Melissa Kite

An angry text exchange between me and a former Tory councillor after she lost her seat has got me thinking. During the campaign, I asked this lady if she would like to put a poster in my front garden as it adjoins the village green. Even more to the point, next door to me is her main rival, who has a placard fixed to his front wall. Her reply came back no thanks. She did not want me to put up a poster or placard as it would only make matters worse by reminding the opposition to vote. In terms of the effect on her main opponent, she said it would ‘wind him up’. This seemed odd to me. Aren’t the different candidates supposed to wind each other up during election campaigns?

‘You’re meant to be having your dental appointment now!’ barked the receptionist, bringing my lie-in to an abrupt end. Very unusually, I had left the builder boyfriend to do the horses on his way to work and I was lounging about in bed. Coffee at the luxurious hour of 9 a.m., spaniels sprawled on the duvet, sun lighting up the room… everything was feeling marvellously laid back, until I realised I had forgotten I was supposed to be having my teeth poked about. ‘Don’t worry, I can be there in 30 seconds,’ I gasped, falling out of bed and scrambling for a pair of jeans. I live four doors down from the dentist. ‘All right, if you come straight round that’s fine,’ she said.

Being told by the Tories not to put a local election poster in my window because it will only remind people why they don’t like them has reminded me why I don’t like them. It also put my blood pressure up, according to my newly delivered blood pressure monitor. I strapped the thing to my arm while I was arguing with a Tory councillor about why they wouldn’t give me a Vote Conservative poster: 136/84. Nowhere near as high as it was in the doctor’s surgery, but still… This happens every election. I always offer the local Conservatives the run of my front garden, which borders the village green, and they always politely decline my offer to display a banner or placard in a prime spot.

Trying to get hold of HRT in the time of Covid is like trying to score crack. Possibly, scoring crack is way easier than trying to persuade your GP to do your annual blood pressure test so you can renew your prescription while the nurse who does the blood pressure testing is socially distancing. I can’t be sure, obviously. While they don’t much want to wrap a strap around my arm and press a button, they are very keen on sticking a syringe into me. The vaccine call-up came in a text from the NHS the day before my blood pressure test, which they finally decided to give me after attempting to do it over the phone, despite me pointing out this wouldn’t work. They texted me to say I could now book my vaccine. I ignored it, and explained to a friend why.

When the time came for the nurse to ring me to take my blood pressure, the phone simply didn’t ring. I was at the horses doing fencing so I checked my messages to make sure I hadn’t missed this ground-breaking event. But no, there was no voicemail saying: ‘Hello, this is the nurse calling to take your blood pressure.’ I was extremely disappointed because I had hoped my cynicism was about to be proved unfounded. There did appear to be no way a nurse could take my blood pressure over the phone. But I had sort of hoped there might be. And I think that tiny part of me that was hoping for such a daft thing was the sheep-shaped part of me that wants to trust the NHS like the other happy sheep people, despite evidence to the contrary.

After refusing to issue my HRT without a blood pressure test, the GP surgery rang to offer me an appointment. ‘I can come any time,’ I said, trying to be accommodating. Having complained about this particular practice before, I felt guilty. They have been very good at issuing me with repeat prescriptions through their online service during lockdown. When a polite, cheerful receptionist said I could not have my HRT without an appointment this time, because my annual blood pressure test was due, I saw that as a good thing, a sign they were doing their job properly. I made a mental note to write about how nice and efficient they were being in this case. Then the receptionist said: ‘I can offer you a telephone appointment next Wednesday.

Watching a woman driving a dog past my house like a carthorse is just another ‘new normal’ of lockdown. This moron had two long ropes attached to a harness around the body of her huge dog and was trying to steer it along the village green by long-reining it from behind as though it were a pony. The poor dog looked utterly fed up. I don’t know, because I couldn’t face asking her, but I got the impression that like the rest of the idiot new dog owners out there, she thought this system was less cruel than putting a conventional collar around its neck attached to a conventional lead. That, you see, would involve pulling on the dog. And the new owners won’t do that.

The rope riders came down the driveway slowly, their horses veering this way and that, side to side, forwards a few steps, then backwards nearly as many. It took them an hour to trespass from the bridleway that crosses the top of the drive and make their slow, dangerously shaky course between the paddocks full of horses until they made it to just opposite our smallholding, where their mounts gave up completely and just refused to take another step. There were four horses, but only one was wearing what I would call tack, as in a saddle and bridle. The other three, including a child’s pony being ridden by a small girl, were being steered by only makeshift ropes wound loosely around the horses’ heads.

