Melissa Kite

The LED streetlamp outside my house was fitted with a ‘compromise’ shield acceptable to a vegan that looked as if it had been made on Blue Peter using sticky-back plastic, and that was bad enough. But a few weeks later, we were sitting in our living room and the light from this streetlamp seemed almost back to full strength, despite the makeshift strip of black gaffer tape. We had been forced to accept this most rubbish of solutions – which wasn’t a solution at all really, and which I’m sure totally breached our human rights if I wanted to be that sort of whinger – because our neighbour, the vegan, had the proper shield removed. She claims she likes the LED bulb at full blast, although how can she?

If I could ban one question ever being asked of me again it would be: ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ I don’t know how many times I’ve answered this in the negative, 57,983 times at least, but the question just never stops being asked. Nobody wants to use even a fraction of a penny of the almost limitless text and call capacity in their perfectly affordable phone packages to send a text any more. What they want is totally free, completely limitless blathering capacity. Consequently, everything has a WhatsApp group attached to it. Every activity I take part in, every hobby, every social group I belong to, now comes with its own WhatsApp group. The effect of this is that the hobby or social gathering never ends.

If you want to understand Surrey, look at the house names. Keepers’ Copse, Meadow View, Weavers, Highfields… What do all these names have in common? They describe something rural that used to be there before it was destroyed to make way for the house named after it. Surrey is where London will one day join Guildford and Woking, making the outer banlieues of our capital city very nice indeed, but obviously destroying the countryside that makes Surrey nice in the process. So not all that nice, in fact. For now, it amuses me to drive along the lanes of chintzy villages in prime commuter belt, grimacing at the names of the houses.

The dynamics of the village can only be understood with reference to what’s happening to the parking. Unless you study the parking, you have no way of understanding the village. Not really. You may think you understand it, but you are just scratching the surface of the alliances and enmities that make the village go around. For example, we recently lost the residents’ parking sign relating to the dozen spaces down the unmade track that leads to my house which had been used by those of us stuck down this track through no fault of our own, other than we had a rush of blood to the head and decided it would be nice to live on a village green. My lawyer friend at the time I bought my house warned me not to, but I wouldn’t have it.

‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message. The builder boyfriend and I were lying in the garden having a well-earned sunbathe on Sunday, his only day off. Meanwhile, as we full well knew, the builder b’s fellow livery customers were hard at work shovelling horse muck out of the fields at the country estate where he has been grazing his two cobs until we can move them to be with my two horses at the new stable yard we have just taken a lease on. This mania for ‘poo picking’ is all very well if you are talking about paddock maintenance. I’m out there with a shovel every day in the small private paddocks where we now keep my thoroughbred and pony.

The girl wound down her window, stuck her mobile phone out into midair, and started to take pictures of the sun. I was behind her Mini on the southbound slip road off the A3 to the Cobham roundabout. On the left was the backed-up turn for Hersham down the Seven Hills Road which is always busy in the morning. I was queueing in the less busy right hand lane to go around the roundabout to Cobham to do the horses. It should not have taken me long, even at 8 a.m. But the woman in the cream Mini in front of me was busy with her phone pointed up into the sky at a sun so blazing it was impossible to look anywhere near it. What she captured I have no idea. It’s hard to think of anything more pointless than trying to photograph a blinding heat haze.

After rushing our little spaniel to the veterinary hospital on the usual bank holiday emergency basis upon which all animals seem to get sick, we were held up by the most extraordinary fracas. The builder boyfriend carried her in, wrapped in a blanket, and we sat ourselves down anxiously to wait. But in the reception area of this smart animal hospital in Surbiton was a family who were engaged in a dispute with a desperate-looking young vet about the bill they had just run up for their fitting poodle. The scrappy white pooch stood on the floor heaving quietly as they shouted that there was no way they were paying for the lengthy consultation they had just had as they were on benefits.

When the vet had finished giving my horses their annual flu boosters, she reminded me the vaccination regime had changed. For the purpose of competing, horses must be vaccinated for flu every six months, which is something that had passed me by. What with worrying about human vaccines, I had not noticed this change in the rules for equestrian jabs. I thought about it for a split second, then decided. ‘Lucky I don’t compete then,’ I told her. Because being a rabid anti-vaxxer, I don’t want my horses pumped more full of vaccine than is absolutely necessary. And this is precisely the sort of irrational and illogical reaction people have come to expect from someone like me.

