Health

The guest who thought our farm was in the town centre was very cross indeed. She got out of her car by the old fountain and stood hands on hips surveying the meadows sloping from the big old house towards the rugged mountains beyond. She was wearing knee-length khaki safari shorts, so you’d have thought she’d be pleased to pitch up in the middle of nowhere. But she looked askance at the rolling hills and affected to be shocked by the reality of what was clearly pictured and described on the booking site. She asked how she and her husband were supposed to walk to their drinks party in town that evening. Could they walk there? Not really, I said. Not unless the party was tomorrow evening and they had good hiking boots. ‘Taxi?’ she asked. So we had to explain.

‘You could mow all this lawn here and it would look a treat,’ said the arborist, returning from a stroll around the grounds, which were looking resplendent in the sunshine. ‘Yes, yes, mow the grass. Good idea,’ I said, for the builder boyfriend has told me I have to agree with the customers. No matter what they say, no matter how obvious their suggestions, just smile and say ‘Good idea.’ Old houses are like horses. Passing strangers feel ownership of them. Once they encounter them, they proclaim how they would care for them, because they decide from their soulful look that the owners must be neglecting them – when the truth is the owners slave day and night for them, getting nothing but a good kicking for their trouble.

‘Our boys went to Lebanon and trained Hezbollah!’ shouted the drunk Irish lad in the fish and chip shop as an Indian man behind the counter silently fried chips. ‘Chucky ar la!’ the lad shouted, or Tiocfaidh ar la, to correctly spell in Irish the slogan of the IRA, meaning ‘Our day will come.’ And he went on shouting this, over and over, as the Indian fellow stared down into the fryer, and the Friday night customers formed a queue in this small fast-food joint in a West Cork harbour town. The Irish lad was not getting the message that the Hindu chap frying chips was probably not a massive Hezbollah or Hamas supporter, and he carried on shouting about Gaza and inviting the man behind the counter to join in with him.

The builder boyfriend returned from a trip to London to inform me he was being done for speeding at 32mph, for crying out loud. He was flashed by a camera crawling uphill in a 30 zone going through the almost middle-of-nowhere in the Ashdown Forest, on his way to visit his sister in Sussex for the weekend. A few weeks after I completed a speed awareness course for doing an improbably incorrect 40mph on a dual carriageway during a trip to see my parents in Coventry, we were going round the same rigmarole with him. He showed me his letter from the Sussex Police on his return to Ireland. It was slightly less obnoxious than the one from West Midlands Police, but it amounted to the same thing: a £100 fine, sorry speed course.

By changing the address on my driving licence, I was somehow signed up to something that began charging my credit card £39 a month and was going to carry on charging for ever. It was Barclaycard that spotted it and warned me it was a ‘scam’ in a text alert. Had I really agreed to a recurring payment to a company called British Drive? I had no idea what British Drive was, and at first suspected it was an insurance policy, or the firm that organised my recent speeding course. Eventually, I realised it could be something to do with going on to the DVLA website – or so I thought – to change my driving licence address. I tried to cancel the payment on the Barclaycard app but it wouldn’t cancel.

The mole specialist was wearing a pink Chanel-looking suit and pink diamanté shoes. By mole specialist, I don’t mean someone turned up dressed in Chanel to deal with moles on our land. I mean I went to see a top London dermatologist about a mole I was worried about, and when I walked into her office she looked so fabulous all I wanted to do was talk to her about her Jackie O miniskirt and jacket, given a twist with the sparkly stilettos. Before I could do that, however, she complimented me on my long striped coat. ‘Villa Gallo,’ I said, sitting down in front of her desk on the first floor of a smart building in Chelsea. ‘And can I say, your shoes are divine.

I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely known him; he’d operated on him. If I have mild indigestion I think I’ve got stomach cancer; if I get a headache I decide it’s a brain tumour I realised with a start that the man I was talking to was the famous surgeon Ian McColl, who was made a life peer in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 1989. As professor of surgery at Guy’s Hospital, he treated my father for bowel cancer in 1983, an operation so successful that Michael had gone on to live for another 19 years.

The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my ‘to do’ list, getting round to jobs I’d been putting off for months. It wasn’t that my willpower increased. It was that making myself perform tedious administrative tasks took less effort. My inner clerk woke up. The novelty of being calm and even-tempered wears off pretty quickly Two weeks in and I’m beginning to get bored. High on the list of benefits of being teetotal, according to the finger-waggers, is that your mood stabilises – and I’ve definitely noticed that.