Melissa Kite

Two and a half hours after my tech guy began trying to uninstall Norton, he had purple smoke coming out of his nose and mouth. Well, Vimto-flavoured vapour. Sucking on this pseudo-crack pipe like a junkie, he was, and I was itching all over from a bad case of techno-hives. ‘What on earth is happening?’ I kept asking him as he ransacked the hard drive of my laptop, making code flash all over the screen. He told me that if this didn’t work, the only option would be to wipe the entire hard drive clean and start again. I couldn’t explain to you what he explained to me about what was going wrong if I wanted to, or not in his words.

‘I’m just going to pop yourself on hold,’ said the girl from the online shopping firm who was trying to find my amazing disappearing bed. First a bed I ordered arrived with half of it missing. Then, when I rang to complain, they upgraded me to a better bed by way of apology and when that bed came, it had half missing too. Now I had two halves of two different beds: the headboard half of one, and the frame half of another. But one entire matching bed had I none. And all that being as it may, the lack of a complete bed was as nothing compared with the irritation of being addressed with a mangled reflexive pronoun. Why do themselves do it? Do themselves imagine the English language now has a polite pronoun as the French do?

The little lodger is moving in. I chose her after an exhaustive search of twentysomethings looking for accommodation, during which I met a terrifying selection of millennials and members of generation snowflake. The highlight has to be the 22-year-old engineer who came with his parents. They toured the house and inspected the room on offer. They then fixed me with a withering stare and, as the lad stood by saying nothing, fired at me the most frightening list of questions I can imagine being asked about a prospective lodging situation. ‘And where will we sleep when we come to stay?

A big part of my problem is that I don’t understand why people do the things they do. I was walking my dogs across a meadow and I looked behind to see a large, tan vizsla running towards us. He was entire, so I called Poppy and Cydney to heel and put Cydney on the lead because she is also un-neutered. The vizsla hurtled towards us, so as a precaution I scooped Cyd up into my arms. The vizsla then decided that if he couldn’t get to the bitch he’d hump the owner, in her nice tight Lycra leggings. He threw himself at my back, wrapped himself around my legs and got to it. I screamed and looked behind me for the owner, who I expected to be running over to help. But the owner was 300 yards away sauntering through the meadow. Sauntering.

Leaving Norton, the antivirus software package, is a bit like trying to leave the EU. You may think, once you have decided to click the ‘X’ button in the box that says you don’t want to subscribe to this expensive protection outfit any more, that you have left. You may think that it was your decision to make, and now you’ve made it, you’re free. You’re right if you hold your nerve. But then there is the whole issue of Norton’s feelings on the matter, which are only marginally less difficult to deal with than Jean-Claude Juncker’s feelings about Brexit. Like Juncker, Norton 360 antivirus software wants you in a way that you didn’t really grasp the potency of until you decided to say goodbye.

When I made a joke about ragwort being like Islamic extremism, I expected someone to write in. I was fully braced for a complaint from a sympathiser of Islamic fundamentalism, saying look here, Missy, comparing our noble struggle to an invasive weed is beyond a joke. However, the modern world has surpassed my expectations and I have, in fact, had a complaint from a sympathiser of ragwort accusing me of hate speech against another species. The tenor of his complaint is broadly: how very dare I compare ragwort to Islamic extremism, because this is inflammatory and likely to incite hatred towards ragwort. I don’t think he’s joking.

After I had been glossing the woodwork for a few days, I started to feel light-headed. It hadn’t occurred to me that the paint was solvent-based, of course. Not until I caught sight of the writing on the tin one evening while painting a bedroom doorframe did it make sense. But it was too late, because I had inhaled enough of the stuff by then. The keeper arrived to find me neurotically painting architrave so that the paint lines were correct to the nearest millimetre. I was up against the wood so close my nose was virtually touching it, as if I were painting the Sistine chapel. And all the while, I blathered on incoherently.

When I placed an advert for a lodger I really did expect potential tenants to want to come and see the room. But of course, things have moved on. My theory about human beings is that they are evolving into emoticons. A lot of people now go into seismic avoidance when you try to get them to manifest themselves in 3D format. I placed the ad on one of those spare-room websites and within minutes I was deluged by deeply earnest CVs from users with smiling headshot photos. Firstly, these talking heads wanted to make clear that my newly renovated house looked stunning and they would absolutely love to live there. They then embarked on an account of their life and times.

The engineer from Beko arrived and got to work trying to mend the new fridge. Having spent a very long time on the phone to customer services being grilled about my part in its apparent downfall, I was under no illusions that he was going to try and pin this on me. During two extremely unpleasant calls to an 0333 number, I had been subjected to a series of interrogations worthy of Guantanamo Bay. Trick questions abounded, and the chilling impression was given that they knew I would incriminate myself, it was just a matter of time. And they had all the time in the world. They could keep me on the line asking me baffling details about my fridge until I tripped up and let slip that I had done something that invalidated the warranty.

Beko. I always want to sing that song by Peter Gabriel from the movie about the South African freedom fighter when I look at my new fridge freezer. But the anti-apartheid activist was Biko, and the appliance manufacturer is, in fact, pronounced Becko. I know this because I’ve just had to ring the Beko customer services line after my new fridge freezer started pooling water around every orifice. ‘Good afternoon, welcome to Beko customer services,’ said the lady. I wanted to say ‘Beeeeko, Beeko, Beeeko-o-o. Beeko.’ But I didn’t. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘my new fridge freezer isn’t working.’ ‘When did you buy it and where?’ she said, as if she’d done this too many times.

