Melissa Kite

Some people get into the choosing of tap fittings. I am not a person who gets into the choosing of tap fittings. After a day looking at tap fittings, I don’t so much feel like I’m choosing tap fittings as the tap fittings are choosing me. It is imperative I do this quickly. A short sharp tap choice. Bang. Belgravia Lever Traditional. Or possibly Ultra Chrome Beaumont. Or Ultra Chrome Luxury Beaumont for only £10 more. Damn it! One thing I do know. I’m not having anything with ‘Quest’ in the title. I don’t want a tap that thinks it’s on a Quest. That’s allowing a tap way too much self-importance. Nor do I want a ‘waterfall’ bath or sink fitting. Or a ‘zest’ shower. It’s too tiresome.

‘Information,’ came the reply. ‘We want information.’ The voice echoed in my head. Oh no. Oh please God, no. A month after going under offer again the new buyer hasn’t even booked a survey. The emails from their lawyers come thick and fast demanding bits of paper. And just like the last time, I have supplied every last bit of paper in my possession, to no avail. The sticking point that is constipating this buyer is what they are calling ‘the leasehold information’. Several weeks ago, when I accepted their offer on condition that it be a quick sale, I told them there was no ground rent, and the solicitor sent them a copy of the lease and the lease extension proving this with the Sellers Information Pack.

Of all the many indignities I have suffered at the hands of my iPhone, the humiliation that sickens me the most is that it has rendered me ungrammatical. This monstrous device. This vile, evil, vindictive, obstructive, disingenuous, fiendish machine. I hate it. I loathe it more than I had thought it possible to loathe an inanimate object. For example, I just sent a message to the builder boyfriend saying: ‘Casserole on the oven, can you hear it?’ The BB will come in later, look on the hob for a casserole and, finding none, open himself a tin of soup. He will not look in the oven. And he will not be able to hear the casserole. I’m guessing he won’t even attempt to hear it. Why should he?

‘Mesdames et messieurs, allow me to introduce you to your meals,’ said the waiter. Oh lordy, I thought. Here we go. We were in a country pub near my parents’ home that used to be a little local place where you could get a Sunday roast for reasonable money. But it has been taken over by a gastro-preneur, whose party trick is to buy a small venue in a Midlands high street where people were perfectly happy being served normal food for modest prices and gastro-pub-ise it until no one local can afford to go there. Which is not very nice. But given the decline of the pub industry, one excuse you might make for it is that perhaps world-class food will bring inward investment to the area, an influx of bored young executives from West Bromwich, perhaps.

Someone has given the builder boyfriend an iPhone and things will never be the same. Until now, he has always had a ‘rubbish’ phone and I have always been able to get hold of him. Even though I have a blasted iPhone myself, at least one of us used to have a communications device that made and received calls. His ‘rubbish’ phone was some kind of ancient Nokia or first-generation Samsung — you know, the kind with no access to the internet. It worked. When I had a BlackBerry, we had as near perfect communication as any couple could wish for. He would call me, I would answer, or vice versa. Remember that? Then I got an iPhone, very much under duress, because the BlackBerry corporation, in its infinite wisdom, refused to keep making the phones everyone loved.

If it takes any longer to find a buyer for my London flat I am going to start coming to the conclusion that it is perfect for me in my old age. Forget moving to a cottage with a vertiginous staircase in the inhospitable countryside, this two-bedroom apartment minutes from the hustle and bustle is just the thing for an aging couple like the builder boyfriend and me. ‘Think about it,’ said the BB the other evening, as we sat in my cosy living room, he nursing the usual aches and pains he brings home after a hard day on a roof. ‘This is just what we need. It’s handy for shops and services and it’s all on one level so I can limp around as my dodgy hip gives out.’ He’s right.

Shoot me if I ever let slip I’ve been mucking out with rubber gloves and a dustpan and brush. As God is my witness, I have just left a stable yard where the clientele were all ‘non-riders’ — women whose only joy in horse-owning was to make the mucking out last as long as possible. This is because horse-owning is changing, I fear. Stable yards where people once came to ride their horses are becoming petting zoos where women who have never grown up, possibly because daddy didn’t love them, store a horse they call My Minty, who they believe will fulfil their emotional needs by allowing them to overfeed it. These women can’t ride.

Unexpectedly re-available is a very good phrase. I have often seen it applied to house advertisements and thought how fabulously impertinent it sounds, so I am asking the agents to attach it to the description of my flat now that it is back on the market after a right old hoo-ha with the buyer from hell. Unexpectedly re-available is a grammatical tongue-twister, and a euphemism that manages to be both enigmatic and facetious at the same time. I also like it because it speaks to me on a personal level. I have been unexpectedly re-available countless times and I wish I had thought of saying so whenever I went on one of those dreadful dating websites. Unexpectedly re-available, due to time wasters. Well appointed, in good decorative order. Traditional yet versatile.

Fine, so I got it completely wrong. It turns out the sale of my flat was not held up by a wiggle in the garden, but by a kink in the kitchen. This kink in the kitchen is far more serious than a wiggle in the garden. I should have realised that, the buyer’s solicitor has complained. I don’t know why I got the idea that exchange of contracts had been delayed by a mistake in the plan for the garden, but I’m struggling to keep up. I’ve been deluged with complaints about absolutely everything I had thought was fine. From the crisp new electrical safety certificates to the diligently maintained boiler service history, nothing has been good enough.

