Melissa Kite

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.

‘The colour of this kitchen is inspired by a blend of heather, bracken and the mountains of the Isle of Skye,’ says the brochure. ‘Oh, sweet Lord,’ I think. ‘I just want a kitchen.’ Five months into the renovation and my fondest wish is simply for it all to be over before Christmas. But for that to happen I must stop browsing endless catalogues making preposterous claims about MDF units evoking the magic of the Isle of Skye and order a kitchen from the only place that doesn’t threaten to bankrupt me.

The Albanian builders have started a turf war in my kitchen. The hostilities broke out suddenly. One minute the builders were building and the plumber was plumbing and the next minute the builders were shouting at the plumber and the plumber was looking helplessly at me to intervene, only I couldn’t intervene because a) the builders were shouting in Albanian, and b) I would have no idea what they were on about if they were speaking English because it was something to do with the floor and the radiators and the gap for the patio doors in millimetres — about which I know precisely nothing. I’ve watched those Grand Designs shows a thousand times and cursed at the screen whenever a woman has declared herself project manager of her own build. ‘Ludicrous!

Although it seemed unlikely, I did not immediately dismiss the possibility of a hit and run skip lorry. The witness reports were clear: they came to empty my skip, couldn’t manage it, smashed the street to smithereens and drove off. I came home from town that evening, drove up the track in the dark and there was the one and only street light illuminating the line of houses where I live — a nice traditional old thing like a gas lamp — knocked halfway to the floor. It listed dangerously, having stopped just short of crashing through my front window or the one next door.

They are building the bonfire already. In the dip where winter flooding sometimes creates a small lake, the wood and branches are being piled. A massive board has been nailed up announcing that ‘No More Material Is Required. By Order of The Bonfire Association.’ Therefore: ‘No Dumping.’ But someone has dared to disobey the order of the Bonfire Association, and has heaved an old blue sofa into the hollow. This has sparked an inquiry. While cycling the spaniels, I overheard a group of ladies stopped on the pathway overlooking the immolation site discussing what should be done. The organisers are aware. They will be dealing with it. The culprits ought to be ashamed of themselves, for when certain sofas burn they emit toxic fumes.

How reassuringly like old times it is, going to a God-forsaken retail park with Stefano. We mooch about the DIY store together like an old couple, me with a face like thunder, he quietly pointing out boring things that we need like door handles, whispering the price, knowing exactly when I am liable to blow up. It doesn’t seem five minutes since he was a brave young adventurer from the wilds of Albania making his way in London, colliding with me one day while painting the outside of my neighbour’s house. I pounced on him and got him to paint the outside of my house as well, then made him take me to Croydon Ikea in his Skoda estate car to buy my ideal Nigella shelf for stacking plates above the sink.

Assuming someone had moved house before, and put a new boiler in their new house, while remaining a customer of British Gas, I set about doing that. It never occurred to me that I might be the first person on the planet to attempt such a thing. Not for a second did I imagine I was a swashbuckling pioneer to come up with the idea of ripping out an old boiler at the same time as continuing to buy gas, electricity and home servicing from an energy supply company. But it turns out I really was, or at least that is the impression I was given. Having decided to continue with the same company, rather than shop around for a new supplier who would charge me slightly less at first then much more in a year’s time, I rang to ask about my service contract.

BT have just put the phone down on me for asking them to stop sending me junk mail, which is a bit much really. I rang the customer services number to ask if they would please unsubscribe me from all the emails they’ve been sending since I became a wifi customer of theirs. ‘You’re driving me mad with these emails,’ I explained, and truly I was at the end of my tether. Every day, the same message arrives in my inbox, warning me I have only days left to take advantage of a special offer on BT Sport. I wouldn’t mind but one of the things I spent countless precious hours of my existence explaining to BT when I took out wifi was that on no account did I want BT Sport.

Stefano and his boys got to work with gusto and within a few days the upstairs of my house started looking like the upstairs of a house. ‘I’ve got walls!’ I exclaimed, after one day. The next day: ‘I’ve got doors!’ The day after that I had a wardrobe. ‘Oh, you are wonderful!’ I told Stefano, and he looked at me with his usual expression, a bemused grin. ‘Getting… there…’ he said, in between the screeching of his boys putting electric saws through sheets of plasterboard. ‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘What are these?’ A bag of pink doorknobs lay on a table. ‘You don’t like?’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t be my first choice,’ I said.

Stefano the Albanian turned up in a brand new Audi off-roader, cutting quite the dash. He looked older, with some silver flecks in his black hair and beard that were rather distinguished. How to explain my predicament? It was tricky. I hadn’t been in touch since I’d asked him for a quote to renovate the ‘dream’ cottage. But then the builder boyfriend submitted his tender for the work, and talked me round. I argued vociferously that we would only fall out and that made the stakes too high. But the BB insisted. He made it a matter of his honour. He could not allow another builder to build on what he considered his patch. So I caved in against my better instincts, and of course, three months into the work, I was proved right.