The bank was having Transgender Visibility Day when I popped in to deposit some cash.The stressed-looking customers, meanwhile, seemed mostly like they were having Affluence Invisibility Day. One woman was complaining bitterly that £4,000 had been transferred to the wrong place and the bank wouldn’t give it back. I put my hand on the cash in my purse and stroked it a little. I’m amazed we are still allowed to keep cash. I’m sure they would have liked to have got rid of it by now. Thankfully, I had some so I could put it in my account to stave off overdraft text alerts because nothing else had gone through electronically, because of some malfunction in the system delaying things a few days.

My friend Emily, who once got an owl stuck to her hand, was bringing her son for a day with the ponies. Like all manic souls, Emily can produce both magic and chaos, and you never know in what proportions. Emily may appear eccentric but like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory she always turns out to be right. It’s recalcitrant friends like her who have sustained me over the years when everyone else is spouting ‘the line’. That said, you have to fasten your seatbelt to be around her. It must be ten years ago we were walking down a lane in Surrey together when she noticed an injured owl. I tried to warn her but she insisted on picking it up. As she did so, the owl dug its talons into her hand, pulled itself up and used her as a perch.

Since recovering from Covid, I seem to have quietly been developing supernatural powers. At first I thought I had simply lost my sense of taste and smell, but a year on the situation is more complicated than that, I am starting to realise. I can’t really taste or smell anything in the conventional sense. If I sniff and sniff, with my nose over a cafetière of coffee, or a pan of bubbling Bolognese sauce, I get nothing. When the builder boyfriend comes home in the evening, I call up the stairs from the lower ground floor kitchen: ‘What does this smell like to you?’ I burn everything I don’t stand over and watch and I’ve drunk more gone off milk than I care to remember, realising only when I feel the lumps in my mouth.

The window of the new shop was as brightly coloured as a circus entrance, and stuffed full of items bearing no relation to each other, from chocolates and candles to vases and old chairs. The unusual name, too, made the place seem like it might have some mystical, hidden purpose. The builder boyfriend wandered over the road from our house to explore this latest niche store to open up in the village. When he came back he said: ‘Do you remember Papa Lazarou from League of Gentlemen?’ I do indeed remember the demonic circus character who featured in four episodes of the TV show. He would bang on people’s doors and kidnap women declaring: ‘You’re my wife now!

The lodger looked at me blankly and pronounced wearily, as though intoning something he was tired of parroting, that I was putting vulnerable people at risk by not having the vaccine. I stifled a yawn. Can anyone really still think this? A half-hearted argument of sorts ensued while I was washing up and he was heating his microwave dinner in which neither of us could really be bothered. I tried to politely point out that it was a good job an irresponsible person like me was so foolhardy and fearless about Covid or he would not have found a room in the middle of lockdown, especially since he works at a hospital. And he put a stop to the discussion by saying: ‘Well, I’m trying to get my head around Ukraine now.

‘This is my father, and his pronoun is he,’ said the builder boyfriend, checking his dad into Accident and Emergency. ‘And how do we address you?’ said the personage at the reception desk. ‘You can address me as they,’ said the builder b, who was happy to go along with the way the hospital wanted to do things, if only to entertain himself during what was obviously going to be a long wait. His father had fallen on top of a gas canister in their building yard and he was now in so much pain they suspected he had broken his ribs.

Trees glorious trees. People can’t get enough of them. They don’t want to take care of trees, they just want to plant more and more of them. We have so many trees not being cared for by our local council that I was utterly amazed to see volunteer do-gooders planting saplings around the village green and surrounding common land when I was out walking the spaniels the other day. Surely they can’t want more trees not to pollard, coppice or treat for processionary moth, I thought. But perhaps I should not be surprised. I wouldn’t say people round here are naive when it comes to land management, but I saw a tree surgeon’s van recently with the slogan ‘Every branch matters’.

‘A diary?’ said the lady in the chintzy gift shop, pronouncing the word very much as Edith Evans said ‘handbag’ in the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a diary. Do you have one?’ I was standing in the middle of a shop so like one that would sell a diary that I could not express quite adequately how obvious I thought it was that they might. This gift shop and café is on the high street of the village where I live and is easily one of the prettiest gift shop/cafés you have ever seen. It has every kind of pretty thing inside, from greetings cards and novelty books about wellbeing to china cups, shawls and rugs, lamps, pictures and doggy-themed place mats. ‘No!