Melissa Kite

‘Do you have any questions?’ said the man at the insurance company after an hour of me trying to take out a new car policy. ‘No. I wouldn’t know how to ask you a question about what has just gone on even if I wanted to,’ I replied, because insurance is now so complicated there is no way a person not employed in the underwriting industry can understand it. And that would not matter, except we do need to get our heads around it, because we have to change it every year. Insurance companies are good to you until they’re not, because insurance is like a toxic love affair. After a few years of one being nice to me, I got the inevitable punch in the face renewal quote and had to go on one of those price comparison websites they ought to call abused.com.

After most of Islington moved to Wales, it was foolish of me to think about following. But the need to escape from Surrey becomes ever more pressing by the day, with housing developments, racing cyclists and incompetent dog walkers bearing down on us so hard we cannot bear it much longer. The builder boyfriend has almost finished the renovations, with the top floor insulated and made into a storage area. We can’t afford to do the loft conversion for which we have planning permission, so we have lined and presented the space at the top of the house in all its empty glory so that buyers can see the potential for a third bedroom.

After an incredible 13 emails, Vodafone decided that I was who I was claiming to be, and refunded my money. I’m still not sure where my phone disappeared to, or whether it is coming back. They did not offer any explanation for why I bought a phone in their store in Guildford, got it home, discovered it didn’t charge, and took it back to be told no, I absolutely could not have a refund, or an exchange. No, they could not possibly just nip out the back and get me another one. They had to send the faulty one away. The guy was so rude to me it’s entirely plausible that he shoved it under the desk. But he said it was going to be packaged up and they would call me when it was fixed.

After launching an investigation into my missing phone, Vodafone informed me it could not deal with me any further until I went through a series of checks to prove that I was who I said I was. I then became locked in an Orwellian battle with an automated system that sent email after email demanding, for example, that I confirm my email, until I gave up on my lost phone, because no amount of confirming seemed to work. Maybe it was naive to try to tell Vodafone that one of their stores had sold me a Nokia that did not hold a charge, refused to refund or exchange it, then sent the phone away into the ether to be mended, where it apparently disappeared.

‘Can I ask you why you don’t want a smart phone?’ said the chirpy manager, as I stood blinking in front of him in the intensely red Vodafone shop. I took my iPhone out of my bag and explained that I wanted a second phone with no brain whatsoever. A stupid, backward phone was what I wanted. Not a scheming, conniving monster like this one. And I said this quietly, so that my iPhone didn’t hear me, because that is how frightened I am of it. ‘Ah!’ said the pin-striped tech wizard, as if he had heard of this situation before, or perhaps increasingly. Reaching for the bottom shelf, he told me there was only one such phone in his shop. He put a tiny, plastic Nokia in my hands. It was so basic it was as light as a feather. I said that would do fine.

One of the village vegans gave the bacon sandwich resting on top of the recycling bin outside my house an accusing look. I had placed it there, on a plate, for the builder boyfriend who was underneath my jacked-up Volvo which had been making an alarming high-pitched wheeze. I always bring him a coffee and a snack when he’s fixing something, and as it was late morning, and he had missed breakfast in order to drive us to the horses in his truck because my car was emitting a wheeze from the undercarriage, I brought him a bacon sarnie. And so it sat perched on the green bin that stands just inside my gateway bordering the village green, as the builder b lay under the front left hand side of the old Volvo, parked on the track, the dog walkers of Surrey parading by.

Last night I dreamt I went on holiday again. It seemed to me I stood by the departure gate, and for a while I could not enter, for I kept setting the metal detector off. Then, like all unvaccinated dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed through the barrier. The boarding tunnel wound away in front of me, its sides covered with weeds. As I pulled my hand luggage on squeaky wheels, I lost sight of the open door of the plane, and then it appeared again, the smiling stewardess beckoning. I came to the door suddenly with my heart thumping. There was a British Airways Boeing twin-engine jet, and my seat on it, secretive and silent as it had always been, the navy blue leather shining in the moonlight of my dream.

Someone else with my name is wreaking havoc with my attempts to control the Twitter account I don’t want. Obviously, I haven’t been on Twitter other than to stick my toe in briefly, then pull it back out after realising how very cold it is in there. But I can’t work out how to deactivate my account. I’ve tried many times but it is beyond me, so I have had to stay on Twitter but not actually go on Twitter. This position was holding up fine, until I started getting emails telling me someone had logged into my account and if that wasn’t me I should do something about it.

‘Did you hear it?’ said a friend of mine, red-faced with the flush of a piece of news she couldn’t wait to offload, as she rushed into a church hall where we were attending an event. She was bursting with excitement because a mutual acquaintance had just been on a radio phone-in show banging the drum for the vaccine. I confessed I had not heard it, because I had no idea she was planning to go on. But it didn’t surprise me because this lady has had a go at me for being ‘one of those anti-vaxxers’ because I won’t have the jab — mainly because I’ve recovered from Covid. She apparently made quite an impression on the radio.

The streetlighting engineer walked up and down outside my house trying to work out who was right: me, or my neighbour, the vegan. On the one hand, I was claiming this LED light was lighting nothing of importance on a deserted village green at night while shining through my bedroom window driving me insane, and therefore should be fitted with a shield. On the other hand, my neighbour the vegan was claiming that if the bright white bulb was slightly dimmed on one side, women would be attacked, old people would trip over bins and it would be ‘scary’ to encounter fairground people and travellers in the dark when they occasionally stay on the green. Why scary?

