Melissa Kite

Never mind Clap for Carers, I’m trying to start a new weekly morale booster called Scream If You’re Going Round The Bend. The idea is you come out on to your doorstep once a week and stand there screaming until you’ve got it all out. It could be fantastically cathartic and do much to help the growing mental health problems caused by lockdown. Let’s make it every Friday at 8 p.m. I don’t want to clash with the key worker hero worship, so Thursday night is out, and doing it on Wednesday would only make it look as though I was trying to upstage Our Wonderful NHS. If we make it Friday night it could be something to look forward to, a way of starting the weekend.

Our battle with the EU has given me an insight into the parking disputes outside my house. Or is it that the parking disputes outside my house have given me an insight into Britain’s battle with the EU? Either way, I was reading through this Brexit trade deal we’ve accepted because we can’t be bothered to counter illogic with logic any longer, and it suddenly occurred to me why my neighbours persist in parking outside my house. And why, when I then park outside their house or someone else’s, I’m the one getting the funny looks. People push each other about for no better reason than the way one horse kicks another in a field.

Bring back the men having sex in the undergrowth. This was the thought that occurred to me and my friend simultaneously in a magical joint epiphany as we rode out over the misty heathland the other day. Wistfully, we beheld the sandy tracks of Ockham and Wisley from atop our mounts as we suddenly realised what was missing. They used to frequent this heathland most religiously and many is the time I’ve whinged about them, including once in a family newspaper where I posed for pictures with the spaniel Cydney, looking disgusted. My harrumphing face made it clear: I don’t approve of married men pulling off the A3 in their saloon cars and getting it on with each other at a local beauty spot on the way home to wifey.

If the novelty of going for a walk doesn’t wear thin for the marauding masses soon, I am going to have to buy a laminator. I’ve bought so many warning signs off the internet telling townies what they can’t do around livestock, I might have to learn how to make signs myself. A bulk order of ‘Dogs Must Be on a Lead at All Times’ had to be placed during lockdown as we started to attract people who would rather be at Westfield shopping centre. I affixed them along the fence line inside my field, along with traffic cones and stripy roadworks barriers, because although walkers should not be in my field, once they stray off the footpath and go in there you cannot assume they will know what to do about it.

Now that our social lives are a Venn diagram that only mathematicians can understand I am officially becoming a recluse. I’ve been getting to this point for years, but since the latest Covid rules mean that what we can and can’t do until ‘vaccine freedom day’ can only be understood if you have a head for shaded charts, I am resigning from polite society, in so far as I was ever in it. Boris may as well have announced 375 tiers and a rule saying anyone who wants to celebrate Christmas needs to sit inside an actual bubble and roll themselves along the floor. I have no idea what the government is on about any more.

Pretty Man was a plump white pony in the forefront of a sad picture. The photograph showed the seizure by the RSPCA of 123 horses from a farm down the road from where I live. The picture came to summarise many aspects of a story that exploded on to social media and released so many emotions among the public, especially horse-lovers. A plump white pony is standing defiantly in the middle of a herd of muddy horses being rounded up and loaded on to lorries to be taken away. Later it emerged that the pony wouldn’t load. He refused to get on the lorry. It took most of the day to get the horses on board and the ones who went on first had to stand on the lorries for hours. The plump white pony was the last to go up the ramp. He protested to the last moment.

The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the sky and black smoke curling over the village, that was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When the builder boyfriend was shutting the field gate and could see a bright blue explosion, what he was witnessing was the start of an ‘alleged bonfire’. We often meet at the horses after he finishes work, then we drive home in our separate cars. He let me out the gate first and stayed behind to lock it. After he rang me and told me what he could see on the horizon, I turned round and drove back to the pub, which is just down the lane from the field. It was now pitch dark and orange flames roared into the sky.

Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever be sane again? With apologies to Morrissey and Marr, I started singing a version of their seminal hit on the way back from getting the horse and dog food and I have been humming it ever since. I feel very jaunty, all of a sudden. I know I’m supposed to be paralysed with fear and hugely depressed, but I’m not. Sorry. I arrived at the feed store just in time, getting the last space in the car park before the place became besieged. A little old lady behind me in the queue reached out as I lost control of my trolley.

