Melissa Kite

Market day in Bergerac and the streets are paved with chicken bones. As a spaniel, I am bound to say this is as near to paradise as one can get. From the doorway of every shop there wafts the aroma of happiness. I pull to go inside each doorway as we pass. She pulls me back out. But at the open-air market there is endless opportunity. While she looks at one wicker basket after another, I lick the ground for whatever may be there, which is always something utterly delicious. Tiny morsels of goat’s cheese, bits of salami, globs of duck pâté, and the gizzards — oh the gizzards! The very essence of utopia. I wonder if anyone has thought of this as an advertising campaign. Duck guts — the taste of paradise! I might write to the duck companies.

Bonjour mes amis! Cydney spaniel ici, en France! Well, the Eurotunnel was very nice, although the dog departure lounge could have been grassier. I’m not a fan of AstroTurf. Doesn’t hold a scent very well. No one checked my passport either. Mummy passed it through the window with hers and his as we went through, but the French police laughed and said they didn’t want it. What a cheek. Mummy was cross because it cost over a hundred pounds. Hopefully they will check it on the way back so we can get our money’s worth. The other passengers were friendly. There were a few dachshunds and a Hungarian vizsla in the dog-agility area, stretching their legs before departure. No sarcastic growls about Brexit.

‘Of course, there will be no air quality now,’ said a friend, shaking her head over my support for Brexit. ‘You what?’ ‘Air quality,’ she said. ‘Or green belt. Or Sites of Special Scientific Interest, preserving the countryside and wildlife... All those really good EU regulations have all gone now.’ ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I started to feel exasperated, inwardly thinking, ‘Uh-oh, here goes another friendship...’ ‘All those EU regulations safeguarding everything. All gone. No more air-quality rules. No more SSSIs.’ ‘So you’re saying Brexiteers have ruined the air now, are you? That’s where we are up to with the scaremongering? No more air now we’re out of the EU.

We fled Balham after the result, having been outed as the only Leave voters in Lambeth. The builder boyfriend and I packed our possessions into the Volvo and headed for the safety of a friends’ house in Hampshire. ‘Come on, quick, leave the bloody third pair of wellies, just bring the essentials,’ said the BB as he lifted the spaniel into the boot. We took bedding and towels and baskets of tinned goods in case we decided it was too risky to return, and that the only option was to keep fleeing. Maybe we would just keep driving until we found a cottage for sale. We might put in an offer and camp until the sale went through, and I would take whatever I could get for the flat and sod the loss of equity.

The cottage in Surrey has fallen through, for the time being at least. Maybe I am going to be a country girl again at some point, but for now it’s looking like I will have to remain a while longer in Bal-ham, gazing longingly towards the south. The owners of the cottage in Ripley pulled out, after I failed to sell my flat quickly enough. To be fair, I had promised I would be under offer within days, because that is how it has always been before. I have had the place on the market twice in the past two years, and both times it was snapped up in a matter of hours at the asking price. On those occasions, I was then not able to negotiate the right price on the property I was trying to buy. So I decided this time to get an offer accepted first, then put my flat on the market.

‘This EU passport is an outrage. I want a British one!’ Not my words, Cydney’s. The spaniel is coming round to my way of thinking on the EU referendum after visiting the vet’s to get the necessary paperwork for her forthcoming trip to the Dordogne — or Dor-DOG-ne, as she prefers to call it. After spending a small fortune on her bed and board at the dogsitter the last time I went away, I decided she would come on holiday with me this summer. As soon as I have cast my Leave vote on 23 June, I shall be packing us into the Volvo and heading for the Eurotunnel and a lovely break in a gite in France. If the result of the referendum is that we are to remain in the EU, I shall be doing a spot of house-hunting while I am there too.

