Real life

‘Dealing with a bruised soul’ is how I read the headline on the front of Horse Scene magazine. When I looked closer, the actual headline was ‘Dealing with a bruised sole’. But sometimes you see what you feel. I turned to the article anyway, because I do, in fact, have a horse with a bruised sole. According to Horse Scene, a bruised sole can happen as quickly as stepping on a stone. (I imagine that a bruised soul can happen just as easily, but that is where my knowledge of the matter begins and ends, because there are no magazines on the shelves of Farrants newsagents in Cobham with articles on bruised souls, so far as I can see, which is a shame.) Gracie, the skewbald hunter pony, has a bruised sole precisely because she stepped on a stone.

The man at the next table looked down at my fidgeting spaniel and shook his head. ‘Not trained,’ he said. How rude. There I was, having a quiet drink with my friend at the local pub, when the man at the next table decided to give me some unsolicited advice about how to control my dog. There is nothing worse than unsolicited advice about techniques of cocker spaniel stewardship. As any cocker spaniel owner knows, if you manage to train one not to leap out of too many third floor windows, then you are doing well. I have to admit, however, that the man at the next table had some right to intervene. Cydney was driving the pub mad by whimpering and wriggling at my feet.

As well as buying vinyl records, I have begun collecting three-dimensional books constructed of paper that you hold in your hands and operate manually by turning their pages over. I buy them from bookshops. There are a few of these emporiums scattered across the country. My favourite one is called My Back Pages in Balham, and it has just put up a sign saying that it is closing down. This means I have only weeks to ransack its cramped shelves to loot them of all the books I have ever seen in there that I want to own. I contemplated telling the nice Irish man who runs it that I will order a lorry and simply take away the lot.

Are you stressed? Do you worry that your stress levels are not normal? Do you fret that your reactions to everyday situations are an indicator of your total inability to cope with modern existence? Then why not take my handy personal stress self-assessment test? It’s easy, fun and at the end there will be an opportunity to review your score and get totally unprofessional advice about what your stress levels mean and what you should do about them. Here we go. Question One: You open your eyes. It is not yet 6 a.m. and the dog is slapping your face with her paws.

One of my favourite things to do is to visit the field where Tara, my bad-tempered chestnut hunter is retired because there, I know, I will find like-minded company. We are two obstreperous mares together. Never happy to concede defeat on the smallest of issues where a long, arduous battle might get us absolutely nowhere, we are two of a kind. When I bought her more than ten years ago, the friend who spotted her in Horse and Hound and went with me to try her out warned me: ‘You’re quite alike. I’m not sure if that will always be a good thing.’ She was right. Tara could handstand with her back legs so high in the air that her tail flicked over my head and brushed my face.

‘We hate Tottenham!’ If they had shouted it once they had shouted it 100 times. I wasn’t sure why, as we were watching Chelsea v. Basel. But I knew enough about a girl’s place at a football match not to turn to my male companion and ask what would no doubt turn out to be a stupid question. I love going to Stamford Bridge, just every now and then, you understand. I know nothing about any of it. I have never claimed to understand the offside rule. But every so often, when a male friend invites me, I dust off my Chelsea shirt. I find the action on and off the pitch affords one the most fascinating glimpse into human behaviour. In the past, I have had to sit in the corporate seats because that is where the ex-broker boyfriend always sat.

Sometimes, the answer only becomes clear when you stop trying to work it out, and give in to the incongruity of things. I was buying some shopping at Sainsbury’s in Balham. I picked a check-out where the conveyor belt was empty and the cashier looked as if she was waiting for the next customer. But as I started to unload my shopping, she looked up, shook her head and said: ‘Not closed.’ ‘You’re closed?’ I said, thinking that must be what she meant. ‘Not closed,’ she insisted. So I went on unloading my shopping. Upon which she shouted, ‘Not closed!’ and motioned at me to take my shopping back off the belt. ‘Not closed?’ I asked. ‘Not closed,’ she said.

Such a tiny creature would not be any trouble, I decided. And so I got the idea, at the beginning of the winter, that it might be all right to leave a mouse in my garden shed. It was such a cute mouse with the twitchiest whiskers. It had burrowed into a sack of Chudleys Original dog biscuits and was also making use of the bale of Easy Pack straw I had stored there for the rabbits. It was perhaps naive of me to imagine that this creature intended to live a monastic life of splendid isolation, feasting on dog food, sleeping the sleep of the righteous in the chopped straw and perhaps, for diversion, browsing through some of the newspapers lining the plastic recycling box holding the dog biscuit bag. But it was on this basis that I granted him leave to remain while the weather was inclement.

Having diagnosed myself with diabetes, I demanded the doctor run a full set of blood tests. Just to confirm what I already knew, you understand. I was weak, dizzy, my vision was blurred, I felt devastatingly tired, could barely get out of bed, and only then to stuff myself frenziedly with chocolate and biscuits. The internet sites were very clear. Type 2 diabetes can affect thin people as well. In fact, we are the forgotten sufferers. This is because there is a little known phenomenon known as ‘skinny-fat’. Thin on the outside, fat on the inside. It was entirely possible, these sites assured me, that my internal organs were coated in lard. So much made sense to me now. I ran screaming to my GP. She already thinks I’m mad.

Two pedantic nerds should not be allowed to come together in a small space. In any case, the guy who runs quiz night at The Black Swan and I have a history of locking horns. On Halloween, we had a terrible row about Greek semantics. He asked, ‘What animal would you turn into if you were suffering from lycanthropy?’ I wrote down ‘wolf’ and assured my team that we were on firm ground as I happened to be an avid reader of period horror stories. But when it came to the marking, the pub quiz compère said the answer was ‘werewolf’ and that we couldn’t have a point for writing wolf. ‘Look here,’ I argued, ‘if you are suffering from the mythical disease of werewolfism you don’t change into a werewolf. You are a werewolf.

My ability to almost play the opening bars of Chopin’s Revolutionary Study may seem like a futile skill to have. But I never lost faith that it was going to come in useful one day. I can only play the first bit because I was halfway through learning the piece as a teenager when my piano teacher informed me — compelled, I presume, by some music teacher’s Hippocratic oath — that I would never make a concert pianist, and so I hadn’t the heart to put myself through two hours practice a day any more. I went on playing, but without worrying too much about the precise coordinates of my fingers. What I lack in precision I make up for in volume, however. It is a very good stress-buster, although not so much for the neighbours.