Real life

Sitting opposite me in an elegant restaurant, my male friend looked deep into my eyes and said three little words. And with those three little words, he changed my world for ever. ‘You need Swarfega.’ ‘Swuh…swuh…’ I said, feeling a lump forming in my throat and my whole identity crumbling. ‘Swarfega. You know, the heavy-duty hand-cleaner in the red and green tubs. You can buy it on the internet.’ I looked down at my hands. But they weren’t there. Someone had put the hands of Albert Steptoe on the ends of my arms instead. ‘Oh my god! Where have my hands gone?’ I gasped. The waitress came and topped up my water glass but she needn’t have bothered.

‘They all have very distinct personalities,’ said my friend Hannah, as she invited me to come to her house and pick a bunny. In truth, I hadn’t given much thought to the preferred personality of my forthcoming rabbit. I confess I wanted a quick fix of a bunny, a companion for Tinkerbell Butch Cassidy, so called because she started life as a girl and then morphed into a boy when, upon closer inspection, I panicked and declared the vet’s earlier pronouncement misguided. Tinky had been bought as a companion for TT, the two-tone bunny I found in a box by the side of the road. They had been happy when I thought they were boy and girl, and just as happy when I declared them boy and possible boy.

‘What do you mean, your ex-ex-boyfriend is still living with his ex-girlfriend?’ said my friend Sarah, pulling a disgusted face. To summarise the many questions that followed, this bosom buddy of mine dared to ask me to explain why I was now referring to The Builder as my ‘ex-ex-boyfriend’, and why said ex-ex-boyfriend was still living with the girlfriend he was going out with before he met me. Talk about impertinent. Sometimes my married friends give me absolutely no leeway for how complicated modern romance is. They have no idea what singletons have to cope with in this godless age. The last time they were single, women used to be ‘courted’ or go on ‘dates’, or get ‘marriage proposals’.

Shortly after rekindling my relationship with the builder boyfriend, I had another hair-brained scheme. I brought the mad chestnut mare in from her retirement field thinking that while I’m U-turning on crucial decisions with Cameronesque ease, I might as well review my policy on horses, as well as men. The mad chestnut mare is 25 and murderously bad-tempered. Age has done nothing to mellow her. The staff at the stables call her ‘the old bag’. She is like an elderly relative in a nursing home who derives perverse pleasure from giving the people who look after her hell. Whenever I turn up, I am greeted with comments such as: ‘The old bag was kicking the door for her breakfast at six this morning.’ ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry.

The renovations were too much for me. I had to get the builder boyfriend back. But before you call me weak, manipulating, cheap, pathetic, or (if you’re into American self-help books) co-dependent, just hear me out. I defy anyone to go through what I went through with a consignment of ill-fitting MDF and not make a panic-stricken phone call to an ex-boyfriend who happens to be a building contractor. And it’s not as if I rekindled the relationship entirely in order to get my house halfway back to habitable. I missed him. I missed his funny south London builder ways. I missed his deafeningly loud laugh, his tousled, blond,  dust-filled hair, his weather-beaten face and soulful blue eyes. I missed the way he wears T-shirts when it’s minus four.

Never turn your back on builders. I only nipped out to walk the dog. I was barely gone half an hour. When I left I had one good room. The spare room. The only nice room in the house. I really love the only nice room in the house. I love the jasmine white walls, the beige carpet, the peaceful spotlighting, the satin curtains, the silk cushions, the newly fitted wardrobes. I keep it meticulously tidy because it is all I have got to show so far for my six-week-long renovations. The rest of the place looks like a bomb has hit it. The spaniel and I curl up on my overpriced Ikea day bed in the only nice room in the house and dare to dream. ‘One day, Cydney,’ I tell the spaniel as she snoozes, ‘it will all be like this.

When you start renovating your home, it is like pulling the loose thread of an old jumper. Everything unravels. I only tried to fit a dimmer switch, and now my entire flat has come apart. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I was having Stefano the Albanian builder fit wardrobes in the spare room. It was almost done. He was just fitting the dimmer switch for the spotlights when he pulled a little too hard on the delicate invisible thread that holds everything in my world together. Suddenly the entire flat was in darkness. Fiddling with the lights in the spare room had triggered a catastrophic failure of the wiring system, which then revealed itself to be ancient, made of fabric, and about to burst into flames.

Ikea is a totalitarian state. When you drive under the overhanging barrier preventing reasonably sized vans from gaining access to its car park you are entering sovereign territory. Should you get stranded in Ikea for any number of reasons, the best way out is to call the British consulate. Alternatively, you might try the Ecuadorian embassy. I hear they are very good. In any case, I got stranded in Ikea. This is my story. The spare room was nearing completion, so Stefano the Albanian builder and I went to buy a day bed. Stefano manfully crashed his van straight into the overhanging barrier, then drove the wrong way up the ramp with cars tooting. It was brilliant, like being in The A-Team.

In sympathy with New Yorkers, albeit inadvertently, I have had virtually no power for weeks. Worse, I have been warned that my lights are on an ancient system of fabric wiring which could burst into flames at any moment. I have been trying to fix things, but have come up against a vicious circle of energy industry red tape. Or should I say blue tape? It is, after all, the deregulated version of petty bureaucracy. There is so much blue tape, in fact, that I, a collector of shares in every utility company to go on sale since I was 18, am beginning to question my commitment to privatisation. Hush my mouth! To summarise: British Gas, my electricity supplier, came out when the lights blew two weeks ago and said the whole place needed rewiring.

