Melissa Kite

The young lad behind the counter of the betting shop looked at me askance. ‘This horse is 200–1.’ ‘Yes. I know.’ He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice. ‘Have you had a tip?’ I looked around me to see why he was whispering. ‘No.’ He stared at the betting slip. ‘You’ve had a tip, haven’t you?’ ‘No!’ I insisted. I really hadn’t had a tip either. I was betting on a horse I had just seen being loaded into a lorry in the yard where Darcy is busy becoming a racehorse. I got so excited seeing, for the first time, one of my horse’s stablemates going out to the races, to be ridden by her trainer, no less, that I ran down to the Coral and put a fiver on the nose.

‘The last owner who tried to ride his own horse got tanked,’ said the trainer, looking up at me as I perched on Darcy, knees nearly up to my chest like a pixie in the racing saddle. ‘After three circuits he threw himself off into the muck heap.’ ‘I get the picture,’ I said, running my gloved hand against Darcy’s neck. ‘Please, look after your mother,’ I whispered to her. She was perfectly calm beneath me. Because I raised her, I have always felt like I can trust this horse with my life. I was about to find out exactly what that meant. It is all very well trusting a horse you have raised from a yearling while cantering her around the woods. It is quite another when that thoroughbred has grown into a gleaming racehorse.

At least two insurances are going to have to go, as I grapple with fear of penury, I have decided. My health insurance is looking increasingly pointless, because I never use it. I just keep it going because I daren’t stop it. And I think the same can be said of my ‘Being A Cool Person’ insurance. If you have never heard of the latter, it is also sometimes referred to as ‘membership of Soho House’. I have had it for donkey’s years but I never avail myself of it. I used to use it a lot in my heyday, when I could party with the best of them. Back then, I could drape myself against a bar with a mojito without looking absurd.

After pulling out of my flat sale and U-turning on the idea of moving to the Cotswolds, it took me a while to realise why. But there is a reason I can never seem to find what I’m looking for. No matter where I go to house-hunt for the cottage of my dreams, nothing is ever right, be it in Cobham or further along the A3 or, giving up on the south east altogether, in the Cotswolds. And the reason is not that I am a hopeless flake. The reason is that I have not really been looking for a place in Cobham, or Ripley, or ‘down the Hog’s Back’, as tempting as that may sound, or, more exotically, in a village on the Surrey-Hampshire borders, or even in Cameron Country just outside Chipping Norton. No. I realise now I have not been looking for a place in a place.

‘Are you afraid of falling over?’ asked the bored young radiologist, as he started filling out the forms. I had been recalled to St George’s Hospital to have a bone density scan. I must explain that the issue of whether or not my bones are disintegrating has been somewhat tinged with hysteria ever since I managed to get myself told off by an Oxford professor for not taking HRT. I rang her to get a quote for an article I was writing about yoga and why it might be helping me through the menopause. One minute I was looking up a revered expert on physiology in the Oxford University experts’ directory. The next minute a really scary woman was barking down the phone, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about yogaaaah...

Exciting news. We might be expecting. I say might because I haven’t done a pregnancy test yet. I thought about doing one then I thought, what the hell, I will leave it to fate. If it happens, it happens. If not, I will look on the bright side as it will save me a lot of bother. Actually, it was the other way around, if I’m honest. My first reaction was total panic, then I thought, if it happens I will look on the bright side. It will be nice to hear the patter of tiny paws around the place. Oh, didn’t I say? It’s Cydney who might be expecting. Not me. Lordy, no. I’m well past that. But Cydney is in her prime.

‘Yes, you can report it, but it’s going to take ten minutes to go through the process,’ said the oppressively cheerful bureaucrat at Surrey Police when I rang to tell them about my stolen saddle. After the first 30 seconds I could see why. She kept asking me to verify that I was all right — still coping, still breathing, still pumping blood around my body — after every sentence. For example: ‘I just need to take your name and address. Is that all right? I need to open a file and log your personal details. Is that OK?’ ‘Yes, fine,’ I said, before telling her my name and address, which prompted a lot of tapping. ‘If I go silent… then it’s just because… I’m typing. Is that all right?