Would you like a Labour party manifesto with your breakfast?’ the tattooed, multi-pierced waitress might as well have asked as she served me the most left-wing breakfast in the world. What on earth is going on when Balham becomes so avant-garde that it negates the very reason a curmudgeon like me moved there — to be as far as possible from the trendy, liberal intelligentsia that rules most of London? If I had wanted my local cafés decked out in reclaimed wood and serving quinoa specially flown in from the Amazon rainforest on Air Hypocrisy, then arranged on a pile of pea shoots according to a recipe by Gwyneth Paltrow, I would have settled in Islington. Instead, I think I’m safe in crumbly old Balham, with its Caribbean market and pound stores.

Turns out you can’t eat grass. A horse does something clever to it in its mouth that humans can’t. Fine, so it was an absolutely ludicrous thing to do. But I blame the ex-builder boyfriend (who is not an ex-builder, he’s an ex-boyfriend, for those who have queried that). He and I were in Tara’s field, assessing whether the retired mare was in danger of laminitis, when the ex-BB said: ‘Trust me, this grass is sweet. Taste it.’ And for reasons I barely understand, I knelt down, plucked a handful of grass, put it in my mouth and chewed. ‘Ooh, it’s delicious!’ I exclaimed, for truly it was tastier than a gourmet salad. I then got carried away and instead of spitting, I swallowed. Oh yes, very funny. I know. The BB laughed and laughed.

After a tense two week stand-off, the Balham Airbnb Crisis has been resolved. My upstairs neighbour and I have drawn back from the brink. He has agreed to let me station bed and breakfast guests in my main bedroom. I have agreed to pay slightly higher building insurance contributions. By the time we signed the new direct debit forms, we had brought Balham to the brink of world war three. The biggest irony is, now it’s all sorted, I’m not so sure I want to do Airbnb. I’m not sure my nerves will stand it. My latest guest, a girl from Taiwan, arrived on Sunday afternoon when I was out doing the horses. I had hidden a key and messaged her to call me when she got there. I talked her through where the key was, and though it took her quite a while, she found it.

Some people call their house Dun Roamin’ to sum up their state of mind. After ten weeks ministering to my horse’s tendon strain, I’m thinking of putting up a sign outside my house saying Dun Bandagin’. Wrapping Darcy’s front legs painstakingly morning and night for several months has been an interesting experience. In a way I shall miss it because it has taken me out of my own worries, apart from the main one, which is sinking into horse-induced poverty after attempting to train Darcy for the racetrack. I’ve said it before, or if I haven’t I ought to have: a thoroughbred is like a Porsche 911 — when it’s going well you think it’s the only car in the world it makes any sense to own.

Hello, Cydney spaniel here. She’s lying in a darkened room so I’m to tell you what happened. To cut a long and very shaggy dog story short, the car failed its MOT. And we had to use public transport. I’ve been telling her that Volvo is shaking like no doggy’s business when she brakes, but will she listen? Turns out the suspension is shot to pieces. So she leaves the car with a mechanic in the country, near where the horses are, and tells me we’re getting a ‘train’ home. My best mate, the gamekeeper, drives us to the station where we walk up and down a lot of steps. There is a sign by the steps saying ‘Proud to be working with the RSPB to give nature a home at this station.’ This seems a bit silly to me.

Buffy Sainte-Marie said it best. ‘The lights of town are at my back, my heart is full of stars./ And I’m gonna be a country girl again.’ At least, I hope I am. But if I do manage to pull off this long-awaited move to the country, it will all be thanks to a Spectator reader. It was years ago now, I had a very nice letter from a gentleman who lived in the Surrey village of Ripley, about ten minutes from Cobham, who recommended that I move there. That must have been stored away in the annals of my brain, but deep in the annals, because, after scouring Cobham and finding nothing I could afford, it still didn’t occur to me. I went way down the A3 and looked for land around Farnham and found a cottage with no central heating and one acre for £720,000.

