Melissa Kite

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.

Teacher training is terrific fun. Oh yes, I am thoroughly enjoying myself on my evening course at Guildford College. Don’t worry, I’m not actually becoming a teacher. The Snowflakes of Britain are safe. No, I hit upon the idea of running a writers’ group. But of course you can’t just run anything in this country any more. Once you look into the Kafkaesque nightmare of having strangers in your house or of hiring a venue in which you will interact with other human beings, you start to fall into a dark and terrifying pit of equality and health and safety legislation. Naturally, the first thing anyone wants to know if you are offering to come within 50 paces of a ‘student’ or ‘learner’ is that you have a DBS.

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.