Melissa Kite

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.

The Israeli chef and I have become firm friends since he moved out of my flat. He has his own place now, and is trying to find a job. I take him horse riding at the weekends. On the way down the A3 he asks me all sorts of questions about his new life in Britain and the things he is struggling to make sense of. Like why he can’t get a work visa. He is very upset about this. ‘You have to understand,’ I explain, ‘that the mistake you made was to come here legally and apply to the system honestly and openly, stating clearly that you wanted to find work.’ I glanced at him as I drove, surveying his handsome baby face, dark skin, slightly curly black hair.

A wonderful email has arrived from Airbnb entitled ‘Discrimination and Belonging — What It Means For You’. Having tried to make sense of it, I feel it can mean only one thing with any certainty. And that is that the Airbnb party is over. The web business started by a whizz kid in his New York apartment is about to feed itself to the ravening equality agenda wolves. Sadly, the once proud Airbnb corporation has decided to launch ‘a comprehensive effort to fight bias and inequality in the Airbnb community’.

For three months after I move to the country, I am told, I am going to be in the most almighty panic. I will ask myself repeatedly what on earth I have done. I will have sleepless nights worrying that I should never have left London. I will wake in a sweat in the early hours gripped by the idea that I cannot possibly survive now I am not ten minutes’ walk from the Northcote Road. And then, magically, one day, about three months in, I will wake up in my country cottage and look out of my bedroom window at the sea of green and say, ‘This is the best decision I have ever made.’ I’m really glad a few friends who have done this move have talked me through it, because I panic at the best of times.

Coffee shops are becoming impossible. I had been standing in the queue at Caffè Nero on Battersea Rise for nearly half an hour behind a man ordering a round of coffees that were so complex, so detailed and intricate, so different from each other, so bespoke and unique, that it would have been quicker to get served if I had been standing behind a man ordering a helping of weapons-grade plutonium and a custom-made Range Rover. I had nipped in to buy a coffee and a croissant. Silly me, for wanting a coffee and a croissant.

After the Fawlty Towers incident, I decided it was best to research the origin and extraction of all future B&B guests on arrival, before the builder boyfriend got stuck in. You may remember that he accidentally on purpose got a piece of gaffa tape caught on his top lip and held some ceiling felt at a jaunty angle during the stay of the Airbnb customers from Bavaria. Thankfully, they were in another room and didn’t see but I had to shush him because he was making a bad job of whispering, ‘Don’t mention Brexit! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!’ A girl from Taiwan and a gentleman from Zimbabwe then came and went with no major incidents. But when a young chap from Israel booked in I thought I had better be careful.

Against all odds, I almost got through an entire Brexit dinner with dignity, and without opening the valve in my head which allows hot steam to escape. Almost. Our little Leave Means Leave campaign soiree at a restaurant in Birmingham was going swimmingly until a TV journalist drew up a chair and within seconds started berating one of the guests, a government minister, for not giving a cast iron assurance now that every foreigner living in Britain can stay once we leave the EU. ‘Oh go on! Can’t you just let everyone stay?’ he pleaded with the minister, who was trying to eat his sea bass. ‘I mean, these are real people, you know, real families.’ Naturally, as stupid Leave campaigners, we had all thought they were pretend families.