On the basis that I might need a new boiler soon, I thought I had better sell the London flat and move to the Cotswolds. Fine, so it wasn’t just the gurgling noise coming from the Potterton Performa. I had been pondering my place in the world, which is never a good thing for a person of my nervous disposition to do. The break-up with the builder boyfriend; the escalating cost of keeping three horses in Surrey; the liberal leftie south London neighbours regaling me every time I leave my house with the words ‘Isn’t Jeremy Corbyn wonderful?’ — it was all making me feel perfectly unstable, as if a big move was the only thing for it. I can’t be doing with this madness, I thought. I need to sell up and go somewhere quieter, saner and less expensive.

If anyone wants to know why the Labour party is about to elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader then they should come and sit in my back garden in Balham. I have just heard, while lying on a sun lounger, the most absurd and yet horribly revealing conversation between two neighbours talking to each other over the fence. I think it is worth me giving a full transcript of the dialogue for posterity, so that history might understand why the main opposition party of the United Kingdom elected as its leader a man who signed a Commons motion looking forward to the day when an asteroid hits the earth and wipes out mankind. It all started with the conversation catching my ear because one of the women was talking about her love of horse-riding.

Surely it can be no coincidence that the road by which one enters St George’s Hospital, Tooting, is called Effort Street. The taxi trundled along this road, pulling up at the drop-off point in front of the Lanesborough Wing, home to the specialist I have been assigned. It has taken the best part of two years of effort to get to Effort Street, badgering my GP until both she and I were so tired of my ‘change of life’ symptoms that I got the feeling the NHS agreed to let me see a gynaecologist just to stop me making doctors appointments. The Lanesborough, unlike Effort Street, is very badly named because it is nothing like the Lanesborough hotel. Inside, there is no one to welcome you, never mind afternoon tea.

The vet bill has been sitting on my desk for three weeks. All vet bills are cruel and unusual but this one is even more so than most. It only came about because the owner of the yard where I had the horses until recently kept telling me they were lame. They didn’t look lame to me. ‘Maybe she’s just tweaked herself in the field?’ I said, as we trotted Grace the skewbald pony up and down. ‘She’s lame as ****!’ he declared, in his charming horseman’s patois. The thoroughbred filly, meanwhile, he declared utterly beyond help. ‘She’s club-footed,’ he growled. ‘Well, maybe one front hoof’s a bit taller than the other,’ I said, bristling like a mother who has been told her daughter needs an orthopaedic shoe.

‘No, I do not do WhatsApp.’ That’s pretty much all I ever seem to say to people nowadays. They ask me if I do WhatsApp, I say I don’t do WhatsApp and they never bother with me again. I deduce from this that not only can we not now meet in person (so 80s), we cannot talk on the mobile phone either (so 90s), and nor can we email each other (so noughties). We have to do WhatsApp. I don’t know what WhatsApp is and I cannot bring myself to find out. In answer to the next person who asks, I say: WtfApp! WhocaresApp?! GetalifeApp!! I was full up with pointless technology when I got as far as using an iPhone.

‘Cydney, we are not moving to Cobham!’ I told the spaniel in my best outraged Margot Leadbetter voice. What a sad moment. All my adult life I have worshipped Cobham as a haven of everything good and right and well-functioning in the world. A place of old-fashioned values and comforting, staid right-wingery. A place of millionaires and lottery winners. A place where the streets are paved in Chelsea footballers, slightly drunk after a night out at the local steakhouse. I have loved Cobham with all my heart, having one foot in it, by stabling my horses there, and one foot back in Balham, south London, where I live. Recently, I moved the horses to Dorking but I was only there a few months when I realised my mistake. Dorking is not like Cobham.

Insomnia has a lot to answer for. I have not been sleeping well for years but a few months ago I stopped sleeping at all. By that I don’t mean I sleep a little bit. I mean I sleep never. And since I stopped sleeping, I have been teetering on a knife-edge. It is, I can reveal, barely possible to behave in accordance with the law if you have had no sleep for a significant time. I suspect a large proportion of the prison population just needed a sleeping pill to make them into responsible citizens.

Here is what I thought happened. I thought that as I tided my store room at the stables I put my car key in a boot for safe-keeping. I had been reorganising all the tons of horse stuff I have accumulated over the years, from rugs to bridles to brushes, numnahs, girths, lunge reigns, lead reigns, head collars, spray soaps, first-aid kits, boot polish, haynets, travel boots, exercise boots, tendon boots, over-reach boots, stable bandages, tail bandages, rosettes, buckets, scoops, fly masks ...you get the picture. I was having a clear-out.