Stefano came back to paint the front of the house. I have never been so pleased to see his red and white van. He emerged with a startling new crew cut instead of his wavy black hair. He was wearing a red and white T-shirt with his company logo on it. But otherwise, he was the same. He grinned a wide grin and held out his enormous hand to shake mine. ‘Hello boss,’ he said. ‘I’m not the boss,’ I said, ‘You’re the boss.’ He laughed. He has not been here for six months since he helped me finish the major works inside the house after the builder boyfriend walked out, or was sent packing, or walked out as I sent him packing. I’m not sure which it was.

Instead of carpeting the upstairs of the house, I had grass fragments removed from the dogs’ ears. I can’t say I enjoyed the grass removals as much as I might have enjoyed having carpet to walk on. I had picked out a lovely stripy pattern that wouldn’t show the dirt, and was really looking forward to not slashing my feet with splinters every time I stepped out of bed on to bare floorboards. But then Cydney and Poppy managed to coordinate the shoving of razor-sharp pieces of vegetation down their lugholes, hospitalising themselves just a week apart. Cydney was first, dashing around the green outside the house and diving headlong through the frazzled undergrowth, burnt to a crisp by the heatwave, then coming out with her tail between her legs.

This was going to be about how a major phone company surprised me by delivering a fantastic service. I was quite excited because secretly I have always wanted to be forced to admit that in spite of my rock bottom expectations, all is right with the world. It began when I went into the Carphone Warehouse to buy a new iPhone, something I had dreaded and put off for so long that my old iPhone was held together with gaffer tape. I sat down with a nice chap and told him I wanted a phone exactly like my old one, because I’m weird. He said they no longer did 64 gigawotsits — he said the proper word, obviously. The available options were 32 or 128 and he recommended 128 because 32 was impossibly low and I wouldn’t be able to download. I explained that I didn’t download.

Opening a button of my shirt to get the horse lorry through its MOT is the sort of thing I like to kid myself about. I know I’m not really getting a lorry through its MOT by unbuttoning my shirt, but at my age it makes me feel good to think that I might. So I put on this tight gingham number, one less button done up than usual, denim shorts and a Stetson cowboy hat I bought in Bozeman, Montana, and I drove my lorry to its MOT retest on a stinking hot day looking like a poor man’s Shania Twain because I had it in my mind that I had to give it my all. Never let it be said that I do not go all out when push comes to shove. And this was shove because the lorry is an old E-reg rust bucket of a Ford Transit.

Finally, I got my hands on a gun. About the size of a sawn-off shotgun it was, just under 20in long, a fine specimen of a weapon. It was surprisingly light and easy to wield. I held it and thought of all that I might now accomplish. Everything I had dreamed of could now become reality. I would right all the wrongs. I would put things in order. Oh, I would do so many things. I stood in front of the bedroom mirror and admired my reflection holding the gun unloaded, pulling the trigger to see how it felt. It felt good. I went down to the cellar and rummaged through the boxes of miscellaneous stuff and found what I thought was the appropriate ammo: decorator’s caulk, white, smooth finish. Getting the caulk tube into the sealant gun was tricky. I had to phone the keeper.

Every day in every way we are paying for more and more. I realise this increasingly. Things we took for granted as free are added inexorably to the list of things we are charged for. And now we have rural parking charges, by which I don’t mean we are going to be charged for parking outside a village shop. Sleepy little One Stops have been on viciously policed meters for years now, as we all know. I mean parking outside a deserted wooded area while you walk your dog. Very soon, there will be no such thing as a free walk, or a free picnic. In Surrey, where I reside, Chobham Common, Newlands Corner, Ockham Common and Whitmoor Common are just a few of the reasonably deserted places where you now can’t pull up in your car without a parking warden appearing to ticket you.

After sanding floorboards for two days I became even more demented than usual. The hand sander was the exact right size to make it horribly arduous but just about possible to do the entire downstairs floor this way, and so I persisted even when I should have given up and hired a large machine. By the time I had sanded seven boards I had started to mildly hallucinate. What was the keeper thinking, leaving me with a Black & Decker ‘Mouse’ while he went on holiday? I suppose he wanted to tie me up with a job that couldn’t lead to decapitation or electrocution until he got back.

Dear customer, we are invading your privacy and sending you this unsolicited email in order to tell you that you are entitled to not get any unsolicited emails from us under new data privacy laws. Here at Easi-Equine (…or fill in name of company you have never contacted and never wanted to have anything to do with…) we take your privacy extremely seriously and we want you to know that we would never send you any emails you didn’t want, apart from this one and the 357 previous emails we sent you which you will find in your spam box.

Now I know how the Karate Kid felt. Two hours after I began oiling the newly laid deck in my garden, I could barely move my arms. Wax on, wax off, I kept repeating. I knelt until I had rib marks in my knees so deep they looked as though they might never come out. After eight boards, the muscles in my right arms were bulging. I tried swapping the brush to the other hand, but that took too long so I gave up. Wax on, wax off. I would have to have one big muscled right arm and a scrawny left one. As long as someone attacks me from that side, I can block them with my right hand. The hours passed, the sun went down. I oiled my way to the door just in time for nightfall. ‘Start at the far end and work to the door,’ the keeper had instructed me before he left me with the pot of oil.