Melissa Kite

‘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.

‘How could you forget to get on the train?’ asked the keeper. ‘I can understand how you forgot to get off the train, but how were you standing on the platform waiting for another train to go back the other way, and the train came but you forgot to get on it?’ I had been on my way from Victoria to Clapham Junction. The keeper had rung to say he was popping in to let the dogs out and did I want them fed? I was telling him no thanks, as I would be on the train to Guildford in a few minutes. But as I was sitting in my seat saying this, the train was pulling into Clapham Junction, the doors were opening to let passengers off, and then the train was moving away again.

The broken mirror lay in hundreds of shattered pieces on my bathroom floor, having fallen off the wall while I was out. I had hung it with one of those ‘easy fix’ sticky-back hooks that don’t require drilling or screws. You know the ones. They don’t damage your walls or your tiles. And they don’t work. The one I used to fix this small, very light mirror above the sink worked for about three weeks. It was so easy I thought I had cracked it. From now on I would do all my DIY with sticky-back hanging hooks. I could probably finish the house by using them if I really put my mind to it.

The sound of something hideous woke me in the dead of night, and I shot out of bed. I looked at my watch, blinking in the gloom of the energy-saving bulb as it grudgingly dribbled out a slither of light. It was 3 a.m. and there was a strangled wheezing sound in my bedroom. I’m getting used to this house making noises, though it took me a while to come to terms with the groaning. An old man groans in pain in the dining room. I assumed it was a ghost. I’ve got every other problem going, structural, legal and decorative. So now I’ve got a poltergeist: the tortured soul of some other poor sod who tried to renovate this place and was driven to the point of insanity and beyond.

‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!’ I screamed through the window of the car while driving down Cobham High Street. ‘Are you aware,’ my saner self said to me, ‘that you are driving down Cobham High Street screaming a slogan from a film?’ ‘Yes,’ I said to my saner self. ‘Yes, I am aware. And I’ll take it from here, thank you.’ I had been to the kebab shop for a chicken skewer to cheer myself up when it happened. It was 8 p.m., dark, and I pulled up outside Ali’s feeling utterly deflated by what I shall simply call ‘all the rotten hypocrisy’. I parked, as I always do, in the off-road space outside his takeaway joint and two others, a fish and chip shop and an Indian.

We live in a cynical world. One cannot simply advertise something for sale and expect people to believe what one is saying. The first person to turn up to view the horse lorry did not even want to test-drive it on the basis that it was clearly a death trap. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m just a bit concerned about that roof.’ I looked at the roof, baffled. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the roof.’ Genuinely, it’s the last bit of the lorry I have ever worried about. I tend to worry more about the floor, given that that is the bit the horse is standing on. I had the floor fully checked. But the roof? Not so much. What trouble the roof of a horsebox could possibly be, I could not imagine.

‘I bet Brian May isn’t lying on his back in a field shelter wondering how long it’s going to take for the snow to cover him and whether the horses will just poo right on top of his frozen head,’ I thought. Then, groaning in agony, another annoying thought surfaced in the annals of my resentment banks: ‘I bet Ricky Gervais hasn’t just schlepped a 30-litre container of water from his upstairs shower to a field of horses because the troughs are frozen and not refilling.

‘Good afternoon, my name is Bradley, and how may I be of help to you today?’ After you’ve spent ten minutes negotiating an automated system that quite clearly aims to frustrate you from ever getting through to a human being, when you do get through to one, through dint of your own bloody-minded refusal to reply to any of the absurd automated questions — ‘If you are calling about something irrelevant, please say “irrelevant!”’ — until the system cannot cope with your silence, and concedes that it will have to put you through to a real person, it is patently absurd for that person to pretend to be your long-lost friend, beyond ecstatic that you have rung them.

Everything since the ZX Spectrum has pretty much left me cold. Ghetto blasters, Sony Walkmans, CDs, Apple Macs, iPods, PlayStations… I didn’t want any of them. Back in 1981, I did want a CB radio and I nearly got one too, but then my mother found out that lorry drivers were on them and the thorny issue of whether it would be appropriate for a nine-year-old girl to converse with a trucker put the kibosh on the whole thing. I was bitterly disappointed. I seem to remember I cried. I did not cry about not being bought a Commodore 64 or a BBC Computer, as the technological bee’s knees was then called, or any other home computer with plastic rather than rubber buttons like mine had. I did not covet them. Nor did I covet a video game machine.

After much thought, I am toying with the idea of faking my own death. I mean in a virtual sense, but as virtual reality is more important than physical reality nowadays, this is pretty heavy stuff. Specifically, I want to cease to exist on Facebook, Twitter and all other social networking platforms, where I barely exist anyway because they frighten me so much, but where I have what is known as ‘a presence’. Do not scoff. I have reason to believe it may well be possible to do this. A few weeks ago, I faked my own iPhone death. People said it couldn’t be done.

Why do people find it so hard to believe that a horse can be a psychopath? Not an obvious, screaming mad psychopath either. A brooding, deceptively quiet sort of psychopath who turns on a sixpence. I arrived at Tara’s field the other day to find one of the girls with a horse in the neighbouring field wandering about in her field shelter — while she was asleep in it — searching the ground for something. I’ve told them repeatedly never to go under the wire into Tara’s field and run the gauntlet of her homicidal hooves and treacherous teeth. But Tara stands there snoozing and smacking her lips sleepily like a harmless old lady in an old people’s home, and they look at me like I’m mean and say: ‘Aw bless her!

‘Please, could you just clean my teeth?’ I want to say, only I don’t. I go along with it, praying it will be over quicker if I cooperate. ‘And how are you today?’ she says in a frighteningly polite voice, a flash of steel glinting in her eyes as she looks down on me in her impossibly white outfit. ‘Well, I’m at the dentist so…’ I give a little nervous laugh, inviting her to show me she is human. She refuses. Her expression flickers for a second, then she hardens the courtesy in her tone. The angel of hygiene is now being ultra-polite, a tone that meets menace coming round the other way: ‘Is there something wrong? Is there anything I can do?’ I can see that we are into ‘Do you need to take a moment?

The vet who is unhappy that I cracked a joke about vets has received the backing of the British Veterinary Association. This strangely brittle organisation, having nothing better to do, apparently, has put out a fantastically pious statement denouncing me for daring to joke that vets are expensive and that some seem keen to diagnose the worst-case scenario. The BVA posted its statement on social media, an action that inevitably led to the usual snowflakestorm: how very dare I make fun of (fill in offended group)… Fine, asI said last week I’m happy to do away with humour if that’s what people want. Let’s just deal with the facts.

A vet has accused me of a ‘hate crime’ for making a joke about vets. On the basis that everything is a hate crime, I am not getting too upset. But it does seem to be the case that jokes are becoming a liability. The sort of complaints I used to get were from lefty bloggers calling me subversive for daring to mock an organic café in Balham that purported to serve locally foraged ingredients. There were also some poor souls on Twitter who said I had worsened their gluten intolerance by making jokes about wheat. By and large, though, people have been wonderful and responded to my jokes by saying, ‘Oh ha ha, yes, very funny.

‘Not being rude, but I don’t think you should do any DIY,’ said the gamekeeper. He had just witnessed me make chicken soup by liquidising a boiled chicken carcass then pressing all the wrong buttons on the liquidiser, so detaching the bottom of the jug from the jug rather than releasing the jug from the machine, sending a deluge of soup downwards on to the kitchen counter and floor. Cydney was standing below, ever hopeful, so as the cascade of soup splashed on to the spaniel’s head she simply tilted herself to gargle down the rain of good fortune.