Surprise, surprise. The person who had the shield taken out of the street light so it shone back into my bedroom window was precisely the person it was always going to be. I wish the world would shock me more, but it seldom seems to. When the council told me someone had demanded the full glare of the bright white LED bulb be restored, I nursed a forlorn hope that it might not be the obvious suspect. Wouldn’t it be exciting, I thought, if someone other than a left-wing vegan interfered in my happiness? But it was not to be. Lefties love harsh light bulbs, even in rural areas. I think it’s something to do with them not really liking the countryside and trying to make it more like the town.

The street lamp as bright as the Dog Star is back to its full glare outside my house. I won a small victory earlier this year when I persuaded the council to fit a shield to one side of it after threatening to throw myself out the window because I couldn’t sleep. But the other day, an engineer arrived in a van with a crane lift and took the shield away. I wasn’t there, a neighbour witnessed it, but when I got back home the street lamp was sporting a makeshift strip of black gaffa tape around the top, shielding only a tiny bit of light.

We were enjoying our evening at the overpriced gastropub until a woman in a dark uniform appeared at our table. She didn’t introduce herself or explain why she was there, and the first thought that entered my head was that we were being arrested. It was partly that the woman was extremely well built and wearing a navy gabardine jacket and trousers. But it was also because we were with Anthony. I looked across at the builder boyfriend’s wayward friend, a tanned, blond, spiky-haired estate agent who is a dead ringer for Shane Warne. He was spooning French onion soup into his mouth in between downing vodka shots and I thought: ‘Oh no, what has Anthony done now?

My pro-vaxxer friends have been a lot nicer to me since they started testing positive for Covid. I’m calling my vaccinated friends ‘pro-vaxxer’, by the way, just so they can see how it feels to have a quirky-sounding label applied to them based on their personal choices about how to withstand a pandemic. Meanwhile, I’m most certainly not going to call myself an anti-vaxxer because I’ve had dozens of vaccines, just not this one. I don’t need a label that’s become a term of abuse and was used by an MP while condemning people who don’t want the vaccine as the sorts of scoundrels who might launch a physical attack on him.

‘My phone says I can’t go out until Tuesday, so I can’t come and meet you,’ said my friend. And she repeated this down the line several times, as I insisted I did not understand. I had nipped outside the hairdresser with my hair in highlighter foils to take her call and was standing on the street, phone tucked under the silver-paper flaps, a stiff wind blowing. I assumed she must be saying something else and I had misheard. ‘It’s the app on my phone,’ she explained. ‘I’ve counted the days myself and I should be able to go out today, but my phone says I have to stay in for another day, so I’ll do that.

We had gone to visit a friend at a stable yard on a country estate on a crisp autumn Sunday. I was going to help his daughter with a pony they weren’t sure about. The builder boyfriend and I drove up a winding driveway past an elegant stately home to an antique stable yard from a bygone era where our friend was waiting with his daughter and their pretty black cob tied to the wall. Hens clucked from a nearby coop, kids came and went in wellies and warm jumpers, for there was a chill in the air. A young girl tacked up a smart, dapple-grey mount. Clip clop clip clop went the horses. And then a man in black stockings and suspenders walked into the yard.

The horse lorry arrived and lowered its ramp — and I stood in front of it knowing that my thoroughbred was not going to load. We were already beyond stressed, having been told our lease at the farm was not being renewed, and with the shooting season bearing down on us. In one week the guns would be going off around us. The horses had to be moved. But this blasted ramp was covered in beige carpet. If it had been red carpet, Darcy might have been happy. She is so precious, so oversensitive, so self-absorbed that I have no doubt she would have appreciated a red carpet. But lumpy beige carpet? Oh, no no no. The old boy explained that his rubber-lined ramp had just been replaced and the new one he had hurriedly covered thus.

The filling station on the road out of the village was like a scene from Mad Max. People were all but jumping on top of the petrol tanker that had pulled in to unload its bounty. As desperate drivers screamed and shouted, it wasn’t so hard to imagine them swinging from the doors of the cab, attempting to hijack it, while the driver inside beat them away with the end of a sawn-off shotgun. The forecourt was a seething mass of screeching people on the verge of savagery, not so different from the Thunderdome. After a while, I noticed that everyone was fighting over the same four pumps while two at the furthest side stood empty. I leapt out of my car and ran over to the vacant pumps, which turned out to be diesel only. Who was in charge here? Nobody, it seemed.

British Gas finally agreed to service my boiler, for no reason I could make out other than the boiler wasn’t new any more. All the while it was new, they refused to go anywhere near it. The majestic Worcester Bosch was installed four years ago as I began my renovations, egged on by the builder boyfriend’s bold assurances about the king of combination boilers. When I rang and asked to take out a Homecare agreement on it, I was expecting them to jump at the chance of what would surely be money for old rope. It was hardly going to break down any time soon, or ever, according to the BB, so I was baffled when they turned me down. If they had installed it, that would be different, they said.

After the landowner told us to be out in three weeks, then admitted we had three months to move our horses under the terms of our lease, the search began. We set about putting my house on the market and looking for a place with a few acres, but it was soon clear we were not going to find anything in budget. With the clock ticking on our notice period at the farm we’ve been renting, we had to look for livery for the horses. The timing could hardly be worse. Vacancies don’t tend to come up as winter approaches. But I always find the Good Lord provides when your back is against the wall. Sure enough, I found places for my two horses at a nearby stable yard and the builder boyfriend came across a field to rent for his cobs.