Real life

A dimly lit street in a drab south London suburb at 8 p.m. on a weekday night. A girl driving to her friend’s house for dinner. Suddenly the girl gets a blinding headache and needs to pull over. She searches in vain for a space but cannot see anything. The headache gets worse and worse until just when she thinks she is going to pass out from the pain she spots a small opening by the curb outside a shop. Thank goodness, she thinks, I can get some painkillers. There is an eerie atmosphere in the dark street as she parks. A climate of fear seems to prevail. If this were the opening scene from a horror film, some really creepy music would start to play as the girl steers her car into the space outside the shabby line of shops. Obviously the girl is me.

That it should come to this. I suddenly realised I was bent double over my wheelie bin, my head inside it, riffling for rogue bits of plastic or cardboard thrown in by neighbours or passing drunks, or passing drunk neighbours. ‘I’m a civilised person, reduced to the status of a bum!’ I screamed in outrage when I realised what I was doing. If you had written a sci-fi novel in the Sixties you could not have predicted that the year 2011 would see law-abiding, middle-class people riffling desperately through garbage. But as macabre as it sounds, it’s actually worth doing for the amount of money I could save. Despite government promises to change the law, it’s still a £1,000 fine for not recycling in my area right now.

Nothing makes me want to move to Cobham more than a letter from Lambeth Council that begins like this: ‘Dear householder: We have made changes to our recycling and refuse services. These changes are the result of a waste strategy that we have been developing over the last two years with your help.’ I hadn’t realised that I had been helping Lambeth Council with anything, least of all a waste strategy. In fact, I would go so far as to say I had been under the impression that I had been very deliberately trying not to help Lambeth Council with anything, especially its waste strategy. But apparently this is not the case. ‘From 4 April 2011 every Lambeth resident must recycle their rubbish.

One of the joys of spring is my annual nose around other people’s houses. Or it used to be. It seems things have changed in the house-hunting world. Estate agency has become automated. I had spotted a nice three-bedroomed place near Tooting Common and had rung the agent to ask them to show me round. ‘Are you registered with us?’ said the perky voice at the other end, sounding suspiciously like a call centre operative. There then followed an inquisition I can only liken to getting through security at Tel Aviv airport when you’ve got a stamp on your passport from Iran. It started with the utterly baffling question: ‘Why are you looking to move house?’ Why?

Never download anything strange from the internet. Never put your credit card details into a site you are unfamiliar with. Yes, I know. But I was desperate. I couldn’t make my father’s new laptop work and having bought it for him as a gift I was miffed. So I started clicking on all sorts of dangerous-looking icons in an attempt to save face. In particular, I decided to click ‘Download Microsoft Office now!’ This is because after a cursory examination of the machine I decided that the problem was most likely that, in a moment of blondeness, I had forgotten to install Office when I bought it, and that a free trial of the product had come to an end, thus disabling the system which should store my father’s documents.

After saying the word ten times I realised I was fighting a losing battle. I was sitting in the back of a taxi at Cardiff station and I could not get the driver to understand where I wanted to go to. This was distressing because, so far as my family has been able to make out, the Kites originate from Wales. We like to think we were Welsh falconers, back in the day. I’ve always loved Wales, and fondly remember summer trips to Ruthin Castle, my father stopping the car on windswept hilltops so I could feed the rain-drenched sheep. I haven’t been for ages but I keep my hand in: I watch Gavin and Stacey. But here I was in a cab in Cardiff saying a word on a piece of paper over and over to no effect. ‘Swalec. I want to go to the Swalec stadium.

Every time a man tells me he doesn’t want to marry me after all I buy a horse. This is getting very expensive, as you can imagine. Tara Lee appeared weeks after I inquired of a fiancé about the possibility of us having children. I can’t remember whose idea she was now, but she proved most effective. It is hard to hanker after babies when one is being hurled around the hunting field on the back of a mutinous mare who wants to be the first over every six foot hedge with a dirty great ditch in front of it. My maternal instincts were thus stifled. The next boyfriend played an equally cunning game by claiming he wanted wedding bells and babies while doing everything in his power to make sure bells and babies came there none.