The builder boyfriend declared himself very happy with his £65 pee. He insisted it was good value for money because it was reduced from £130 if we paid within 28 days. Some would say that is still extortion, but the BB insisted he was a totally satisfied customer. He was also unfazed by the fact that Transport for London issued me with two fines for stopping on a red route in Elsynge Road for 30 seconds so he could relieve himself. This is because he didn’t have the bother of sorting it all out. The two fines had two different serial numbers so the total cost of the pee might have been £130 or indeed £260 if I had left it longer than 28 days to pay, and had I not rung up to challenge the error. ‘Welcome to Transport for London.

As if by magic, a sign that I am doing the right thing by moving out of London arrived in the post. And not a moment too soon, for with all the to-ing and fro-ing over arcane anomalies in the floorplan of my flat I had become so heartily sick of the conveyancing process I was almost ready to jack the whole move in. Two identical, suspiciously thin and official-looking A5 sized envelopes arrived at the same time. This is either the Inland Revenue telling me I am going to jail for believing that half-asleep guy at their call centre who told me I shouldn’t worry too much about my tax bill, or it is something even worse, I told myself, fingering the envelopes gingerly. I ripped one open without further ado and a letter from Transport for London came out.

The problem holding up my house move turns out to be a wiggle. Have you ever had a wiggle? It sounds jolly enough but, believe me, you don’t want to go there. If you have a wiggle in your garden, you had better be prepared for the worst. I had no idea about this wiggle, because when I bought the flat I only had my lawyer scrutinise the Land Registry documents to a normal degree, which is to say I asked him if everything was broadly all right, and when he confirmed that it was I told him to proceed. I have lived in the flat quite happily since 2002 and I have never had any trouble at all with the boundary lines. I fix the garden fencing one side, the neighbour takes care of the other.

If the buyer asks me any more questions I am going to pull out. I have to put my foot down somewhere or this is going to drag on indefinitely. I went under offer some months ago now and it was thought I might be in my dream cottage for Christmas. Ha! The next prevailing theory was that I would be in by the end of January. That’s a laugh too. After various legal nightmares to do with disputed rights of way, unmade shared- access tracks and windows in neighbouring properties facing the wrong way, the purchase of the country cottage is good to go. The problem is the other end.

A few moments after saying the communion rite, the priest looked at his congregation and uttered easily the most disturbing thing I have ever heard said in a church: ‘If anyone wants a gluten-free Eucharist, please queue up on this side.’ The builder boyfriend, already grumpy at being made to go to mass, tittered behind me. We hadn’t been able to find two seats together so I now had to imagine him making a series of faces to my back. I couldn’t resist. I had to turn round and seek his opinion on this most revoltingly PC of moments. I have been going to mass off and on like the bad Catholic I am all my life but I have never heard anything so ludicrous.

The most annoying thing about starting a new year is how long it takes for everyone to crank themselves back into action. I knew I wasn’t getting the real picture when I rang the taxman to say I would like to pay in instalments, and the chap on the other end of the line yawned and said: ‘Well, if you want to.’ ‘I’m not sure I want to,’ I said. ‘But I’m fairly sure I will have to. I mean, if I can’t pay it all in one lump sum before the deadline, I had better set up some kind of direct debit quickly, hadn’t I?’ He sighed heavily. ‘Mmm. You could do.’ There was a long silence so I said: ‘Shall we do that now?

What a fraught, divisive, infuriating sort of year it’s been. It started with me attempting to go on a blind date and being clocked by a speed camera doing 35 in a 30 in the dark on the way home. And on the way to the speed course, obviously, I pranged my car trying to park. I took this to be an omen. The ex-builder boyfriend was duly dusted off and put back into active service. In February, while having two new tyres fitted at a tyre shop in Wandsworth, I found myself being hit on by a jihadist tyre-fitter. We got chatting as I sat in his waiting room. He sat at his desk, beneath a golden passage from the Koran, and I somehow ended up telling him I had been to Iraq. The next thing I knew he was confessing to the fact that he was just back from there, for top secret reasons.

‘Right, this is it,’ I said to the builder boyfriend. ‘I am going to knock on the door of next door.’ ‘I don’t know why you are bothering,’ he said. ‘Does it really matter who lives next door? You’re going to be so happy here. This move makes absolute sense for you. Just look around. It’s fantastic.’ And so it was. We were standing in front of my new house. If it all goes through I will be in for Christmas. I looked around me: England’s largest village green. And my new house nestling right on the front of it, overlooking the cricket, and the farmers’ market ...an idyllic scene. But this is me we are talking about. ‘This is me we are talking about,’ I said to the builder b, with a grimace.

‘How was your week?’ I asked my friend as we rode our horses to Bookham Common. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Except the other day I got caught in a yellow box. £65.’ ‘Me too!’ I said. ‘Where was yours?’ ‘Kingston,’ she said. ‘Mine was in Raynes Park,’ I said. ‘£65. Junction of Coombe Lane and Durham Road. No idea how I did it. It was at night so I never had a chance. It won’t have been well lit.’ ‘Mine was during the day but I only just got stuck in it. The bumper was overhanging for about three seconds. I’ve requested the video footage.’ ‘Good for you. I paid mine. I don’t have the time to mount a challenge this month, what with moving house.

A few weeks after switching my iPhone to the EE network, I noticed a funny thing. It hadn’t rung. I checked my voicemail and found heaps of messages from angry people asking why I wouldn’t answer. Was I sick? Was I avoiding them? Had I finally lost all grip on reality and run away to join a convent of Cistercian nuns? A constant stream of furious texts was coming in as well, although a lot weren’t coming in, I found out later. All said the same thing. ‘Where are you? Why are you ignoring me? Have you been granted asylum in Montana by Donald Trump already?!’ Meanwhile, my nearest and dearest got hold of me on my secret other number, the one connected to the ancient BlackBerry that I cling to for dear life because I hate the iPhone so much.