Melissa Kite

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.

The two-acre smallholding lived up to its name in being very, very small indeed. We had to squeeze around the front door one at a time to get into the entrance hall, which was also the front room and the entry to the stairway. It was a red-brick semi in a row of cottages on a ridge overlooking a valley just outside a quaint Sussex village where we stopped beforehand and convinced ourselves we would be happy with one unfriendly café, a novelty homewares store and a hiking shop that was so pretentious it was advertising ‘directional clothing’. The short, block-paved driveway of the house was so steep we didn’t dare drive the XC90 up on to it for fear the handbrake would give way and the Volvo would crash through the living room window of the house opposite.

‘I’ve got COPD,’ said a friend of mine, not elaborating at all as I stared at him waiting for him to explain what that stood for. I had to look it up later. His expression told me firmly that everyone was au fait with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A few hours earlier, another friend had texted to say she would be late for t/c, which, upon my enquiring, turned out to mean that she would be late meeting me to have a cup of tea or coffee. She said she was busy at GC (which turned out to be Guildford College) and had been working late at the ITA (by which she meant Italian restaurant). Why do people talk in acronyms? Is it self-obsession that makes them think everyone instantly recognises the very specific shorthand terms that refer to their lives?

We began searching for the farm of our dreams in Wales as we planned our escape from Surrey. The problem was, so did every other dreamer in London and the south-east of England. Since lockdown, the rush to perform ‘lifestyle change’ has sent the price of the valleys sky high. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Welsh farmers must be downsizing to townhouses in Chelsea. We were already quite down. It was sad to be served notice on the land we have been renting to keep our horses. We knew we had to buy our own land this time. We quickly ruled out staying here. Even if we could afford Surrey, we don’t want to carry on dodging stockbrokers on electric bikes. We settled on East Sussex as a possibility, because the builder boyfriend has family there.

The letter arrived in a hand-addressed envelope, inside of which was a handwritten note. After everything we have been through, we were expecting something typed, from a solicitor. It began by politely thanking us for looking after the land so well. But in the next paragraph, the landowner attempted to serve us three weeks’ notice to move our horses, claiming that was all she needed to give. We texted her immediately to say our lease states three months. She replied later to say three weeks had been a mistake, she meant three months. She tried to make light of it. But we already know we are losing our smallholding because the shoot wants the land. And they want it before the shooting season starts.

If it’s true that the virus finds your weak spot, it has lodged itself like an evil monkey in my head. After departing from every other bit of my body, it was still in my brain. It told me I didn’t need friends any more. So, as I moped about the house ‘self-isolating’, I sent a series of very odd text messages, telling my friends what the monkey thought I thought of them. The monkey also told me his theory that there is no such thing as long Covid. All Covid is long. I would never get over it: ‘Well, have the authorities bothered to conduct any research to find out if anyone who has survived this lurgy is feeling 100 per cent better after six months or a year? ‘Do you know anyone who says they are the same again?’ the monkey asked.