The cyclist pulled into our gateway, got off his bike and grabbed hold of the electric fencing. Installing game cameras, along with signs making clear to passers-by that they are on film, has not always deterred trespassers, but it has provided us with interesting viewing. And so it was on this occasion, as the cyclist pulled in for what cyclists pull in for. By this I don’t mean they necessarily relieve themselves swiftly against a bush. I mean sometimes they duck under the tape to go inside the field or stable yard where they make themselves at home, in a semi-seated position. Look, it’s not nice to have to describe what they do, but then it’s not nice of them to do it.

As I scoffed down a fabulous supper in a candlelit room full of ecstatic diners, it struck me that this was what the Jazz Age must have felt like. This was a night out at what can only be described as a speakeasy, complete with live music from a crooner serenading us from a safe distance, beyond the spatter range. The mood among the merrymakers was very much one of living for today, for tomorrow we may be either dead of Covid (unlikely) or fined for breaking draconian bans on everything, everywhere (highly likely). Are the police to raid the homes of people in Tier 1 to make sure no one from Tier 2 is inside them?

‘I can’t put it off any longer. She’s dying and I don’t think I can ignore the inevitable. We’ve got to let her go. I’m scared. Will you come? Please? I really need you.’ I sent the text and waited. After a few minutes, the man I depend on more than any other texted back. Usually he drops everything and comes. This time, his reply would shatter my world. We had been planning to go together to Currys, my tech guy and I, when the old Acer finally gave up the ghost. But I had been dreading it so much I had nursed her along even when the keys started malfunctioning. Being a writer with a laptop with a T that doesn’t work is a challenge.

‘Please be aware there is now a Covid surcharge,’ I told the builder boyfriend one morning, as we discussed the bills. ‘I have carried out a risk assessment in accordance with government guidelines and I’m afraid I need to pass on the cost of the personal protection equipment I now need. Please also be aware that, as of this month, you will be required to register to be with me by downloading the app.’ He ignored me, of course. There is no one to whom I can pass on the cost of everyone else passing on the cost of Covid to me. It started with the dentist. I rang up after getting a reminder that my check-up was due and the receptionist said: ‘Please be aware there is now a £20 Covid surcharge.’ I expressed flabbergastation.

The pile of fly-tipping was dumped in the night as usual, right against the five bar gate. I arrived to feed the horses and found seven fridges and a pile of mattresses blocking the entrance to the field. I raised my eyes to heaven and said: ‘Thank you, God!’ The rotting mattresses and busted, filthy fridges, lying with their doors open, blocked almost the entire pull-in, the field gate and the stile. I believe Nicholas van Hoogstraten once piled up a load of old fridges to block walkers from looking into his garden from a footpath. Well, maybe I know how he felt. No rambler, no matter how many National Trust stickers he has in his car window, can park up to ramble around my horses and cause havoc with seven fridges piled against the gate.

The Volkswagen Passat was parked next to my field gate, sticking out into the lane, blocking larger vehicles from getting round. The farrier was due in an hour. I looked around and saw a lady picking blackberries a little way down the lane. ‘Excuse me? Hello!’ I called, walking up to her thinking: here we go again; more lockdown torment. I geared myself up for conflict with another bad-mannered Surrey rambler. This one was slumped against a bush, reaching upwards, almost swallowed by branches, apparently not hearing me but no doubt pretending, as they do, that I didn’t exist. ‘Excuse me?’ I insisted. As she pulled herself out of the bush, I could see that she was in her sixties and casually dressed in pale blue crumpled trousers and shapeless sweater.

Every time I get on a horse I have to face the likelihood that a dog, or pack of dogs, will have me off. This issue of idiot dog owners walking their dogs for the first time now they are working from home is a situation that has developed since Covid but as far as I’m aware, no government guidelines have been issued to deal with it. Traditionally, dog owners in the idiot class don’t walk their dogs themselves, delegating that to a dog walker who collects the dog in a van and drives it to a place where it is walked with a load of other dogs. Either that, or the dog is driven to a place known to idiots as doggy day care. Here, it is put in a paddock with other dogs to bark and whine at the gate until they are all put back inside the van and driven home again.

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 mask, sans handkerchief he spluttered and spattered. His capacity to ignore my stare was magnificent. I’m not a tolerant person, and when someone is sneezing at me during what is supposed to be a pandemic I cannot muster generosity. Sitting on the worn, red upholstery of the 1453 South Western train service from Waterloo, I looked daggers at this fellow to no avail.