Real life

There are many greetings one might grudgingly accept as adequate when one arrives at a hospital emergency department. But a sign saying ‘Helpdesk’ is not one of them. ‘Reception’, ‘Report here’ or even ‘Check-in’ would have been a tolerable overture from King’s College Hospital when I pitched up with my hand crushed and bleeding. But Helpdesk? Helpdesk is what you thrust in people’s faces when they are queuing for IT support. Helpdesk is what you tell people they are getting when they want to make backup files from their hard drive. Helpdesk is not what you offer people who are hoping for their broken limbs to be treated.

It started with a drip. Never thought it would come to this. Actually, forget that. What has happened to me since I called out the plumber last week is so traumatic that, try as I might to make it more palatable by dressing it up with a Hot Chocolate motif, it’s not going to wash. As previously reported in this column, my boiler was dripping. A plumber came in and righted the drip by ripping the boiler to pieces. But the next day it started dripping again. So I called him back. ‘It’s all right, it’s just your undulating spivvlethwack valve,’ he said, or some such nonsense, as he cheerfully took it to pieces again. Three hours and countless trips to buy parts later, he had said ‘it’s all right, it’s just your...

Top of my ambitions for this year: be less nice. Do fewer good turns. Be less amenable and most of all a lot less kind to animals. While this sounds a bit grim, you have to consider that I am starting from a very high base. If I go out of my way to be heartless every time a stray needs rescuing, I reckon the most I can hope for is that I won’t end up with every single one of them in my house. Just 50 per cent of them. Frankly, I would settle for that. Because I must not continue the year as I have started. With another rabbit in my kitchen. How this happened I have absolutely no idea. Why, when asked the perfectly preposterous question, ‘Would you like a rabbit?

Putting a letter through the slot of a rubbish bin and pointing your car key at the front door of your house are fairly good indicators of stress, I think it is fair to say. I found myself doing both these things this week as I floundered around in the Christmas rush, trying to reorder every single aspect of my life in time for 25 December. Why is this? Why do we have to ‘get everything done before Christmas’? I don’t mean buy a turkey and send some cards to friends and family, which would be a pleasure. I mean, do every single job we’ve been meaning to do all year in the space of two weeks. A mini version of this happens when you go on holiday. What starts as a quick tidy round as you are waiting for the cab to the airport morphs into a massive deep clean.

So much for ‘make do and mend’. I’ve been desperately trying to patch things up in the spirit of credit-crunch thriftiness but I am getting absolutely nowhere. This is because shops do not stock ‘the bits’ any longer. I have spent the last week trying to do DIY jobs around the house and I can confidently report that there is a highly organised global conspiracy to stop us mending anything. This is why retail parks that used to be full of useful places selling spare parts are now resplendent with emporiums called ‘Kiss Me Hardy’s Wacky Warehouse’. On closer examination, this turned out to be a children’s soft-play centre attached to a pub — ‘Let the kids run riot while you take a well earned break!

I try not to be a party pooper but the other night I came home to such a cacophony of revelling from a neighbour’s house that I concluded there had to be a gathering of international gangsters, drug barons and hookers in my street. The thumping hip hop, screaming and glass smashing was coming from a house whose back garden borders mine at the bottom; so I crept outside to see if I could catch a glimpse. I picked my way to the end of the garden in the dark, pulled myself up over the fence and braced myself to see hoards of Nike-swathed homeboys dripping in gold chains and spliffs.

As I don’t live in what my friends consider to be ‘town’, I don’t get many visitors. My friends who live in ‘town’ protest that they cannot possibly be presumed upon to come as far as Balham. For a long time, I used to mind about this and made all sorts of silly attempts to force people to enjoy my suburban hospitality. Once, in an attempt to stage a dinner party, I drove to Chelsea and led a convoy of cars back to my house, swerving and flashing in desperation as they ventured south of Albert Bridge. When they got to my front door in one piece you would have thought they had made it to a cave in the Hindu Kush. ‘Wow!’ they all exclaimed, ‘it was only ten minutes...I can’t believe it...Did you know it was ten minutes to Balham?.

I will always remember what I was doing the night I tried to downgrade my Sky package. Scorched into my memory with pain it is, just like the day Elvis died. It started ominously. I had turned on the television. I only turn on the television once every six months. Every time I do so I feel like a battered wife going back for more abuse. I thought I could make it work this time. But, really, what was I expecting from a series of channels called ‘DMax’ and ‘Dave Ja Vu’ and ‘Movies4Men’?