Another date with a younger man is not ideal. But as I only get asked out by men in their 20s nowadays — something to do with evolution, no doubt — I have decided to go with it. So, to drinks and dinner with a very handsome 26-year-old student. Actually, he is retraining to be something artistic after leaving banking, so he is not really a student. More a conscientious objector. But he is still very young. Technically, if I had had a baby at the same age my best friend at school did, I could be his mother. Perhaps I have been watching too much Cougar Town but I thought this might be fashionable, that I would draw admiring gazes as I paraded around town with my young beau. Not exactly.

The loud clanging of metal poles woke me rudely from my sleep. I opened my eyes suspiciously, accustomed as I am to disasters creeping up on me when I least expect them. I lay for a few moments contemplating the sounds and what they could mean. Builders shouting, vans pulling up and driving away, heavy objects being flung around my front garden. This was definitely not something that would go away if I buried myself deeper in the duvet and tried to get back into my dream about ponies. I struggled into my dressing gown and, with a due sense of exhaustion and dread, opened my front door. I was greeted by such an immediate and almost impenetrable wall of scaffolding that I could barely get out. Metal poles criss-crossed all over the place, the front of my house had entirely disappeared.

The mid-life crisis has arrived early. It took me by surprise. I woke up, made coffee and at the very point I would usually be thinking, ‘Oo, I must put the recycling out,’ I thought, ‘Oo, I must buy a Porsche.’ How can this happen? I hate flash cars. My motoring history includes two small Peugeots, a Renault 5 with flower transfers down the side and a broken accelerator pedal, and a fire-engine red Ford Fiesta called Bunbury, after the non-existent character in The Importance of Being Earnest. It just shows how powerful is the urge to cling in vain to the remnants of one’s youth.

Some sadistically cheerful young popsy called Keeley or Tasha, I can’t remember which, terminated the call because I breached security. My own security. This is a bit rich, even if I didn’t keep completely to the rules. I always cheat during the beginning of the recorded message when the Patricia Hewitt sound-alike tells you to enter your membership or connect card number. I did enter the details once, you see, and the automated hell into which I descended was so macabre that I vowed never to risk an encounter with it again.

Golden corn spread out on the road; women washing in rivers; pots and baskets and sugar cane balanced on heads; a dead man in his best clothes being carried to his pyre; goats, bullocks, monkeys everywhere; baby elephants ambling through traffic… After a week of it, I turn to my guide Rajai and announce somewhat dramatically, but meaning every word, ‘I think I have lived more in the past seven days than ever before.’ ‘That’s India,’ says Rajai matter-of-factly, as if I’m just one more Westerner having an epiphany. Rajai, a multilingual expert on art history and architecture, is a little frustrated by my emotional approach to sightseeing and is, I suspect, not convinced that I’m up to scratch as a tourist.

‘Stop leading!’ said the poor man trying to dance with me as I dragged him around the floor. ‘Stop leading!’ said the poor man trying to dance with me as I dragged him around the floor. ‘I can’t help it,’ I said, pushing him under my arm and forcing him to perform a series of impromptu pirouettes, ‘you keep going wrong.’ ‘That’s not the point,’ he gasped, as I half strangled him in a headlock. ‘I’m meant to lead. You follow.’ Follow, shmollow. I had been taken to a Ceroc dance class in the genteel confines of Esher civic hall by my friend Amanda, a devotee of the pastime, who told me it was just what I needed to put a smile on my face.

Deck the halls with anti-wrinkle cream. Fa-la-la-la-laaa-la-la-la-la. ’Tis the season to be racked with insecurity. Fa-la-la-la-laaa... I don’t know why Christmas should remind us of failure and doom. It’s meant to be a celebration of the greatest beginning of all time, the birth of Jesus and the possibility of everlasting life (albeit it after death, although I’m not fussy — I’ll take everlasting life in whatever format it’s being offered). And yet all it does is make me think about how old and lonely I am. It doesn’t help that my birthday is on 1 January, or that I sat next to a famous chef at a Christmas party the other day and he guessed my age to be forty.

Insurance is a mug’s game. It begins with a sensible attempt to guard against catastrophe and escalates into risk hysteria. With the onset of the cold weather, I only wanted to take out some simple cover on my radiators, but I ended up in a frantic scramble to insure myself against everything bad or even just mildly annoying that could possibly happen to a human being, ever. Last winter, my boiler broke down so I made sure it was heavily insured this year. Naturally, therefore, my boiler did not break down this year. My radiators leaked. Or rather one of them leaked and fell off the wall for good measure. I rang British Gas who confirmed that I had opted out of radiator cover so I took the hit and called Tony the plumber.