‘Welcome to Victims First. Please leave your name and number and we will return your call. Beeeeeeeeeeeep!’ I had rung the number given to me by the police to pay my fixed penalty fine for not having an MOT. This £100 I was trying to pay was coming out of an increasingly tight household budget, incidentally, so I decided that the fairest thing to do was to claw it back from the state. I had, of course, deeply apologised to the officer who pulled me over for forgetting the MOT after the Covid extension period ran out. And I begged him to let me drive straight home, park off road, and take the Volvo to be tested the very next morning. But he insisted I had to be fined.

‘Have you had your jab, Margery?’ said one Surrey lady to another in the queue for take-away coffee at the chintzy, shabby chic coffee shop. ‘Oh yes, I’ve had it for my country,’ said her friend. ‘I just can’t understand these people who won’t have the jab. I mean, how selfish…’ I looked at them and they looked at me, pointedly, because they had decided what sort of person I was thanks to the altercation we had all just had. ‘Margery, are you feeling all right after your jab?’ said one to the other, more quietly. ‘Well, now you ask, no, I’ve been rather ill for two weeks now. I’m sure it’s nothing.’ ‘Yes, I feel dreadful too. I’m sure it’s nothing.

‘We’re sorry your experience with us has not been a good one,’ said the press officer at Surrey Police. ‘You misunderstand me,’ I told the chap. ‘I didn’t expect being cautioned for breaking the law to be a good experience. In fact, I think it’s very important that breaking the law and being caught is not a good experience.’ I explained to the officer who had telephoned in response to my enquiry that I was not complaining about being fined for not having an MOT. I was unhappily happy with that bit.

‘Anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you have anything to say?’ I looked at the baby-faced police officer and tried to think of an appropriate response. I had been driving to Guildford station to meet a friend who every now and then comes from his nearby home on the train. I park in the station car park and together we walk to a kebab shop, order some food, eat it where we can perch, and cheer ourselves up. Running low on diesel, I pulled into a filling station on the way. After pulling back out, I noticed a police car close behind. I turned into the railway station and its lights flashed. Readying myself to explain the Covid-compliant kebab, I wound down my window.

The street light as bright as the Dog Star was fitted with a shield, and I was assigned my own personal engineer who rang and texted me. Whether or not this was because I had threatened to throw myself out of the window, I can’t be sure. But it is certainly true that I got service with a smile after I lost my already limited supply of marbles and yelled down the phone to Surrey County Council that if they didn’t do something about the bright white LED bulb shining into my bedroom from the street lamp newly fitted with the latest ‘energy saving’ technology, then I would jump. It was a ‘day burner’, which meant it was on all day and all night.

Eventually, I got so bored I ended up at Burger King. For no other reason than to amuse myself one evening, after doing next to nothing all day, I entered the car park of the Ladymead retail park outside Guildford. I wasn’t hungry but I convinced myself I would like a bean burger, because it was either that or sit at home watching the builder boyfriend watching Bangers and Cash, a TV show about old cars for unreconstructed men like him. And I had done that for what seemed like 175 almost consecutive evenings already.

The kitchen tap began dripping as if it knew perfectly well that this would land me in a predicament whereby I would have to brave a phone line. I tried a friend who is a plumber but he confirmed that getting a new valve would involve contacting the kitchen shop where I bought the tap, and he didn’t fancy it. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll call them. But if I’m going to do the worst bit, then I might as well get him to fit it for nothing.’ By which I meant the builder boyfriend. My plumber friend agreed and then abandoned me to my fate.

An everlasting lightbulb brighter than the Dog Star was installed in the street lamp outside my house one morning as I watched the two engineers being lifted up on a crane. I knew it was trouble as they took out the soft yellow bulb from the antique holder and installed a bright-white LED. I had been dreading this, but when it finally happened the result was worse than I could have imagined, because they didn’t put it on a timer, like the old one. They switched it on and left it on. All day and all night it blasts out its blinding white light. It is never night time. What the devil is this light for? I live up a track on a quiet village green. Counting mine, there are only eight houses up here. No one comes or goes at night except for the odd dog walker.

Not long after he took on a smallholding for his cobs, the builder boyfriend found a couple walking through his fields with their dog. They had appeared out of nowhere, apparently by squeezing through a small hole in the hedge with a neighbouring property. As there is no footpath through his land, the BB was perplexed. ‘Can I help you?’ he called. But the smartly dressed couple waved him away. ‘No, thank you!’ the man called back politely enough, as he and his wife walked on with their spaniel, which darted this way and that, soon entangling itself with Jimmy and Duey, the builder b’s black and white cobs.