The recession has been a huge disappointment to me. It’s the lack of haggling I find so hard to come to terms with. When the great financial crisis began we were told we were going to get all sorts of eye-watering bargains. Everything was negotiable, it was said. Even the cheese counter at the supermarket was doing dodgy deals on Stilton. If you offered the man on the fish counter a fiver, he’d slip you an entire cod. What nonsense. There is no haggling. I haven’t found a single shop that has been prepared to have any of it. I tried it in Zara with a black dress with a hole in the seam. ‘I’ll give you £60 for it,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m afraid this dress costs £80, madam.’ ‘Yes, but there’s a hole in it so...

This will be a bit of harmless fun, I thought, as I climbed three flights of stairs to the top of a building in theatreland in search of a fancy-dress costume. I found myself in a room full of rails crammed tight with bright costumes. And there, standing in front of them, was the strangest person I have ever seen. She was wearing a lacy Dangerous Liaisons number with bursting décolletage and enormous side hoops, and she was smiling a disconcertingly wide smile. When I told her I had come to hire a fancy-dress costume she shrieked as if someone had stuck a cattle prod up her bottom. ‘Oh, how exciting!’ Barely had I started to explain that I wanted a tasteful costume for a small house party than she shrieked again. ‘Yes, yes! A dancer from the Moulin Rouge!

Sometimes the irritations are so great, you just have to stand up and be irritating right back. So it was that I found myself loitering under an ugly new sign at the bottom of my road, holding a petition. ‘Excuse me, sir? Would you like to protest about these horrible signs? They cost £1,000 of your taxpayer’s money and as you can see they are obtrusive, ruin our view of the common and serve no purpose whatsoever except to advertise the local authority.’ I love Nimbyism. I think it is a much underrated attitude. I can’t understand why it’s so frowned upon. In fact, I think it’s really hypocritical and shortsighted of politicians to object to people objecting.

You couldn’t make it up If I’m ever stuck for a plot for a dark and twisted dystopian sci-fi novel I must remember to open my front door and start a conversation with a traffic warden. You are always guaranteed a richly surreal and deeply macabre experience when you engage with the bizarre regime of local authorities which charge people to park outside their own homes. The other day I went out to remonstrate with a warden over a fine that had been issued to my father for parking slightly to the left of the correct bay for visitors. He’d only been there a few minutes, and as the visitor bay was empty it was obviously an honest mistake. But of course we know that is not how it works.

Hotels frighten me. I can only approach them armed with industrial-strength earplugs, a box of teabags, a jar of Marmite, an orthopaedic pillow, a towelling robe and slippers that fit, a large bag of apples, some bottles of mineral water, a scented candle and a DVD boxset of Columbo. ‘What the hell have you got in this case?’ asked a colleague as he helped me out of the taxi at the hotel where we were staying for the Tory conference in Manchester. ‘Too many outfits,’ I said. Because I really didn’t want to list the sad collection of home comforts I had packed in a bid to get myself through the next four days without throwing a tantrum at reception. Why does it have to be this way?

Just when I thought the junk mail on my doormat couldn’t get any more pointless, a record-breakingly worthless form of advertising has begun to pour in. It’s from my local Labour council showing off the inventive new ways it has found of spending my money. The other day I got a leaflet telling me about a ‘community action fund’ which has been mysteriously allocated a quarter of a million pounds — apparently it just fell out of the sky — to spend on three local projects and I get to choose. Whoopee. Would I like to spend the money on...drum roll...

The insufferably smug family in the BT commercials is now more than an annoyance to me. Whenever I see them, I throw whatever I have in my hands at the television set and scream, ‘Liars!’. I have hated the BT family for years. Unlike the Oxo family, which was reassuringly grouchy and came to the table sulking murderously only to be cheered up partially by Lynda Bellingham’s instant gravy, the BT family is ‘modern’ and politically correct. It consists of a gormless-looking young guy with ruffled hair played by the idiot son from My Family, who has fallen in love with a kooky, tawny-haired, twinkly-eyed divorcee with a dazzling array of children of all ages who he is now attempting to father by being pally and ‘modern’ with them.

What a pleasure it has been to have workmen digging up my street. No, seriously. I want to pay tribute to British Gas and Morrison and all the other contractors who have been tunnelling into my home, tearing out shrubs and ripping up floorboards in order to lay horrible-looking pipes attached to huge and hideous new gas meters. Normally, of course, I would complain gustily about the fact that I have been mired in the most colossal inconvenience, bereft of gas for hours on end, subjected to endless drilling and digging, day after day for weeks. But it has been an absolute pleasure, every minute of it. And do you know why? Because of the abundance of real men it has brought along.