Real life

This horse-rearing business is not for the faint-hearted. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought an eight-month-old filly out of the racing industry. Well, I wasn’t thinking, was I? I went to see the Builder Boyfriend’s mother one Sunday for a nice trip out. She owns a small private yard in Sussex and had just picked up a few acquisitions from the sales. The Builder had asked her to get him a driving pony and, as the pair of them looked over the stable door at the speckled blackand-white cob he was going to hook up to a trap, I made the fatal error of looking in the next stable. A little bay foal put her head over the door and said hello. And that was it.

‘Question 2. In which year did the Berlin Wall come down?’ shouted the quizmaster. And then he repeated this with dramatic pauses, as quizmasters are apt to do: ‘In which year…did the Berlin Wall…come down?’ ‘Oh, yeah!’ said the youngest person in our team. ‘I just got that!’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she said, with a huge grin on her face. ‘1989,’ hissed one of the team members. ‘Yup, 89, definitely,’ whispered another member. ‘I remember because I’d just got divorced and I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway and…’ But the youngest member of the team was still having something of an epiphany. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she kept exclaiming.

My gay best friend is cheating on me with another woman. I saw him with her the other day and now I’m prostrate with grief and shock. I don’t think I will ever be able to bring myself to forgive him. Even if he begged me to come back to him, we can never be the way we were. I don’t even know how to tell him I know about the affair. He is carrying on as if he doesn’t know that I have found out. All I keep thinking is: ‘How could he do this to me? How? After everything we have been through? The long discussions about Botox, the episodes of Kath & Kim, the endless gossiping...I wouldn’t mind so much, but the gay marriage law was already making it harder than ever for sad, forty-something single women like me to hang on to their gay best friends.

A letter arrives from David Cameron, asking me to vote by post in the European elections. Presumably he means vote by post for the Tory party. The letter has a postal ballot application form all filled out with my name and address. I just have to sign and return it in the envelope provided. ‘Apply for a postal vote today and help us secure an EU referendum… If I am Prime Minister after the next general election, there will be an in-out referendum by the end of 2017. This is my personal pledge to you…Yours sincerely, David Cameron.’ I stare for a long time at this letter feeling strange, conflicting emotions. The main thing that hits me is this: things are obviously much worse for the Conservatives than I had thought.

The look on her face said it all. I can always tell my friend Denise is upset about something when she is sporting an especially wide grin. Denise is from Jamaica and is a devout Jehovah’s Witness. She takes most catastrophes by being alarmingly cheerful about them because they just go to prove that the end is nigh. Whenever I am with her and something goes wrong, she invariably laughs and exclaims: ‘No good, Mey-lissah!’ She then treats me to a lecture about how wicked the world is and how the day of judgment is coming any day now. I’m inclined to agree with her most of the time. And this time was no exception. I had invited Denise to Surrey for a day in the country. I keep promising her I will put her on a horse.

‘Quick, let’s slip one in the menu,’ said the builder, taking a leaflet from my handbag after we had paid the bill at the pavement café where we had just had lunch. As he did that, I put one inside the menu on the next table, which was empty, and the table beyond that. As we walked down the high street, I slipped a bunch into one of those property magazine holders outside an estate agents. Then we passed a community noticeboard on a wall. The builder slid a leaflet through a gap in the glass door. ‘Good one,’ I said. Then I put a stack of them on a cashpoint machine. This week, I have mostly been distributing leaflets emblazoned with the legend Say No To A New Town At Wisley.

‘Please, I beg of you, take me to see André,’ was my mother’s heartfelt plea. And so it was that we turned up at Wembley Arena — she, my father and I — to experience the global phenomenon that is André Rieu. André Rieu is a Dutch violinist and conductor who tours the world staging big venue classical concerts featuring all the popular classics you most want to hear. But that description really doesn’t do him justice. You cannot possibly grasp what André Rieu is and does before you see him in action. When you see him perform live with his Johann Strauss Orchestra you realise he is not so much a violinist and conductor as a force of nature. His name could be a verb, if it were not so unpronounceable.

Seeing a poodle on the London Underground wearing a red vest with the words ‘Diabetes Medical Dog’ has given me an idea. I have been trying to think of a job for my working cocker spaniel. Currently she is employed one day a week during the shooting season, picking up pheasants. She likes the work and has a great talent for it. I was advised to get her into employment as soon as possible because working cockers are renowned for needing an occupation. They like to have their brains tasked and little Cydney is no exception. If I don’t give her something to do, she finds something to do and that can be problematic. When she was just two, I discovered a pile of all the important letters I had never received, but people swore they had sent me, behind the living room sofa.

Drip, drip, drip. The noise of my downstairs London conversion flat, where the plumbing was fitted by turn-of-the-century sadists who booby-trapped the building so that if the upstairs neighbours ever dared to try to re-fit their bathroom, they would unleash a leak and never, ever be able to find the source. Drip, drip, drip. The water drips from their bathroom, through my ceiling into my bathroom through the middle spotlight of the false ceiling, which is now camouflage-patterned with damp patches and horrible yellow watermarks, into a big red bucket. Drip, drip, drip. It is like Chinese water torture. It started when the two brothers upstairs (I mean siblings. I’m not using the slang for black guys, before anyone gets too excited) put in a new bathroom a few weeks ago.

Don’t do it. Do not, whatever you do, even think about doing it. I was happy not doing it. And then I weakened and did it. And now I am living to bitterly regret it. I speak of switching my broadband provider, of course. Like any ‘switch’, it promised to be many things — cheaper, faster, shinier — and turned out to be a living nightmare. What made it worse was that my BT service was very good. It was expensive, but it worked. I remember the fateful day I decided to ditch it. I knew deep down it was the wrong thing to do. I loved you, BT broadband. You weren’t superfast fibre-optic. But I loved you all the same. Then I had a rush of blood to the head and decided to ring Sky to ask whether I could get a cheaper TV package.

