Melissa Kite

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.

‘What a fabulous tan, where did you get it? said one of my fellow lunch guests as we entered the women’s powder room of a Mayfair hotel. I get this a lot. I want to talk about where I have wintered, or summered, or springed, because although I am poor I am lucky enough to mix with people who are not, and I love people who are not. I will defend them to the death. The poorer I get, the more capitalist I become. I can trace my attraction to Trump directly along the lines of my diminishing bank account and mounting credit card bills. I think it is to do with the fact that when one encounters poverty it is so unutterably awful that one can bear it only by taking refuge in the knowledge that somewhere else there are people who are comfortable, some fabulously so.

Laminitis is a lot like alcoholism. Once you cross the line you can’t go back. ‘My name’s Gracie and I’m a grassoholic,’ is what the skewbald pony should be saying at least three times a week to other grassoholics like herself. She hit rock bottom a few months ago at the start of the spring and has been in recovery ever since. But I’m not hopeful this latest period of abstemiousness will last unless she makes a sincere decision to change. In truth, she has been bumping along the bottom for years, bingeing and then swearing off. Every spring I think it will be different. I put a tape across the field and make sure the amount of sugary grass she has access to is limited.

The first time I saw a woman leading a horse down the lane on a lead, both she and it dressed from head to foot in high viz, she in a crash helmet and safety vest, I thought nothing of it. But that was a good year ago now, and since then the increasing number of terrified, fully armoured women leading horses out for a walk like they were dogs rather than riding them means I can no longer pretend this practice is a one-off or not really happening. Much as I would like to turn a blind eye to the increasing madness in the horse world, I have to confront the reality that this world is now beset by women who can’t ride horses. Women who have no intention of ever learning to ride horses. Women who may even be labouring under the delusion that it is cruel to ride horses.

Because my mother is always telling me everything will be all right if I join a tennis club, I’ve joined a tennis club. In fact, I haven’t joined a tennis club so much as joined a group of women with a tennis coach who meet once a week for instruction at a court in Surbiton. A friend of mine is a member of this group and kindly agreed to take me. I borrowed a spare racket of hers and dusted off some dusky pink Lycra hot pants left over from my flirtation with hot yoga. As we gathered on the sunny court down an alleyway between two houses in a genteel residential road, she and the other four ladies wasted no time in telling me that the coach was going to be unutterably rude. ‘We’re so sorry,’ said one of them. ‘It’s just the way he is.

‘You’ve got your essay on your back, then?’ said the stable yard owner as I headed out with Darcy on our morning hack. I have taken to wearing a hi-visibility vest even though I swore I would never join the Day-Glo brigade: large women on fat cobs plodding very slowly down the road in so much protective gear they look like they are going to fight the Taliban, not walk round the woods slower than a snail. I swore I would never make myself look like them. I have ridden blithely along the country lanes of Surrey to reach the common for years and I have never had a problem with motorists, unless you count the loud-mouthed chav who wound her window down and yelled at me for not paying road tax.

‘If this madness goes on, I will not be able to leave my house without downloading the app,’ I told my friend, who had been exhorting me to download the app for something. In fact, I had been trying to book a fun ride. Every year, my horsey friends and I go on these cross country jollies during the summer months. And every year all we do is ring or email the secretary of the relevant riding club, say we are coming, send a cheque, get our start time and turn up in our trailer on the appointed day. Not any more. The riding clubs have discovered apps. And so now, when one tries to register to go on a fun ride, the antithesis of fun begins. You cannot ring or email anyone to book anything anymore, let’s face it.