Melissa Kite

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.

Reluctantly, I decided I would have to throw away the MRI scan of my head. I’ve hung on to it for years as potentially crucial evidence. But a New Year clear-out of my renovated house would mean nothing unless I made hard choices. Some randomly kept treasures needed to be culled now the house was almost finished. The scan package was huge — 15 A3-size slides showing my brain from every possible angle. I had it done by a private clinic after I decided the pain in my ears was a tumour caused by mobile phone use. This scare was very popular, you may remember, back when cell phones were a great source of anxiety to those who hadn’t the first clue how they actually worked.

If only I knew whether I would have a kitchen, I could order a turkey. But despite having an almost finished kitchen space, half the kitchen units are still stacked up in the dining room and a weighty impasse has developed over the delivery options for the rest of it. Naturally, the shop can deliver the cooker, dishwasher and worktops right now, but there will only be one man in the van and another man will be needed at my house to help him carry the worktops. I can’t carry them, and I am not remotely insulted by the gender bias this implies. Stefano, meanwhile, is refusing to come back until all the units are on site. I told the kitchen manufacturer this and they said they could deliver the kitchen now but they will need another man.

While the vet was checking Gracie, I asked him to take a look at Tara, the old chestnut hunter. Just a look, mind you, from a safe distance. I wouldn’t recommend anyone, however qualified, approach the red devil. Aged 32, she is slower than she used to be but still finds ways to express her love of violence. Imagine the dragon from Lord of the Rings coming at you with its neck stretched out, baring teeth, and somehow bending itself round to aim its back end at you at the same time. She has always been like that — coming at you with both ends, they call it — so no suggestions on a postcard, please, as to what made her this way. She’s had a wonderful life, and she has never stopped celebrating it by being unconscionably aggressive and hideous.

After a week of cold hosing, I decided I would have to get the vet to the small swelling on Gracie’s leg. ‘Dear Lord, be merciful,’ I prayed. But I knew that the quantity of mercy I would be shown would very much depend on the vet who came. My usual vet is the last good vet in the world — the only vet in the western hemisphere who will make a realistic appraisal of a horse’s condition and give a quote for what can be realistically mended at a morally defensible price, by which I mean a price that will fix the horse without breaking the human owner. Consequently, he is very busy. I rang the practice and was assigned a member of the team who was at a call-out down the road. When she arrived, my heart sank as I saw how young she was.

Six months into the renovations and I have so much dust in my lungs I have had to give Stefano an ultimatum. ‘You’ve got to finish by Christmas,’ I told him when he arrived with his men the other morning, ‘or I am going to have to start spending the budget, such that it exists, on emergency healthcare.’ I feel as though I have inhaled the entire house. I’m not sure what was in this house, but I hope it wasn’t anything noxious. It’s Victorian so it ought to be all right, I have been telling myself. But what do I know? I think I’ve mainly taken on board brick dust and live plaster, the prognosis for which, a swift internet search appears to suggest, is that I should be all right, but then again I might conk out from anthrax poisoning.

The incident I am about to recount I make no judgment about, other than that I believe it tells us where we are in the cycle of civilisation and that it is helping me orientate myself. A friend of mine was walking her dogs at the same beauty spot I walk my spaniels, when a car screeched into the car park sending children scurrying for their lives. My friend ran up and knocked on the window and the window was wound down to reveal a man in a dress and blond wig. My friend said, ‘What are you doing? You could have killed a child. Slow down!’ And the man replied, ‘But I’m a transvestite.’ My friend tried to pursue the issue, pointing out that, be that as it may, he couldn’t speed or run over children.

When it comes to horses, troubles come in multitudes. Multitudes of lame legs. Gracie, the hunter pony, kicked things off by deciding she didn’t want to be caught. A pony who is running at full pelt round a seven-acre field at the sight of you with a headcollar hidden in a feed bucket is a tricky thing. You can walk away and be philosophical about it or you can do the full Monty Roberts. This involves standing your ground, refusing to go away, following the pony relentlessly around the field, breaking its will to defy you. Gracie has an iron will. When she decides that I’m an inconvenience to be avoided at all costs there is nothing I can do to take charge of the situation.