Melissa Kite

A man without a mask appeared to be dying of Covid, or something quite like it, on the London to Guildford train. Hunched double in his seat across the aisle, he groaned as he coughed, gasped as he sneezed, and sniffed as a way of clearing the mess because he hadn’t got a tissue. Sans

Always the National Trust sticker. It feels like every time a car parks across the gateway to my horses’ field there is a National Trust sticker in the windscreen. Sometimes there are several stickers in varied colours, the permits of different years, one above the other, like a star rating system for lefties. A few

After driving around the hospital grounds in concentric circles until I was surely down a wormhole, I found the scanning unit. It was shoehorned down a narrow alley and had four parking spaces outside its door, all of them empty, but the sign above them was clear: ‘Private parking, wheel-clamping in operation.’ It did not

‘Hallo! You was callin’ us about appoint…MENT!’ said the lady at the scanning unit of my local hospital in broken English. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that when I received a letter bearing the logo of a private company informing me of the details of my forthcoming MRI, I got all excited, anticipating efficiency.

We have beans, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, butternut squash, plums and strawberries growing in our garden. I dug up and replanted half the flower beds with food when lockdown started, during a moment of panic about where all this was going. We also began a store of tinned goods in the cellar. Don’t all shout at

The whole of Surrey and south-west London seem to have gone abroad on holiday so I’ve got my sanity back. All the people who were working from home because they couldn’t risk Covid-19 but who had to go out walking and cycling in the countryside all day long have simply vanished. Anecdotal evidence suggests that

From my seat in the greasy spoon café I looked out on a typical English row of shops on a typical English street in a typical English village turned suburb. It was a rundown block consisting of a betting shop, a hairdresser, a charity shop, a chemist, an off-licence, a tattoo parlour and, right at

‘I need an ambulance!’ yelled the builder boyfriend into his mobile phone as the cyclist lay bleeding from a head wound. ‘What’s that, luvvie, you want to order a chicken dhansak? You mustn’t bother the emergency services with that sort of thing, dear, it’s very inconvenient and could cost lives…’ This was a sarcastic approximation

‘What are you going to put on my head to protect me?’ said the man outside the barber’s shop to the bemused looking barber. The builder boyfriend had been standing in the queue for a while and when he got to second in line, as the man in front was asked to step inside, he

‘Are you seriously telling me you would rather meet up on Zoom than in reality?’ I asked a friend as we got stuck into an argument about the future of our existence. ‘Well, it’s all we’ve got,’ he argued. No, it really isn’t. But how to explain to people who refuse to stop being locked

My friend turned up wearing a snorkelling mask, beneath which she had tied a bandana around her mouth. On her hands were crinkled latex gloves that looked like they had seen better days. She removed the mask once she had got herself settled in the garden. Needless to say, she had brought her own refreshments.

‘Have you met the man who keeps his horses in this field?’ said one silver-haired lady to the other, as the pair stood by the gate of the builder boyfriend’s smallholding. ‘No, but I hear he’s not very nice.’ ‘He’s an oaf. He won’t even let us walk our dogs through his field.’ This vignette

Opting out of organ donation was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I don’t mean the decision was hard. There’s no way I’m donating my body parts to the state. The hard bit was completing the online form and getting the NHS to accept my decision. If you didn’t notice, the

The two horses looked like they had never seen anything like it. They had wound up in a dark car park renowned for the practice known as ‘dogging’ after being found wandering perilously close to the M25. A jockey who just happened to be passing — ahem — was holding on to them as the

We went on our first outing, to the beach at Littlehampton, but I’m not sure it was as stress-relieving as it could have been. We kept getting into trouble with the two-metre-ites. These are the people who are using the two metre rule as an excuse to be damnably rude. We packed a picnic and

When people ask me what I did during lockdown, I would like to give an inspiring answer, apart from growing vegetables. I thought I would write The Real Life Guide to Keeping a Horse, with all the stuff other books won’t tell you. Chapter One, ‘You Will Need’, will give the most realistic list ever

If this lockdown doesn’t end soon we are all going to turn into hairy lefties. I have just cut the builder boyfriend’s barnet, very badly. It is my second attempt, and while the first went rather well, because I approached the enterprise cautiously, this latest one has gone horribly wrong because I got a bit