Melissa Kite

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.

‘Racing is 99.9 per cent disappointment,’ said the trainer philosophically, as I sat in the yard sipping coffee, waiting for the vet. She arrived in her pick-up a few minutes later and wound down her window. ‘Am I in the right place?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, still in sardonic mode. ‘It depends what you’re looking for.’ I leapt up and showed her the way to the far stable, where Darcy was standing on only three good legs. The foot that trod on the screw was now fine and she was sound on it. But then, during a short hack on the common, she had gone suddenly very lame in front.

Darcy trod on a screw. Five little words which, if Darcy was anything other than a thoroughbred horse, might signify nothing more dramatic than a rummage through the medicine cabinet and the application of a plaster. But of course Darcy is a thoroughbred horse. And I did end up mothering equine and not human children. Remind me, please, why I did that? Oh yes, something about me never quite working out how to do life like normal people do it, and finding myself, as middle age bore down on me, only able to commune with creatures possessing four legs. Four very delicate, finely balanced legs in Darcy’s case. An expensive way to carry on one’s emotional life. But we are where we are. Darcy trod on a screw. She had been going reasonably well for her first season in training.

The last time I bought a set of tyres in south London I came away not quite knowing whether I had just been asked to become a jihadi bride. Of course, it was only the merest suspicion. If I had had hard evidence I might have gone to the police. Or I might not. These days, one is likely to get done for a hate crime if one complains about a member of the opposite religion. If I had gone to the police what would I have said? ‘Excuse me, I’ve just had a set of tyres fitted to my Volvo by a man who tried to persuade me that IS fighters don’t deserve the bad press.’ Would I have sounded hysterical, or delusional, or just plain prejudiced? And what was my suspicion based on? Not that much.

My upstairs neighbours are terribly nice, but too naive to be allowed to renovate their flat in peace. The two brothers in their twenties bought the apartment together and are doing it up, I suppose, because they hope to sell and divide the spoils so they can buy one flat each. Such are the struggles of the younger generation to get on the housing ladder, and their efforts are laudable. They are young, idealistic and full of enthusiasm. However, it would be much easier for all of us if they would listen to me when I try to explain to them that doom lies around every corner and nothing is more certain than that things can always get worse.

After the £1,100 quote from the vet in London I drove down the A3 and out the other side of the Hindhead tunnel in search of affordable healthcare for the spaniel. On the Surrey-Hampshire border, I found a well-recommended vet who had been in practice for 40 years and appeared to be still engaged in the treatment of animals for a small amount of money above the price of the labour and materials, claiming his reasonable costs back from the insurance rather than making the client pay up front. He was past retirement age and clearly only practising for vocational reasons: a genuine fascination with veterinary medicine, a deep love of his job, and the satisfaction of curing much-loved pets.

If these speed awareness courses get much more entertaining and informative they might become a dangerous incentive to break the limit just to get on to them. I qualified for my second one by doing 35 in a 30 at night in a strange place. Being lost and mercilessly tailgated as I crawled along a pitch dark country lane, I turned right to find a place to pull over and before I realised I was in a residential street, a camera flashed me. Two months later, I was one of 23 people sitting in a faceless office suite inside a multistorey car park in Guildford with Janice, let’s call her, in majestic command of a laser pointer and a PowerPoint display.

My attempt to have a small cyst removed from the spaniel was always going to be fraught with difficulty. My vets are in a posh area of London and have a name that sounds like a multinational reinsurance broker. This is because similar amounts of money go through their books. To save their blushes, let’s call them Simon Fleece and Associates. When I call, the line rings a few times, then there is a pause before it begins to ring again in a different tone. When it answers, a girl says: ‘Simon Fleece and Associates answering service how may I help?’ My formerly friendly local vet is now so big and money-grubbing it has a separate call centre to take overflow calls, I realise. I am very, very scared.

When in India, I always appal my highly educated tour guides. They despair of me, as they drag me round the cultural sights, trying to force education and refinement into me as I lounge about on the walls outside temples soaking up the atmosphere. This trip was no different. My guide had come to pick me up bright and early from the Hyatt in the business district of Calcutta where I had been staying for a three-day economic summit. I had arranged for a further three days of what the tour operators refer to as R&R before I headed back to London. India is one of my favourite destinations but I am a lazy so-and-so when it comes to sightseeing. All I want to do is wander about watching beautiful women wash clothes in rivers. Then a Bengali drummer in the evening and I’m set.

All disputes are now a clash of rights in which both sides compete to see who has the greatest claim to the backing of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I’ve realised this because the other day I took on a road resurfacer who I caught fly-tipping debris and as the ensuing row almost came to blows I contemplated what would happen if the police were called. In the matter of Kite v. Surrey Tarmacker, I wouldn’t like to call it. On the one hand, I’d have a possible gender equality claim, and a very tenuous shot at a disability complaint based on the fact that I can barely think straight most days on account of my midlife crisis.

‘Start at the back and try to pass as many horses as you can,’ said the trainer, as we stepped on to the all-weather track at Lingfield. It was only a practice gallop but I couldn’t have been more excited if I’d been lining up for the Gold Cup. Darcy had been loaded on to the lorry that morning with eight other horses for an outing to see if any of them happened to show signs of what the trainer calls blistering speed. Unless your horse has blistering speed you can forget going ‘under rules’.

‘Sadly, the world is filled with apathy,’ said my friend, as we looked at our sad little list of conscripts to the cause of fighting left-wing lunacy in our local neighbourhood. He’s right. But I can’t help feeling, as I enter another year of what will surely turn out to be non-stop trouble, that a bit of apathy would do me good. My problem is I suffer from the reverse of apathy. I’m too bothered by everything. I can’t stop objecting. I need to sit back and learn how not to give a damn. The apathetic masses must have much lower blood pressure than me. And a lot more friends. When I look back on 2015 it was one tiresome principled stand after another. I took a stand against house-building on the green belt. I took a stand against HS2.