Melissa Kite

‘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.

This much I know, I never want to live in an ‘executive home’, and neither do I want to live in a house that belongs to a ‘collection’ of homes that have been built to a ‘high specification’. And which feature bi-fold doors. Quite frankly, having been house-hunting in Surrey for the best part of two years looking for something I can afford, I don’t care if I never see another bi-fold door as long as I live. What’s wrong with a back door with a simple hinge, or a French window? When did we all get so lost up our own posteriors we needed the entire back wall to come off our house, even if it’s a three-bedroom dormer bungalow? When we decided to make three-bed dormer bungalows worth more than a million pounds, that’s when.

Why won’t the middle classes shout at their dogs any more? My suspicion is that the bleeding heart liberals, having succeeded in stopping right-minded people from shouting at their children, have moved on to stopping us from emotionally scarring animals. The result, of course, is that our four-legged friends are becoming about as unpleasant as your average infant. The spaniel and I take our lives in our hands every time we venture on to Tooting Common, running the gauntlet of ADHD dogs throwing their weight about as their owners cower in the distance calling politely at them to desist. These are not dangerous dogs, in any official sense, you understand. I did once see a pit bull being walked by a hoodie.

Aren’t the police getting younger nowadays — and ruder, and scruffier and more intolerant of middle-class women? In other words, why am I always getting pulled over for no apparent reason? If I were a member of any other minority group I would be complaining to my community leaders of terrible bias and of hideously unfair ‘stop and search’ policies. As it is, whatever minority I do belong to in my Volvo with a Countryside Alliance sticker on the back window and my gundog in a travel cage in the boot, it has absolutely no recourse to complain to anyone. So they help themselves. The other day, I was driving past Wandsworth Common on my way to Surrey to see the horses when I was pulled over by police manning a huge road block.

The doctor eyed me suspiciously as I walked into her consulting room. ‘Ye-es?’ she said, nervously, eyeing me up and down, after I knocked softly and entered apologetically, as I always do. Whenever I go to see her, my GP gives the impression of being taken totally by surprise, and put to astonishing inconvenience, by my seeking her opinion on a medical matter, even though she is advertising herself as a general practitioner and has, I am assuming, various qualifications in this field. ‘Ye-es?’ she said, looking mortified, terrified and outraged on every level as I made my way to the chair by her desk. She never says anything else by way of small talk or introduction, by the way. No ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ or ‘what can I do for you?

Foolishly, I have this wild notion that one day, if the stars align in my favour, I might be able to reduce my Sky subscription. I know, I know. What a crazy, idealistic dreamer I am. But I just feel it ought to be possible to watch television for less than a thousand pounds a year. I seem to remember, in the dark recesses of my brain, that once upon a time, far away in a wonderful utopia where TVs had big fat buttons, there used to be three channels with everything you wanted to see on them and no more bureaucratic or financial a nightmare to access this simple pleasure than paying a licence fee of a few pounds. Now the licence fee — inflated enough in itself — is the least of your worries as the payments to Sky grow bigger and more inexplicable.