. Well, all I can say is, if I go on getting any more empowered I am going to wind up in jail. In my latest adventure, I picked a fight with two burly cab drivers who were blocking the road outside my house. And just to be clear, I haven’t been taking any kind of testosterone supplement, which is apparently an option.

After a rush of blood to the head, I decided it might be a good idea to ask some awkward questions of the RSPCA. Oh no, I hear you cry. What fresh hell is this? Let me explain. I found out that the charity is pretty much closed to any kind of scrutiny. Unlike other powerful organisations, the police or government bodies, the RSPCA is immune to Freedom of Information requests. This would be fine if it were just handing out free veterinary care, but, as we know, it isn’t. The charity can investigate and prosecute a little old lady for failing to spot that her cat has a tumour, but neither I nor anyone else looking into why the RSPCA wants to do this, can investigate very far into them.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, looking my Slovakian friend in the eye. ‘You are going to go back to your own country because the healthcare here is no good?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is no good. Is terrible. I leave job and go home and sign on. I get treatment in Slovakia.’ I shook my head like a wet dog as if this might rouse me from a rum sort of surrealist nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was true. My Slovakian friend, who seems sane enough, has decided to leave Britain in search of a better life in Bratislava. I don’t know her that well, it is true. She’s a friend’s lodger. We have become acquainted over the months she has been living in his house in Surrey and she seems nice enough.

Incredible as it seems to me now, there was a time when a wolf whistle was annoying. A man would shout something approving from a scaffold and I would harrumph about my privacy being invaded, my gender not being respected, my dignity as an intelligent woman being violated. Then I got old and a wolf whistle made my day. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I knew I had turned a corner, gone over a hill and started to slip down the other side, so far as age was concerned, when I first heard a wolf whistle from a scaffold and, instead of feeling outraged, felt the sweet surge of hope. I remember standing there looking pathetically up at the builder in question, like a forlorn budgie, beseeching him to whistle at me again. Or, even better, shout something offensive about my rear end.

‘Hi I did Put it on It needed more’ is the pleasingly obscure haiku I find on my kitchen table. It is from Denise, one of the most wonderful people I know. To give Denise a title — such as cleaner, cleaning lady, home help — would be disingenuous or even downright rude. Because it is fair to say that, in the years I have been privileged to know her, I have not only had my flat cleaned by Denise, I have had my mind broadened, my spirit fortified and my soul set on a path to a place where she assures me I shall surely find peace when the judgment day comes. Denise, from Kingston, Jamaica, is a Jehovah’s Witness, though in all the time she has been coming to my flat she has never once left me one of those Watchtower leaflets on my kitchen table.

Strangely enough, I was in the middle of writing an article about the tactics used by the RSPCA when another animal charity knocked on my door. A young man holding a clipboard was standing on the doorstep, grinning enthusiastically: ‘Hello! I’m from Battersea Dogs Home.’ ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m a bit busy.’ Exposing animal welfare charities for preying on innocent people. I didn’t say that last bit out loud. ‘I just need to tell you,’ he said, ‘that we’ve got a big fundraising drive because a lot of dogs are being abandoned at the moment. And...’, he paused for dramatic effect, ‘...a lot of them have been tortured.’ ‘Tortured?