Melissa Kite

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.

This one goes out to all the male MPs I’ve taken to lunch. I want to apologise to each and every one of you. Some of you know who you are and what went on. Some of you were so tipsy you may not have been fully aware of how shockingly you were being exploited. I estimate there are dozens, if not hundreds, of you whom I’ve taken to lunch, dinner and drinks during my time as a political correspondent. In dark bars and expensive restaurants, or just casually in Commons corridors, I’ve sidled up to you in a designer outfit and pretty much said ‘Howdy, right honourable!’ Look, it was a long time ago and I’m practically an old lady now, in media years.

‘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.

My friendly neighbourhood Lib Dems have put some campaign literature through my door. In a covering note, they intimate that they don’t understand why I can’t understand why everyone votes for them round here. The leaflet features a dozen pictures of our Lib Dem parish councillor doing good works in a variety of settings. Here, he poses in a green field with the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate — a persistent young chap I’ve had to ask to leave my front step on more than one occasion. There, he poses on the high street at a traffic black spot where he has discovered there are secret plans to install a roundabout. Lawks a mercy!

Darcy is high-maintenance, so I decided to leave her in the posh livery yard, with its luxuriant shavings beds and 24-hour butler service. Being the great-granddaughter of Nijinsky, she expects to be accommodated in style and is apt to become disconsolate if left in a field for longer than a few hours. However Gracie, the skewbald hunter pony, was plumb disgusted with the five-star competition stables. As soon as they came down off the lorry, she looked at the pin neat surroundings, the gleaming dressage horses prancing around the arena, and emitted a little snort of disdain. ‘Pah!’ I could have sworn she said. The next afternoon, I arrived at the yard to find the owner wanting to update me. Darcy, she said, had settled beautifully.

Easier by far to load up my horses and move them to the next village than try to fight the No Horse Riding signs here, I decided. I had been sneaking Gracie out the side gate of the livery yard opposite where I live and along the high street to ride around the nearby woods. Nothing illegal about that. But the fact I found myself sneaking, which is difficult on a horse, so as to avoid angry local Liberal Democrat councillors who like to chase horses away, was ridiculous enough to make me face facts. You cannot keep horses in a village run by sandal-wearing tofu-munchers with an anti-rural bias. I should have known what to expect when I first moved here and remarked to one of these strange, Surrey Lib Dems how excited I was to be in the countryside after years of living in London.

Like Steve McQueen gone slightly to seed, the builder boyfriend strode off into the sunset. Nothing becomes him so much as the manner of his leaving. He does so every now and then, this time, perhaps for good. I can’t blame him. As he walked away, his blonde hair shining in the sun, it occurred to me that he is a free spirit. I watched him disappear down the track and thought, it’s a shame to tie him down. He did his best trying to renovate my wreck of a cottage but inevitably he imploded after assorted petty battles. Being dictated to by a Lib-Lab parish council would take its toll on anyone. It wasn’t just the constant carping about our building materials being an eyesore.

‘This situation is Rorke’s Drift,’ said the builder boyfriend, after our proposed renovations were objected to at the parish council’s notorious planning meeting. ‘When you’re faced with 4,000 warriors armed with spears you may as well go down fighting,’ he declared, as we sat in the cottage ruminating on the news from our architect, who had just come back from the meeting. The BB is apt to get even more dramatic than me when we have a fight on our hands, but I actually think he is not far wrong in his use of metaphor. Certainly, I’ve no hard evidence thus far to deploy in arguing against him comparing the parish council of our Surrey village to the Zulus.

Quite stoically, I was mountaineering on my hands and knees over a sea of rubble to get to the temporary loo in the basement until I impaled my foot on a nail sticking out of a chunk of wood. It was partly my fault for wearing flip-flops, of course. But the builder boyfriend grudgingly agreed I had to be mollycoddled, and allowed me the luxury of a scaffolding plank over the sea of rubble. I was delighted with the new arrangement of walking the plank to the loo. But then one day I stepped onto the staircase to descend to the basement and the entire thing moved. It bounced up and down like a House of Horrors at the funfair. ‘Oh yeah, I meant to say,’ called the builder b as I screamed, ‘I’ve moved some bricks so those stairs aren’t fixed anymore.

Two months after I cancelled Sky, a strange letter arrived in the post. ‘We are writing to you because we haven’t heard anything from you since we previously wrote to you about your overdue account,’ it said. Of course, I realise that it is easier for a rich man to get himself prosecuted for attempting to push his camel through the eye of a needle than for a customer to leave Sky. But I had taken no chances. My Sky account was terminated not by a call centre flunky trilling ‘And how can I help yourself today? Can I call yourself Melissa?’ It was cancelled by a ‘service excellence consultant’ on the executive support team.

‘What do you think it means?’ I asked the builder boyfriend as we stood in front of the sign. A huge placard, it had been hammered into the ground by the village action group. ‘Keep Our Village in the Green Belt’ is the gist of what it says. But behind it is another sign, which has been there since we arrived, and, we assume, long before that. This one says ‘No Horse-Riding’. The new sign has been put just in front of the first, slightly to the right, so that the two are unavoidably read together as you enter the village, and form a sort of double message, as impenetrably contradictory as any I have ever seen. We want to be in the green belt, says one sign, while the other announces an ambition to eradicate the sight of people on horseback.