Melissa Kite

‘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.

Decorating a tree on the unfinished minstrels’ gallery was an appealing idea if only for the health and safety violations. The little lodger was up for it and between the two of us we heaved the six-foot tree to the kitchen, preparing to hoist it aloft. As things stand, the gallery above the kitchen doesn’t have a railing. Or floorboards. A railing would only have made it more difficult to get the tree up there. But floorboards are probably a basic requirement when one is planning to stand a tree on a three-foot wide mezzanine, ten feet up in the air. So, as the little lodger watched in mute horror, I pulled out all the old reclaimed floorboards I had stacked in the cellar ready for the carpenter to fit and began pushing them up there.

The horse dentist is handsome, with blond windswept hair and a weather-beaten face. There is something Heathcliffian about him, something wild and sexy. On the other hand, he dresses in overalls, brandishes grim tools, and looks a lot like a medieval torturer. He cheers me up with his gallows humour, but also he scares me. The overall effect is what you would call a frisson. He regales me with rude jokes as he gets stuck in with gigantic pliers. Hard to know whether to laugh or scream. On this occasion, I called him out primarily to look at Tara, the old mare.

Lying in bed one night as the rain pounded down, I became aware of a yellow patch forming on the bedroom ceiling. It took shape as I lay there watching it, and before long it had spread into a glorious stigmata of impending ruin. This would happen. Because it’s not as though for the first year of living in this house I was living with a boyfriend who was a builder, whose original specialist trade was roofing. I must have imagined that. I did of course ask the builder boyfriend to get up and check the roof but with his usual reverse logic he insisted on starting work in the basement which was, it could be argued, his area of least expertise.

Left at the Dementia Café, right at the Sleep Office, past the Spiritual Care Centre… This was my journey through the ground floor of my local hospital until I came to the physiotherapy department where the Calf Stretching Education Group was being held. Hospitals are very different places nowadays from the forbidding buildings of my childhood where doctors and nurses in starched uniforms used to attempt to cure people. Now they host Costa Coffee shops and M&S mini food halls and art exhibitions along the walls, which you peruse in spite of yourself as you pass these marvellous new departments. You wonder what happens at the Dementia Café and the Sleep Office and the Spiritual Care Centre.

If you are wondering, any more than usual, how your tax is being spent, you should know that I have been summoned to a Calf Stretching Education Group. According to the letter from the NHS, it has come to the attention of my local hospital that I have tight calf muscles. ‘We would like to invite you to the Calf Stretching Education Group in order to give you the opportunity to manage your condition better.’ My condition is still a little unclear to me, but it has something to do with a lump on the side of my toe. I went to see a specialist about a bunion and she deduced that I am standing on my feet incorrectly.

‘This isn’t so bad,’ said my friend, as we knelt at my old mare’s side as she lay on the ground beneath a tree growing weak. Aged 33 in horse years, or ninetysomething in human years, Tara had been enjoying an extraordinary renaissance since Darcy the thoroughbred had been turned out to live with her and Gracie the skewbald pony. My old girl had taken to the young racehorse to the extent that the pair became inseparable and Gracie had to leave them to it and pootle off around the field to graze on her own. Tara and Darcy shadowed each other day and night and even walked to the water tank together.

Just when you thought there was nothing more for women of the left to nonsensically oppose, I bring you news of a baffling development. Female horse-riders of a liberal persuasion are burning their bridles. Yes, there’s a new craze among the lunatic fringe of the horse world whose members are casting their reins on to the muck heap. This trend is mainly confined to people who can’t ride very well and who are terrified of horses, making it extremely risky for all concerned.