Melissa Kite

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 weeks ago, a shiny black car with five National Trust stickers parked sideways on, blocking not only the gateway but the stile beside it so people couldn’t access the footpath. When I caught up with the two men who got out of the car, asking them to please go back and move, they were, in very posh voices, extremely rude to me. ‘No, no! We have parked in a parking space, thank you!’ said one of them, patronisingly.

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 say patient parking. Most likely, with a sign like that, it was staff parking. I looked around and realised I was stuck down a dead end. My only option was to reverse backwards, craning my neck around because the old Volvo long ago ceased to have functioning beepers.

‘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. Although I was having it done on the NHS, the appointment came through swiftly with no mention of the health service on the paperwork, which raised my expectations. I rang to confirm, but after holding for a while I was told to leave a message and someone would ring me back. A few hours later came the cheery ‘Hallo!

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 once. I didn’t panic buy, and I didn’t waste a morsel. I shopped very frugally at first and only bought what we needed. But once the shelves started stocking up I began a modest doomsday store consisting of tins of sweetcorn, soup, ravioli, ham and sardines, along with jars of passata, frankfurters and gherkins. Why do we buy giant gherkins at times of crisis? I think it must be something to do with the homesteading spirit that lies dormant in all of us.

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 many of the Covid-phobics have got on planes and enthusiastically breathed as much re--circulated air as it takes to get them to a villa by the sea. The cyclists and the runners and the ramblers with backpacks with cooking pots sticking out of the top have all evidently decided they didn’t need to bother me any more by trespassing through my horses’ field, and have gone somewhere they really wanted to be. That was half the problem.

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 the end, a ‘wellbeing’ clinic, which I took to be a place selling methods to undo all the damage done in the other places. We had driven to this suburb just off the M3 to help a friend who is trying to sell his collection of classic cars. The builder boyfriend is a dab hand with motors, so he offered to help our friend do the pricing. We stopped at a café for a bite to eat before getting to the lock-up, and our friend treated us to lunch for our trouble.

‘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 of what the ambulance service operator said to the BB, which he paraphrased with much artistic licence when he relayed it to me an hour later. I was at home when I got a text message from him to say that a couple of cyclists had trespassed on to the farm where he keeps his horses, a daily occurrence.

‘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 found himself delayed by a curious argument. ‘What do you mean?’ said the barber, who was wearing a visor, gloves and apron and was more than in accordance with the regulations. ‘I mean,’ said the man, who was one of those arch, self-satisfied types the builder boyfriend finds it all too tempting to make fun of, ‘I mean, what measures are you going to put in place around my head to protect me from Covid as you cut my hair, hmm?

‘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 down that lockdown is, to all intents and purposes, over? I get the distinct impression that a lot of people have so thoroughly enjoyed sitting on their backsides doing nothing — sorry, I mean finding themselves and getting in touch with their inner child and being close to nature — that they don’t want it to end, ever.

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. ‘How long have you had those gloves on?’ I asked her. ‘You do know they’re only any good if you change them after everything you do?’ ‘I know, I know!’ she snapped, lifting her bandana to take a suck at her vaping machine, or crack pipe as I call it, disappearing into a haze of stage smoke, like a magician mid-conjuring trick. ‘It’s so nice to see you!

‘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 was captured on one of the game cameras we have dotted around the fields where we keep our horses. We’ve captured thieves in the act of loading up feed, fly-tippers in the process of dumping rubbish and we’ve now found out what the locals think of us. The BB was flicking through footage when he came across the two well-dressed ladies having a chinwag on the footpath and decided, on a whim, to play the video.

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 law changed on 20 May so that everyone over 18 must fill out a form if they do NOT wish to be carved up after death. If you don’t submit this form, your organs automatically become the property of the state and, once they’ve taken the bits they need, your relatives get to bury what’s left. Many will say how callous I am to point this out as being in some way wrong and thus deny a child, potentially, the chance of life from a transplant.

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 usual nocturnal customers of this beauty spot carried on doing what they do. The police were out in force, busy trying to solve this baffling crime. We arrived after getting a call from a neighbouring horse owner warning us that horses in our area were loose. After racing to our fields around 9 p.m. to find them all peacefully grazing, our fences and gates intact, we set about joining a group who had gathered to help.

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 put the spaniels in the car with our beach mats and swimming things. We stopped at the filling station in Dorking to pump up a tyre and as the builder boyfriend saw to that, I went into the shop and got myself into trouble. I picked out some goodies to add to our picnic — a giant punnet of strawberries and some pork pies. He loves a pork pie does the BB. With this armful of items I headed for the counter.

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 published of the items you should assemble before bringing home your new equine friend. Number one item: gaffer tape. I know you’re thinking the farrier comes every six weeks. But in practice most farriers are harder to get hold of than O. J. Simpson on the San Diego Freeway. Thoroughbreds reign supreme in the art of shedding shoes, then demolishing their feet by galloping round their field.

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 carried away with the clippers. My mother is a hairdresser so I assumed I might have it in the blood. I helped out a lot in her salon when I was a teenager. I can shampoo and sweep the floor just fine. But of course the rest of it requires more detailed training, I now realise. One further complication is that I could not get hold of a set of men’s hair clippers.

The rain showers had a strange and wondrous effect. All the cyclists, joggers and dog walkers that were coming from miles away to take their essential exercise in the countryside magically disappeared. No one we didn’t recognise took any essential exercise in the downpours, but then resumed it when the weather changed. I find this odd because the explanation of the day-trippers for putting their bikes and their backpacks and their hiking equipment and their picnic baskets into the backs of their cars had been that they really, really needed to do that — come hell, high water or Covid. The locked-down inhabitants of towns and cities needed to pedal around the countryside hour after hour, day in day out, so badly that we lot who live here ought to get out of their way.