Stefano the Albanian was delighted to hear from me. He was really cross when I got myself a builder boyfriend, which he regarded as a terrible sort of betrayal. He knew something was up when I rang to cancel the spare room renovations. The builder boyfriend had promised to do it for free. On no account was I to commission my beloved Stefano to do the job. The boyfriend insisted that he would take charge of all my interior design and DIY needs from the moment we started dating last November. And to prove he was serious, he set about ripping out my kitchen units in his spare time and installing new doors and drawers, including several that didn’t open or shut properly and one that was totally wonky because he did it at ten o’clock at night after a hard day on a roof.

Any half decent guide to the countryside should include the following tip: if you find an owl by the side of the road, don’t pick it up. I was riding along the lane on the skewbald pony when I suddenly realised there were two huge eyes staring up at me. It was a beautiful brown owl that kept falling over on to its side and then righting itself as the traffic swept past. I got off Gracie and bent down to see. He was pretty beaten up, poor thing. I put my hand out and he hopped into the ditch and fell over. This was clearly a job for the gamekeeper, the source of all natural wisdom, as well as logs and legs of venison. Plus he is always 30 seconds away. ‘What’s up, mate?’ he said, on a muffled line. He was having his lunch in a village three miles away.

The roads seem to be rigged to detect particularly low grade offences nowadays. And when you’ve done nothing wrong at all, the police seem to get ferociously cross. I was once read the riot act by a bearded cop on a motorbike who banged on my window as I sat in gridlock on the Albert Embankment and told me that I was not paying sufficient attention to what was going on around me. When I asked what he would like me to do he didn’t seem to have any specific ideas; he just thought I didn’t look adequately focused. I pointed out that I had been sitting motionless for half an hour and so letting my hands drop from the ten to two position and staring despairingly into space until the car in front moved again seemed entirely reasonable.

The spaniel was given specific instructions. ‘This is your big moment, Cydney. In fact, this is our big moment. Do not embarrass us.’ We were driving up the long track to the elegant estate where the annual shoot barbecue, marking the opening of the season, is held.  It is a huge deal to be invited, the equivalent in parenting terms of your daughter being invited to the Queen Charlotte ball for debutantes. Cydney has had to work hard for this. Hours and hours of lessons in deportment around game birds have led up to this point. We go out with the gamekeeper and he gives her jobs to do, like moving stray pheasants from one field to another.

Success. Finally, I have made someone in a call centre do what I want, when I want and how I want it. I stumbled on the secret formula for getting jobsworths to co-operate quite by accident. It was an ordinary day. I was sitting in my kitchen waiting for British Gas to arrive to change my meter. The way I look at it, I’m doing them a favour by letting them change my meter. Since I have no meter-changing desires or ambitions myself, their request to rip out my old meter, which works perfectly well, and install a new meter, for reasons unknown, means that they should, at the very least, go to the trouble of knocking on my door when they arrive. I forgot that no one knocks on the door any more. I don’t know when door-knocking became obsolete but it has. Taxis are the worst.

Some years ago, I had a boyfriend who left himself logged into his Facebook account on my computer. When I sat down at my desk after he had gone to work I was confronted with the screen he had left behind which contained a long list of messages. ‘Oo, goody,’ I thought, ‘suddenly I seem to have acquired lots of friends who have sent me lots of messages.’ Facebook was still in its infancy, you see, and I had never had a message on my account before. I was really excited. It wasn’t until I started clicking on the messages that I realised they were all from blonde women I didn’t know. The top one was from a particularly fruity young lady chiding me for ripping all the buttons off her dress the night before. ‘How rude,’ I thought.

Friends with children all seem to agree that there is a general rule on numbers: if you’ve got one child, you may as well have two. But you must never, ever be tempted to think that if you’ve got two children you may as well have three. Apparently, the apophthegm breaks down at that point. Three children pushes you over the edge. It is no longer manageable using the techniques or financing you have previously been employing. It will turn your entire life upside down, drain you of all available resources, fiscal, mental and emotional. I can now confirm that the same thing goes for horses. (It may not be much use to anyone that I have discovered this.

Being blonde and female, I should have known better than to take my Fiat to a main dealer to get it serviced. It’s not that I’m stupid, per se. It’s just that main dealers have an invisible automatic scanning system so that, when a blonde woman walks through the door, an alarm goes off inside the service centre, a red light starts flashing, a till ringing sound reverberates throughout the workshop, and greasy mechanics stand ready with their spanners and clipboards bearing long checklists of mechanical failings. I always swear I will never do it again, but like most women I’m a stickler for doing things by the book.

‘So, you’re a supporter of Julian Assange, then?’ said my friend the radio presenter as we were live on air. Oh, dear. This was going nowhere good. It was far too early in the morning for me to get myself into an un-PC fix. My friend the radio presenter has me on his breakfast show every now and again to review the papers and have a light-hearted chinwag about current affairs. Why, oh why, did we have to discuss the Assange thing? ‘Ehem, ha ha, I think supporter is a bit of a strong term. I wouldn’t say supporter, so much as...er, um...Look, all I said was he might not be guilty. We don’t know yet.’ The presenter fidgeted on the edge of his seat, his antennae twitching at the row that was about to erupt.