Melissa Kite

‘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.

After all that waiting and arguing, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed leaving the EU. The builder boyfriend and I celebrated by popping the cork on a bottle of Denbies bubbly and flying his old yacht’s backstay union flag in the dining room window, which saves me buying curtains. The builder b drank the Dorking bubbly. I’m teetotal so I stick to fizzy water. I don’t anticipate any problems getting Perrier or San Pellegrino in the coming months but there’s always Highland Spring. Of course, if Scotland gets antsy and imposes a blockade, I will have to invest in a carbonation machine. It’s a small price to pay for freedom.

‘This clean sock regime is really annoying,’ said the builder boyfriend, as he rummaged through his newly inaugurated top drawer. I had toyed with the idea of giving him two small drawers as I did last time he graced my domestic arrangements with his presence. But this time I gave him the entire chest: that’s four drawers in total. That’s a lot of commitment on my part and a fair amount on his, too. It scared him, understandably. ‘You’ll be wanting rent next,’ he said, grinning sardonically. ‘Aren’t you pleased, having all your clothes so nicely arranged?

‘Don’t touch anything sharp. Don’t saw anything or drill anything or sand anything,’ said the builder boyfriend as he left the house. ‘I generally agree,’ I said, mindful of the fact that this is what the keeper used to say. ‘But I’m disappointed you include sanding, because I think I made a very good job of the living room floor, and now I’m going to sand the dining room.’ I truly believe there is nothing a deranged woman with a sander can’t achieve. The builder b and I are trying to get the last bits of the house finished so it is in a fit state to be sold.

My mother is a classy lady. I have always known this, but it still affected me in a way I can’t quite describe to see that her handbags have bags. I was helping to move the folks into their new home when I discovered this rather wonderful fact about my mother. Praise be, by the way. HS2 finally played along and the sale went through. We packed up the house in which my parents have lived for 50 years and on the morning of the move the builder boyfriend and I took the spaniels for our last ever walk in the fields at the back of my childhood home. The shape of the high speed railway is now carved into the land. A vast ploughed tract runs for miles across the fields in which I used to picnic and ramble. It was an idyllic childhood, I now realise.

‘What do you mean, you have no ID?’ I asked the farmer, starting to feel dizzy with the mind-boggling convolution of it all. ‘They took all my personal documents. I keep asking but no one gets back to me,’ he said. The farmer, you may remember, was the subject of a police and RSPCA raid on land near to where I live in Surrey where the RSPCA seized 123 horses, which then disappeared on to the motorway in lorries with the charity refusing to say where it was taking them. Shortly after, I was leaked documents showing where the horses had gone. They had been split between half a dozen locations, sent to the four corners of the country, up to eight hours’ drive away.

‘Is it for your daughter?’ said the sales assistant as I pointed to an expensive skincare product. She had glided over to me looking concerned as I stood in the pristine shop dressed in muddy boots and quilted coat, a woolly pompom hat on my head and not a scrap of make-up on my face as usual. I dare say I smelt of horses and dogs, prompting her to glide more swiftly towards me than she might have done had I been odour neutral, or giving off a nice whiff of Chanel like the yummy mummies floating about the place. I’m not a yummy mummy. I’m not even a slummy mummy. I must be described as childless, although I have slightly adopted the little lodger in that I have taken her under my wing. I looked at the sales assistant and saw that her face was a picture.

Since posting some of my research into the RSPCA on Facebook, I now better understand the way social networking works. Social networking is local as well as global. So if you live in Surrey and ride horses you can join a Facebook group full of people in the same area doing the same thing. Only because these people are not speaking face to face, they can be tremendously rude to each other. The upshot of my spending a couple of days on one of these sites plugging my investigations into the RSPCA, including its role in the seizure of 123 horses from a farm down the road from my home, was that all these people started arguing and fighting with each other online in a way they would never dream of doing if they were standing in the same room.

