Melissa Kite

After a year dealing with estate agents I can only say: a plague on all their houses, except the one of mine they’re trying to sell. I do hate being obvious and lashing out at oft maligned groups because it really is too clichéd. I belong to several of these hated groups myself, after all. Journalists, they get it in the neck all the time. And hunters. See Rod Liddle last week or Liz Jones the weekend before that for some classic examples of how the left rip me to shreds whenever I dare to suggest that I would like to keep the countryside a nice place in which to live.

‘If you ask me,’ said the builder boyfriend, watching me hobble down the street as we set off for an early evening bite at the kebab shop, ‘you’re laminitic. ‘Think about it. You’ve got ludicrously small feet. They’re useless. Look at them. I’m surprised you can even balance on them. And you’ve gained a bit of weight, by your own admission. You’re like a thoroughbred horse. You’re carrying too much weight for your funny little shallow feet and you’ve gone lame. You’ve got laminitis. If you’re not careful, your pedal bones will rotate and then we’ll have to put you down. You need to get some weight off. Soaked hay for you. No more hard feed, after this kebab.’ All very amusing, I’m sure.

Should I report Liz Jones to the police for calling for me to be murdered? It’s a tricky one. On the one hand, as everyone has said to me since she set about me in her Sunday newspaper column, nobody listens to her. Nobody cares that she singled me out for her particularly whacky brand of resentful bile, simply because I wrote a piece in The Spectator last week questioning the idea of re-releasing lynx into the countryside. Or rather as my friend, a veteran PR agent, said: ‘No one listens to the crazy bag lady.’ This is all very well, but if I had called for her to be killed, or anyone else in the animal rights lobby, can you imagine the furore?

Out of the blue, I woke up one morning and my feet didn’t work. I opened my eyes, swung my legs out of the bed, and at the very moment my feet should have begun walking nothing happened and I promptly fell flat on my face. I asked Dr Google and he was unequivocal. If your fortysomething feet won’t flex in the morning then you are suffering from a condition called plantar fasciitis, inflammation of the soles. There is, naturally, no cure other than to stop using your feet. However, you can help yourself by wearing trainers. ‘I am going to have to venture into one of those sportswear superstores,’ I think.

‘This is the last straw. Never again,’ I thought, as I sat in the carpark of a Little Waitrose eating a chicken mayonnaise salad with my bare hands. I always say this and I always come back for more. I tell myself I can handle it. If only I shop differently it won’t hurt. I’ll buy own brand. I’ll resist the three for twos. I’ll make it work. I have to. I love it. I can’t live without it. I have to find a way... No, no. I must leave. I cannot go on like this. And I pull myself together. But after a few weeks’ shopping in some sensible alternative with its reliably good produce and predictable, dull prices, I am drawn back.

What is happening to estate agents? Or let me put it another way. If the professional classes thought they were going to escape unscathed from ‘free movement of people’ then they were wrong. I feel it is only fair to warn the office workers and the suited and booted that their salaries are no longer safe from the Eurovision job contest. I know this because I have been trying to sell my flat for a while and a part of the problem has been that the agent put in charge of selling it was a young girl who, while sweet, lacked the ideal vocab range. I overheard her doing a viewing one day: ‘This is sitting room, where you can sit. This is bathroom, for take bath. This is bedroom where you can make sexy-time.

‘Oh no, I can’t bear it,’ said the builder boyfriend when I told him I wanted to look at one more house with land. I have dragged him round too many one-bedroomed hovels with a few scrub acres out the back. We have had to be polite about too many dilapidated sheds which the owners are calling a stable block. We have had to think of too many ways to compliment a rotten pole barn, or a patch of bare earth and weeds a vendor claims is a sand school. We have smiled at too many bathroom taps in the shape of shells. We have said ‘Oo lovely!’ at too many pine kitchens. We have pretended to like too much cheap laminate. It crushes the soul. But more to the point, these places never have horses.

‘How did I get here?’ I think dazedly. I am sitting in the Big Yellow Self Storage in Balham being interviewed, there is no other word for it. The person interviewing me is a relentlessly cheerful girl who wants to know everything, there is no other word for it, about me before she rents me a storeroom. But not only that, she wants to know everything about something she is ominously calling ‘my storage needs’. As I deliberate on the prices and options, she announces: ‘This is about making sure it’s the right decision for yourself.’ I want to store a piano for a month. I’m not choosing a pension plan. But I don’t say this. I just sit there thinking the world has gone mad and I wish I could get out of it all somehow.

Whenever I try to use the NHS I end up feeling like Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense. No one can see me. It is as if I don’t exist. And unlike Dr Malcolm Crowe in the movie, I have not, as I wait in hospital and GP surgery queues, found an ally with a special gift which enables him to see me when no one else can. No one has ever come up to me and whispered: ‘I see sick people!’ Instead, I languish like a ghost in every south London minor injury clinic, A&E and doctor’s surgery. Recently, I received a letter informing me that my local GP surgery was closing and I would have to go elsewhere. While I was impressed that they had at least managed to acknowledge my existence by telling me to bugger off, I felt this was a bit of a cheek.

The builder boyfriend colicked for a week after eating a falafel kebab as he and I sat up all night with the colicking pony. And unlike the colicking pony, who was attended to by the vet and given intravenous Buscopan, the colicking builder boyfriend moaned and groaned in agony, untreated. If he had a GP he couldn’t remember who or where it was. He has not sought any kind of healthcare, nor seen the inside of a hospital, since a gang of thugs broke both his arms when he was a ten-year-old boy growing up on the mean streets of Balham. (That was the real Balham, before the independent hipster cafés came with their nut-milk lattes and sustainable sourdough fritters garnished with locally foraged pea-shoots.

One look at Grace when I went to get her in from the field, and I knew she had eaten herself to the verge of oblivion. Leaving the horses kicking their heels up in the field, while we went to France for a break from them, was always going to have mixed results. This is because, like Jack Sprat and his wife, one eats too much while the other eats too little. While Darcy the thoroughbred picks daintily at the grass, the pony is as greedy as Mr Creosote in Monty Python. I have known Gracie to eat so much she has burped. And horses, it is well known, cannot burp. It is physiologically impossible. I have thought about ringing David Attenborough and telling him I have the world’s only belching pony. He wouldn’t believe it unless he witnessed it.

The colourful banners at the Eurotunnel terminal at Calais spell out the words Treat Shop Relax Refresh Eat. But it would be more truthful if they said Queue Panic Scream Scavenge Fight to the Death. For reasons best known to the French authorities, there is only one restaurant inside the Eurotunnel building at Calais and that is a small Burger King. Now, consider that you have hundreds of hungry travellers arriving in this place, and all of them have either grown used to excellent French food during a holiday, or they are habitually accustomed to it as standard because they are French. Now add to that the fact that, due to heightened security, there are three-hour delays to all departures. Now add to that the fact that there is no air-conditioning, for unexplained reasons.

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.