Melissa Kite

Before I go any further, I would like to make clear that no animals were harmed in the making of this column. You might think that goes without saying, but I don’t take anything for granted when a woman I know has just been censured by the RSPCA for not providing her horses with a ‘comfortable’ place to lie down in their field. ‘What is she meant to do, give them four-poster beds?’ the builder boyfriend asks me when I tell him. Possibly. Or mattresses inside bespoke tents, like a Glastonbury VIP area. Never mind that horses don’t like enclosed spaces and prefer to sleep in the open. Even if you give them a shelter they often won’t go in it. Never mind that it is normal horse behaviour to lock their knees and sleep standing up.

Just before Cydney ran off and disgraced me on the first day of the shooting season, she covered herself in glory. This seems to be the way of things with spaniels. They are a bit like children in the sense that, so far as their public performances are concerned, they either fill you with pride or plunge you into an abyss of mortification. Before she decided to drop me right in it, the little dog performed a really difficult retrieve from a fast-flowing stream. A hen bird was wedged between some fallen branches underneath the current. The head of the picking-up team — who also happens to be the guy who bred Cydney and helped me train her — sent all three of his dogs in, one by one, but none of them could get it out.

What is the point of the Dangerous Dogs Act when there is a man marauding with an illegal pit bull in south London and the police are not arresting him? My friend rang me in hysterics recently after the beast all but savaged his little Patterdale terrier in Kennington Park. The pit bull picked him up in his mouth and started shaking him. When my friend slapped the pit bull with his umbrella, it let go of his dog, ran over to an old man, grabbed his Shitzu and shook that like a rag doll until it was pouring with blood. The old man fell over as he tried to save his dog and the pit bull owner screamed at him as he lay in the mud. My friend called the police, the guy grabbed his dangerous dog and ran off. When my friend next spotted them in the park he called the police again.

After four hours of driving, we should have been in the middle of Dartmoor. And yet we were not. We were pulled over in a lay-by and the infernal devil that is the iPhone satnav was wiping the floor with us. The iPhone has been stuck in groundhog day since we took it to Cornwall in the summer. Specifically, it is obsessed with Liskeard. Ever since we drove through there on the way to a holiday cottage it has been gripped by a strange determination to get itself back there that can only be described as psychotic. So strong is its neurosis that whenever I program it to take me somewhere in London, I set off from my house in Balham with the iPhone announcing: ‘Four hours and 46 minutes to arrival at… Liskeard!

My London flat now has so little space in it I’ve begun storing stuff at the dry cleaners. Back in May, I checked a huge winter quilt in at Viking’s and left it there until the weather turned colder. There just wasn’t anywhere, not a single spare nook or cranny, to put it and quite frankly I balk at renting a £100 a month lock-up at the Big Yellow Storage so I can keep a spare winter duvet. The man at the dry cleaners was quite cross when I turned up this week to claim it, pleading forgetfulness. He had a look that said he knew full well I had intended for my quilt to summer in the back of his shop. When he couldn’t find it he allowed me to come around the counter to look myself and there I found rack upon rack of duvets and quilts snuggly vacationing on his shelves.

As the maître d’ ushered me into the packed restaurant, I leaned in close and intoned softly, so as not to be heard by the elegant lady sitting nearby who was obviously my date, ‘I’m here to meet...’. And I nodded towards her as I said the name of my New York publisher. Yes, that’s right. New York. I’ve had fancy conference calls and everything. A lot of very bright Americans say a lot of lovely things to me down a phone line with a two second delay and I say ‘um’, and ‘oh, right’. And they sound confused that I don’t sound more excited by the prospect of a book of mine being published in the States. I am excited. But in a British way. Added to which reserve you have to factor in my unique brand of chaos.

A letter arrives from the lawyers handling my defence in the phantom whiplash injury claim. It is now coming up to three years since a singularly rough-hewn couple alleged I had incapacitated them by shunting my little convertible in a slow moving traffic queue into the back of their people carrier. I haven’t heard much from them since I appointed legal counsel and notified them of my intention to fight their claim all the way to the highest court in the land. They went a bit quiet after that, failing to submit all the necessary details setting out how and when they want to see me in court.

A crazy woman is living inside my head. It’s not just the normal crazy woman who camps out there from time to time and argues about parking tickets. It’s a new crazy woman who thinks she can avoid parking tickets by fighting men in the street. Physically, with her bare hands. Is this what they mean by ‘empowerment’? You will feel wonderfully empowered, they keep telling me. They being women who have been through the change of life before me. Well, all I can say is, if I go on getting any more empowered I am going to wind up in jail. In my latest adventure, I picked a fight with two burly cab drivers who were blocking the road outside my house. And just to be clear, I haven’t been taking any kind of testosterone supplement, which is apparently an option.