‘I see you’ve got the posters up then?’ said the little lodger as she came home from work. She’s got the idea now that she is living with a person who could best be described as eccentric. But she seems to really like it. She seems to find all aspects of living with me thoroughly entertaining. She was the only applicant who saw the value in the deal I was offering: bed, board, bills and unlimited horse-riding on the pony Gracie. She loves Gracie, and Gracie loves her. She canters off up the field with the lodger looking horribly unstable and I shout ‘Sit up! Pull her up!’ And she pulls and Gracie stops like an angel. She says she is thoroughly enjoying herself. She says she doesn’t mind the manic landlady.

Under a blood moon, that was how Tara went down in the end. The old chestnut mare sure knew how to make an exit. She knew how to do most things, having lived 35 years entirely on her own terms. The builder boyfriend and I stood speechless in the field afterwards, marooned in that strange moonlight. Then the other two horses, standing by the round bale a few feet away, did something I shall never forget. Seconds after she passed, Darcy and Grace put their noses together and breathed. Perhaps they felt her spirit leaving, perhaps they wanted to comfort each other. Either way, they were perfectly silent, touching faces with a wonderful sort of grace.

The frustrating thing about rights is that when you give them to people they don’t cherish and appreciate them. They turn them ungratefully upside down like a modest-sized Easter egg and shake them vigorously to try to work out if something better might be inside. Right to roam is like this. You would think walkers would be delighted to be told they can wander across a farmer’s land, skirting fields full of sheep and horses to take a short cut to a pub, or to make a nice circular route for their Sunday ramble. Not a bit of it. Since right to roam, walkers seem to be almost exclusively furious about footpaths. They want to know why they cannot stray off them to wander around your fields as well, letting their huge dog loose to run around chasing your horses.

Splitting the atom is nothing compared to figuring out how to get hold of your farrier. Why is the farrier more capricious than a rock star? Why does he hardly ever turn up on the day, much less time, he says he is coming? Why does he not keep a diary? Why does he never return calls? Why does he find it impossible to reply to a text, claiming all manner of bizarre contingencies including that his texts get automatically sent to his iPad, which he only checks at night? And anyway his iPad isn’t working so he didn’t see my 15 messages begging him to come and telling him that for the past two weeks I have been ringing him 75 times a day on average. I may as well try to get George Clooney on the phone as my farrier.

Oh, I suppose I might as well give it a whirl, I thought, as the recorded voice began its dirge: ‘If you are calling to cancel your BT service, please press one…’ It would have been more accurate to say: ‘If you never use your landline and have only now, while doing your New Year financial panicking, noticed you pay twice as much for your broadband and phone package as you thought and have had a mild stroke from the shock, press one.’ I pressed one and the voice said I was in the queue for an adviser. The line then went dead-sounding, possibly to make me give up. But I didn’t.

1 January. Rooms left in house to decorate: 1 (only the attic, therefore doesn’t count).Walls plastered by self with no help from man: 1 (vg!!). Reconciliations with ex-builder boyfriend for the festive season owing to total collapse of self-belief right on cue at year end, notwithstanding evidence of self-sufficiency in newly plastered walls: 1 (must do better). Am plastering genius, it turns out. After faffing about with something called a hawk to no particular avail, I ended up chucking all the tools on the floor in exasperation and plastering the dining room with my rubber-gloved hands. It was a bit like baking, only instead of kneading dough in a bowl, I was kneading British Gypsum MultiFinish on to my walls.

Ebenezer Grayling sat busy in his counting house. It was a cold, bleak day at the Department for Transport. Big Ben had only just struck three but it was getting dark already and the lights were going on in the grand buildings of Whitehall. Grayling stared down at the papers in front of him. He had to make these figures add up before he could go home to his constituency for the holidays. The document was headed ‘HS2 — Overspend; Compensation’, and it made for depressing reading. Because his boss, Mrs May, had backed a previous Labour plan to build a mightily expensive high speed railway through the English countryside, Ebenezer Grayling was having to grapple with a project that now ran billions over budget.