The gloves are off in my battle with the two brothers who live in the flat upstairs. They have just socked me a brutal left hook. And so no more am I going to be the neurotic, menopausal fruitcake downstairs. From now on I am going to unleash my difficult side. It’s a shame, because when they first moved in I thought they were going to be the neighbours I had always dreamed of: handsome and polite, with a look of dread in their eyes whenever I banged on their door. When I explained that the wheelie bin must be put out at right angles to the kerb at 8 p.m. sharp on Wednesday night, they did it. When I told them they had better not clank about in high heels they said they wouldn’t.

The cottage of my dreams (or possibly worst nightmares) proved rather difficult to purchase, not least because the agent selling it did not want to sell it. You may remember he showed me round by plodding dolefully between the cramped rooms in his long dark overcoat like an undertaker, shaking his head at the water-damaged walls and lack of central heating. When I asked about sanitation, he brightened up momentarily: ‘It’s on a CESS!’ Usually these people finesse it with some tasteful euphemism about tanks, but he was determined to make the place sound as hideous as he could. When I said it was just what I was looking for, he recoiled, as if I had actually opened the ‘CESS!

I am becoming the Basil Fawlty of Airbnb. Almost everything that tormented Basil has tormented me since I started taking in guests. I am thinking of nailing up a sign saying Kitey Towers, with the ‘y’ askew. If you don’t know what Airbnb is: some whizz-kid in America hit upon the idea of charging people to sleep on an airbed in his New York apartment. He started a website. You register your home, put up photos, and choose guests you think you will get on with. I’ve had customers from Australia, New Zealand, America, Spain. But while they are usually delightful, I have often felt myself bristling like Fawlty at the sheer cheek of the paying public.

My adventures in penury land me with two job applications on my screen, one for MI6, one for Sainsbury’s. Do I become a spy, or stack shelves in a supermarket? The vacancies are on a recruitment site called Indeed, one after the other: Counter Assistant, Sainsbury’s. Intelligence Officer, London. Just like that. I began googling jobs in a panic because embarrassing things started to happen. For example, a friend who runs a tack shop gave me a broken bag of feed for the horses, saying, ‘Please, take it, I can’t sell it. Really, you’d be doing me a favour.

After a year of affordable car insurance, I knew I had to be in for it when my premium came up for renewal. Nothing prepared me, however, for the quote that came through from Aviva, who I am thinking of re-naming Amorta, or Adversa, which just sounds more appropriate. You may recall that after I won my personal injury dispute with no liability or fault on my record after three years of fighting, I was refunded thousands of the sky-high premiums Aviva had been charging me while the case was going on — because, naturally, they had to assume I was guilty of causing spinal injuries to two members of the non-working classes by bumping into the back of their people-carrier at 5 mph in a traffic queue on Streatham High Road until I could prove I had done no such thing.

If you are the sort of person who enjoys tinkering with a classic car prone to myriad mechanical problems then you really should consider taking up thoroughbred horses as a hobby. After weeks of leg bandaging and foot poulticing, I am becoming a basket case. But apparently there are people who enjoy this sort of thing. They prefer tinkering to riding. I presume they haven’t much appetite for speed, and therefore prefer to spend time with their horse while it is stationary in a confined space. About twice a year, perhaps, they manage to get it to go right and so they enjoy a lovely Sunday afternoon out in the lanes, with people pipping them from behind as they make a holy show of themselves.

Diamonds are for ever. Plumbers take a lifetime. They never finish. No job is too big or small for them to not finish it. All I wanted was a new kitchen tap unit. The hot tap needed a washer fitting but, according to Tony the plumber from over the road, there is no point fitting a washer. It’s more work than it’s worth. The thing to do is to rip out the old taps and fit new ones, which he can do almost more cheaply, but certainly no more expensively, than fitting a washer. Fine, I thought. The old taps are horrible anyway so new taps it will be. Tony got a catalogue from the Plumb Center and showed me the pages of taps, which were all mind-blowingly similar. I chose the cheapest ones and he said he would order, pick them up and fit them.