After a rush of blood to the head, I decided it might be a good idea to ask some awkward questions of the RSPCA. Oh no, I hear you cry. What fresh hell is this? Let me explain. I found out that the charity is pretty much closed to any kind of scrutiny. Unlike other powerful organisations, the police or government bodies, the RSPCA is immune to Freedom of Information requests. This would be fine if it were just handing out free veterinary care, but, as we know, it isn’t. The charity can investigate and prosecute a little old lady for failing to spot that her cat has a tumour, but neither I nor anyone else looking into why the RSPCA wants to do this, can investigate very far into them.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, looking my Slovakian friend in the eye. ‘You are going to go back to your own country because the healthcare here is no good?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is no good. Is terrible. I leave job and go home and sign on. I get treatment in Slovakia.’ I shook my head like a wet dog as if this might rouse me from a rum sort of surrealist nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was true. My Slovakian friend, who seems sane enough, has decided to leave Britain in search of a better life in Bratislava. I don’t know her that well, it is true. She’s a friend’s lodger. We have become acquainted over the months she has been living in his house in Surrey and she seems nice enough.

Incredible as it seems to me now, there was a time when a wolf whistle was annoying. A man would shout something approving from a scaffold and I would harrumph about my privacy being invaded, my gender not being respected, my dignity as an intelligent woman being violated. Then I got old and a wolf whistle made my day. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I knew I had turned a corner, gone over a hill and started to slip down the other side, so far as age was concerned, when I first heard a wolf whistle from a scaffold and, instead of feeling outraged, felt the sweet surge of hope. I remember standing there looking pathetically up at the builder in question, like a forlorn budgie, beseeching him to whistle at me again. Or, even better, shout something offensive about my rear end.

This feature is a preview of this week's Spectator, out tomorrow: Justine Greening wants to talk about social mobility. If it is not immediately obvious why the Secretary of State for International Development wants to talk about this issue, it becomes clear. Growing up the daughter of a steel worker gave her an insight into what it’s like to struggle, she tells me, when we meet in a conference room overlooking Parliament Square. She says she feels that the Tories are not pushing as hard on social mobility as they ought to be. Ms Greening thinks the issue needs a champion. She never says so explicitly, but clearly this is her pitch to take on that mantle.

‘Hi I did Put it on It needed more’ is the pleasingly obscure haiku I find on my kitchen table. It is from Denise, one of the most wonderful people I know. To give Denise a title — such as cleaner, cleaning lady, home help — would be disingenuous or even downright rude. Because it is fair to say that, in the years I have been privileged to know her, I have not only had my flat cleaned by Denise, I have had my mind broadened, my spirit fortified and my soul set on a path to a place where she assures me I shall surely find peace when the judgment day comes. Denise, from Kingston, Jamaica, is a Jehovah’s Witness, though in all the time she has been coming to my flat she has never once left me one of those Watchtower leaflets on my kitchen table.

Strangely enough, I was in the middle of writing an article about the tactics used by the RSPCA when another animal charity knocked on my door. A young man holding a clipboard was standing on the doorstep, grinning enthusiastically: ‘Hello! I’m from Battersea Dogs Home.’ ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m a bit busy.’ Exposing animal welfare charities for preying on innocent people. I didn’t say that last bit out loud. ‘I just need to tell you,’ he said, ‘that we’ve got a big fundraising drive because a lot of dogs are being abandoned at the moment. And...’, he paused for dramatic effect, ‘...a lot of them have been tortured.’ ‘Tortured?

The problem with not getting married, I am increasingly realising, is that you cannot get divorced. There is no mechanism for separating when you are simply co-romancing with someone. The builder boyfriend and I are not even cohabiting. We simply pop round to each other’s houses as the fancy takes us. Not that I am complaining, necessarily. After a lot of stops and starts we are currently rather happy. And this is all very fine and dandy. But every now and then a dread panic grips my heart and I think, ‘Hang on a minute. What if I ever want to get out?’ We’ve been together on and off for three years now. It seems like only yesterday that we met.

A parcel has arrived addressed to ‘Cydney Kite’. The spaniel is ecstatic. She has never received her own mail before, let alone an express delivery package. She wags her entire body frantically as I open it and is driven half demented by the heady smell that arises as I lift out the packing bubbles to reveal... The nice people at Lily’s Kitchen have sent her a food parcel. They read about me getting a £60 parking fine for stopping outside the pet shop and would like to help out. There is a lovely note to this effect and a selection of canned meat, biscuits, treats and a packet of particularly strong-smelling dried fish sticks, which I’m guessing is what is making her almost hyperventilate with excitement.