Melissa Kite

The travellers were blamed for fly-tipping when all that was left on the common after they went back up north were some neat piles of mulched bark and branches. Of course, they should not have left anything, ideally. But I’m not convinced they didn’t cut back the overgrowth to get their caravans parked, improving a meadow which was hideously unkempt after years of neglect by the local authorities. All travellers are not the same, any more than all ‘insert racial group’ are all the same. You wouldn’t get away with labelling any other community as all bad, therefore when travelling people behave well it should be celebrated. Instead, the authorities did their best to paint them as antisocial. The notice cancelling the fête was left up for weeks.

The village fête had to be cancelled because of what they called an ‘incursion’ on to the green. The way the local paper told it, an ‘unauthorised encampment’ put an end to the annual summer event that would have raised money for charity. Actually, as I watched from my bedroom window, what happened was that the organisers of the fête arrived the day before to set up, unlocked the padlock on the gate leading onto the green, and left it open. Our visitors then simply followed them in. The police were called, arriving with amazing speed in lavish numbers, and the new arrivals agreed to move to the back meadow and park their caravans there so the fête could go ahead. But the notice went up anyway: ‘Fête cancelled.

‘Ah well, it can’t be helped,’ said the builder boyfriend. I call people who talk like that civilians. Nut jobs like me can’t process misfortune in such a way. He shouted and screamed for two days about the accident and then he just got over it. ‘Ah well, it can’t be helped,’ he said, after telling me his insurance company was accepting liability. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘Before you take the blame for the whole thing, you did tell them a police car drove the wrong way down the street, the car in front of you slammed on its brakes and you went into the back of them? You did tell them you have witnesses who saw the patrol car, never mind what the police are saying about it never having been there?

For a while, it seemed as if the only words my beloved would ever say again were ‘chicken Kievs’. Two hours of operating a strimmer to clear the undergrowth from the electric fencing around my field had left the builder boyfriend either deaf or so hungry he could only think about his favourite meal. Every question I asked elicited the same two words, until I thought the best thing was to get him home and feed him chicken Kievs. So I hurried to the One Stop and swept every pack they had off the shelves. He sat down at the table looking peculiar and ate his way through four breaded chicken breasts laced with garlic butter, one after the other. Then he looked up and started to converse normally.

Not going to the osteopath worked a treat. Walking out of that surgery after hearing the crunching coming from inside the consulting room while another patient was being done proved to be just the cure I needed. Now, I want to make absolutely clear before we go any further that I am not about to insult osteopaths. General Osteopathic Council, stand down. Individual enraged osteopaths, replace your receivers. Do not start dialling the switchboard. Do not begin composing emails beginning: ‘Dear Sir, I wish to express in the strongest possible terms…’ Relax. There is no need to complain. Let me say for the record: I support practitioners of alternative medicine; I couldn’t be more complimentary about complementary cures. I applaud osteopaths.

Either the osteopath is a psychopath or he is the second coming. I see no other possibility. I turned up on the doorstep of his surgery feeling demented from the pain that has been gnawing at the base of my skull relentlessly for two weeks. All I had done was to duck under the tape of my horses’ field, a movement I have performed a thousand times. But this time, as I turned my head momentarily upside down, something pinged and my skull exploded into the worst headache ever. It was so bad I wrapped my head in a coat and became, like Tchaikovsky, possessed by the theory that it was going to fall off. Holding on tight with both hands, I made the builder boyfriend drive me to the GP surgery. The doctor was supremely unimpressed.

Remainers don’t like borders, I get that. But I had always assumed this was a preference confined to geopolitics. I had assumed that when these people got home they barricaded themselves in their houses and let no one over the threshold they didn’t completely trust like the rest of us. But perhaps they are not such hypocrites after all. For as the builder boyfriend found out when he was on a job the other day, it seems the eccentric dislike of borders permeates some people’s everyday lives. ‘Please leave the gap in the fence,’ was the instruction given to him by a well-to-do Londoner who had secured his services to put a new fence in her garden. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. I’ve got one more panel to put in.

‘Take a seat,’ said the prospective lodger as we stood in my dining room. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sit down while we discuss things,’ he said, producing a folder which he waved at me. Something was wrong here, even I could work that out. ‘Discuss things? What things?’ I asked, backing up a bit because he was a big fella — 6ft something, lanky, with long unkempt hair that made him look like a premiership footballer after a bad night out. He advanced towards me with his folder. I backed into the dining-room table. The builder boyfriend was going to go mad. He had told me not to do viewings when he wasn’t there.

When is planning permission for four loft windows actually planning permission for two? Or simultaneously vice versa? It’s a very tricky question. After spending a week in the nine circles of hell that constitute local authority planning, I have narrowed my loft conversion problems down to two possible options. Either I’d got planning permission for four windows and it was revised down to two, or I’d got planning for two windows and it was revised up to four. Half the planning department at the local council think it was the former and half the latter. Building Control, meanwhile, said they always bow to planning. In other words, they think it’s two and four. It all started with a note from my architect when the permission came through two years ago.