‘How often do you de-frag this?’ said the Good Geek in the phone shop. I had gone in finally to buy an iPhone. Trembling, I produced my laptop so we could download some software and save all the contacts in my BlackBerry and then port them back over to the new device. Or something. The Good Geek is so called because, unlike the other whizz kids who look at me like I’ve got two heads when I come in and ask for ‘a phone with buttons’, he always tries to help me. But he still terrifies me. He had only had my laptop open a few seconds before he typed something into it that made it display its brains all over the screen.

‘Hello, I’d like my money back, please,’ I said to the nice lady on the other end of the line. And if the nice lady on the other end of the line had been working for anyone other than a utility company, I would probably have had my money back a few moments later. As it was, my request to be refunded the £113 that my gas and electricity accounts were in credit triggered a journey into the first circle of hell (limbo). ‘Right,’ said the lady, after I had given her my meter readings, which bore out the fact that my gas account was in credit by £88.13 and my electricity by £25. ‘I see you are due an assessment in March. If, at that time, you are still in credit, you can ask for the amount to be refunded then.’ I tried again.

Just the three resolutions for me. I am keeping it simple. Number one: no more boyfriends. The definition of insanity is repeating the same mistake while expecting a different result and I have been repeating this particular mistake for 42 years. The truth is, I cannot do romance. I am elated to finally discover this and move on. The evening after it all finished with the builder, a friend rang me to see if I was alright. His tone intimated he thought I might have my head in the oven. In fact, I had my meal-for-one in the oven and I was in the best mood I had been in for several years. ‘How are you coping?’ asked the friend, his voice grave with compassion. ‘Fantastic!’ I whooped. ‘Did you know you can get little fish pies for £3.99 from Waitrose?

A very cross letter arrives from someone who wants to tell me I’m a ‘silly woman’. ‘You are a silly woman,’ says the letter. It is from a lady called Mrs Inglis who lives in Edinburgh but gives no more exact address or email so that I can reply. If I could reply, I would write back and say: ‘Dear Mrs Inglis, Of course I’m a silly woman. That’s kind of the point.’ Mrs Inglis also sends me a copy of my own article. She sends it to me, in the post. She has cut it out of the magazine and put it in an envelope. This is not the first time such a thing has happened. When I was a political correspondent on the Telegraph I was inundated with people sending me my own articles on a daily basis.

Emmylou Harris and the McGarrigle sisters wrote a song called ‘All I left Behind’. My version is called ‘All They Left Behind’ and is a sort of inventory of my life, according to the items left in my flat when relationships have ended. Tea cups from Tim, a coffee bean grinder from Jim, T-shirts from Francesco, and a goose-down pillow from Ed. It doesn’t scan very well, but I’m sure Emmylou could make something of it. Some might call it sad that my romantic history comes down to the reverse of a wedding list. But actually, it’s not that sad. The bean grinder is terrific, although, to be strictly accurate, Jim didn’t really leave it. He came to pick his stuff up and I hid it.

Everything is a journey now, especially if it involves failure. The X Factor rejects, people having disasters as they build their own homes on Grand Designs, they’re all on a journey. ‘It’s been an incredible journey,’ they say, watery-eyed as they reflect on what is, in truth, a shameful mess of their own making. Very much in this vein, a new communication from Lambeth Council has come through my door explaining ‘the recycling journey’. Bear with me, because I want you to come on this journey in order to fully grasp the beautiful symmetry of what Lambeth has achieved. Imagine a flow chart made up of eight photographs.

The builder boyfriend and I have had a terrible row. In the heat of the moment, I said something truly awful to him that may have done irreparable damage. It wasn’t entirely my fault. I haven’t been sleeping. And when I haven’t been sleeping I become irrational. Fine, I become more irrational. Suddenly, the other night, I fell asleep while lying on the sofa watching CSI Special Victims Unit. The overcomplicated plot acted like a powerful anaesthesia and I found myself drifting into precisely the sort of deep, blessed sleep I have been craving for months. Before I drifted off, I had asked the builder to run me a bath.

‘Do you know...?’ said the Tory MP I was sitting next to, as he tried to introduce me to the transport secretary. But the transport secretary didn’t even wait until the Tory MP said my name. The transport secretary starts turning a funny colour whenever he sees me. On this occasion he hurried past saying, ‘Ah ha ha yes ha ha ah, erm…’ Before he got past, I grabbed his hand and shook it. I suppose I wanted to assure him that the small matter of him putting a high speed railway past my parents’ back garden needn’t necessarily mean he has to run across the Savoy ballroom. Or look like he wished a tunnel would open up and swallow him.

Like the heroine in Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, I stood in front of it with my mouth open in awe. It was a ship in the earth. I was looking at the tip of a flying saucer protruding from a field where it had become wedged thousands of years before after crash-landing. I had been walking across the farmland at the back of my parents’ house with the builder boyfriend and Cydney the spaniel when we came across it. Let me paint the picture: mile upon mile of rugged countryside stretched in every direction. Stubble fields were lit by a magical golden light. Cows ambled around grassy meadows.

Blind panic grips me at the thought that all over Britain there are people sitting in cosy home offices operating gizmos with ease. I imagine I am the only person alive who can’t print out something from an email without getting in my car and driving to a small shop with no name on Streatham High Road, where a monosyllabic gentleman in Islamic dress will allow me to log on to one of his ancient reconditioned desktop computers and send the document I want to print to his printer, and who will then slap the few stray sheets down on the counter with a look of disdain and ask me for £9.50.