No sooner had the builder boyfriend finished digging for no good reason in the basement than his attention turned to the old but perfectly good downstairs loo. I don’t know why he does this. I didn’t want the basement dug and I certainly did not want anything done to my downstairs loo. It is, or should I say was, a rough but functional affair just off the kitchen, accessed via a small step down into the utility and larder area — turn right at the fridge, et voilà. Well, we all love an en suite. The idea that you can move seamlessly from one enterprise to another, perhaps taking out the milk to make a cup of tea with the sound of the flush ringing in your ears, ought not to be seen as a problem in my view. In fact, I call it flow.

The receptionist fixed me with a withering stare. I had just filled out a repeat prescription form and politely inquired of the girl behind the desk how I would know when it was ready. She harrumphed and asked where I usually picked my prescriptions up from. I told her the pharmacy on site, you know, the one next door to the surgery, the one just there, in the car park of this building. The one you could see out the window. That one. She stared at me as though I were explaining that I collected my prescriptions from the international space station. ‘I’ll look it up,’ she said, as though my theory fell so far short of logic it was not worth even considering. ‘Date of birth?’ I don’t know why they don’t just give us a serial number.

‘Farewell then, little lodger. I wish you would stay for ever but I understand that girls in their early twenties meet boys and go off to live with them in flatshares in Tooting. I had such a soft spot for her, the builder boyfriend nicknamed her ‘mini-me’. I taught her to ride and would pull her behind me on Grace like a duckling. With her pink specs, white blonde hair and tiny frame, she looked like a miniature Daryl Hannah in the film Steel Magnolias. When we first met she peeped shyly at me through the thick lenses. She began chattering away nervously and I don’t think she ever really stopped until she gave me notice a few days ago. I have never met anyone quite like her. We’re all unique, but some people are more unique than others.

‘When you are in a hole stop digging. Have you never heard that?’ I asked the builder boyfriend, as he slammed his spade into a pile of earth. I came home to find him in the cellar finishing some unfinished business. The last time we gave it a go — by which I mean gave ‘us’ a go — he set about renovating the house from the bottom up, attempting to remove all the loose earth in the basement. He filled sack after sack, hauling it out in camel tubs, until I was begging him to please do anything else. In the end, I kicked up such a hullabaloo that he was forced to fit me a bathroom.

A letter before action, or something that looked very much like it, arrived on my doormat from an insurance company. Regarding an incident on 25 October 2018: ‘We are holding you responsible for the damage caused to our insured’s vehicle and the related costs,’ it said. While I had a valid insurance policy, my insurance company was not responding and so they were looking to instruct solicitors to recover their losses direct from me. Proceedings would be served directly on me and not my insurers and could ultimately lead to a court judgment being entered against me, it said. The letter then gave me a final chance to contact my insurers and bring this to their attention so they might deal with it for me.

A leaflet came through my door from the NHS inviting me to take part (if that is the right term) in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. What a kind offer, I thought. They must know I’m stressed. Fine, so I didn’t think that. I thought: what a blasted cheek! This leaflet is a mailshot, clearly, and has been distributed to every home in my area at a cost of goodness knows how much. I looked at the glossy thing in all its impudence and presumption and decided to chase after the postman. He was three doors down when I caught up with him and he wore a cheery smile as usual. ‘Can I ask you something?’ I called and as I approached him he could see I was waving the leaflet. He grimaced. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a cheek, isn’t it?

‘That’s not the builder boyfriend,’ said the luncheon guest as he eyed the builder boyfriend over the table. ‘Well then, who do you think it is?’ I asked the gentleman, who was sitting next to me with a bemused expression on his face. He had put down his fork and abandoned his fettuccine completely after I let slip that his favourite character was seated opposite. He shook his head. ‘No, no. That can’t be the builder boyfriend. He’s got a Countryside Alliance badge on his lapel. He’s not dressed like a builder.’ ‘Funnily enough,’ I said, ‘I make him wear clean clothes when we go out. Were you expecting him to turn up for a lunch party in his work outfit?

An angry villager accosted me outside my house as I came through my front door. ‘You’re wrong about those horses,’ she called. By which she meant the 123 horses taken from a farm down the road by the RSPCA. ‘They were never fed!’ she shouted at me. ‘They were starved! We have been trying to help them for years!’ I sighed. ‘Just a moment, please,’ I said, putting my handbag in the car. I walked over to where she was standing. ‘Look, those horses were all fat if anything. I’ve got leaked photos of each one of them taken by vets in RSPCA custody days after seizure. They look perfectly fine. Would you like to come in and see the photos? Come on, I’ll show you.’ ‘No!’ she screeched.

With very little expectation they would care, I sent an email to Mole Valley Conservatives. It always amuses me, that name. It reminds me that in Ever Decreasing Circles the character played by Richard Briers worked at Mole Valley Valves. Martin Bryce, you may remember, was a narcissistic, obsessive, middle-aged man at the centre of a suburban community in Surrey. He was a relatively unsympathetic character, although Briers said it was his favourite sitcom role. I suppose I have much in common with the miserable Bryce. Bitterly, I sent an email to Mole Valley Conservatives. ‘To whom it may concern: We didn’t leave the EU but I can leave You.