Melissa Kite

‘Cydney,’ I have just told the spaniel, ‘you had better enjoy this tin of dog food because it cost me £67.50.’ I hear you ask, ‘How on earth is this possible? Are you feeding foie gras to your cocker?’ I might as well be. It would be cheaper than buying pet food in Streatham after Transport for London has run amok with a red line painter in a deserted street. I had pulled up as normal outside this sleepy little pet shop on the corner of a quiet residential street to get the dog a consignment of Lily’s Kitchen. I parked in the large empty bay outside, which still looked for all the world like the dedicated customer parking it has always been. Yes, I suppose if I had scoured the tarmac beneath my feet I might have seen lines.

‘I have a feeling,’ said my father, ‘that this evening is not going to go well.’ We were sitting in the bar of a local fish restaurant near my parents’ home having pre-dinner drinks, and I was throwing a wobbly because my tomato juice wasn’t right. I had arrived at the table after putting my order in as I went off to park the car, only to find a drink in a bottle called Big Tom sitting on the table. You know the drill, it’s the little things that get me. I immediately went into one because I cannot understand why asking a bartender to make a tomato juice from scratch is considered beyond the call of duty these days.

If we had to fight a war on the home front I’m fairly sure we would be stuffed. I base this claim on what happens if you try to buy a sandwich at ten past three in Surrey. You walk into a small shop in a nice village. You select a sandwich from the chiller cabinet — egg mayonnaise — and put it down on the counter along with a Diet Coke. You get out your money and look at the lady behind the counter as you wait for her to announce the amount you owe, but instead of taking your money the lady says: ‘Sorry, kitchen’s closed.’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Kitchen closed at 3 p.m. Sorry. We’re not doing food.’ ‘No, you don’t understand. I don’t want you to make me anything. I’ll just have this sandwich here.

The vet arrived at the stable yard wearing his customary grin. He is the happiest man I know. Of course he is. As he once explained to me, horses may be incredibly badly designed for the purposes of the horse-owner, but they are spectacularly well designed for the purposes of equine veterinary practices. ‘Don’t you dare look smug,’ I told him, as he whistled his way into the thoroughbred filly’s stable. ‘If this is bad, you’d better get a syringe full of sedative ready for me because I am going to go nuts.’ ‘Ha haaa!’ he laughed, ecstatically. ‘I’m serious. I want ketamine.’ ‘Ha haaa! Good one, Mel!’ He sounded like he had already had some.

‘And for my next trick,’ said the Volvo, as I parked at the supermarket and pulled the handle of the door to get out, ‘I shall refuse to open while you are inside.’ ‘What the…?’ I said, after pulling the handle a couple of times. I clicked the lock button by the window just in case I had inadvertently managed to child lock the driver’s door. Then I clicked the unlock button on the key. Then I turned the ignition on and off. Then I tried the handle again. Then I decided to have a good scream. I had only just had the 72 fault codes cleared by Karl the mechanic. The Volvo had been flashing warnings at me for weeks. But Karl could find nothing wrong. Then there was the broken wing mirror, only partially fixed with a new mirror piece.

‘What is this, please?’ I said to the estate agent, as he showed me into the building site he was calling a house. ‘This,’ he said beaming, ‘is the kitchen and breakfast room area.’ I picked my way over the rubble and stood in the dark, pokey room with its walls of hideous grey breezeblock. ‘I thought I asked you not to show me anything without a second fix, Sedrick.’ ‘Well, yes, but,’ said Sedrick, one of those perky young estate agents you can’t keep down, ‘you just need to use a bit of imagination. If you stand over here you can really get a feel for it. The space, I mean. You can get a sense of what it will be like when...’ ‘Stop!

In the end, I threw my mobile phone into a sack of Chudley’s dog biscuits. It was the only way I could finish the book. The bag of Chudley’s was in a cupboard so it didn’t even matter that I hadn’t silenced the phone before I threw it in there. At most, all I could hear as I hammered away on the keys of my laptop was a faint beep every few minutes as everyone in the universe texted me to say how disgusted they were that I wasn’t answering. Result: finished book. In one day. That’s all it took. Six months I’ve been labouring over this novel with my phone beeping beside me, like a baby sparrow with its needy little beak open. But in the space of one blissful day when my phone was inside a sack of dog biscuits I managed to get it done.

‘Ouch!’ said the ex-builder boyfriend. ‘I think something’s bitten me.’ And a few seconds after that, something bit me too. We had been walking in the woods with the spaniel, when a winged creature of some sort, or possibly an agile snake, decided to take a chunk out of us both. Within a few hours, the builder was complaining of feeling sick. And my leg started swelling. I’m allergic to mosquito bites, or at least I suspect I am because whenever I get one, it grows to a carbuncle. This time, the bite left an angry raised red patch on the back of my thigh that just grew, and grew, and grew...I decided to plaster it in steroid cream and dose myself up with antihistamine.

Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly fight any more battles, a pink planning notice is pinned to the lamp post in front of my house. The upstairs neighbours are planning a loft conversion. Not just any old loft conversion. All I can see as I scan the notice, my eyes glazing over in a panic-stricken blur, are the words ‘dormer windows’. It has been said that ‘cellar door’ are the most beautiful words in the English language. Surely, the words ‘dormer windows’ are the most terrifying. The worst part about finding the words ‘dormer windows’ pinned to the lamp post outside my flat is that they have been there for goodness knows how long.

You know you’ve been irreversibly sucked into the ninth circle of horse-owning hell when you find yourself perusing an equine supplement catalogue. If you ask me, these tomes should have a disclaimer on the front saying, ‘Abandon all hope, ye pony-lovers who enter here.’ The equine supplement industry is a vast money-burning pit into which you shall surely fall unless you hold fast and stolidly remain the sort of owner who says ‘stuff and nonsense’ whenever anyone tries to tell you that horses have complementary medicinal needs. I used to be extremely stolid. I once overheard a horse-owner in a stable yard telling a fellow livery: ‘My boy is loving his turmeric!

Really, I do wish people would stagger their baby-making. Absolutely every professional person whose services I have required in the past few weeks has declared themselves out of action for procreational reasons. And before I get accused of sexism, most of them have been men. It is a very strange thing, this trend for paternity leave. I wouldn’t mind, but it doesn’t just start when the baby arrives. It seems to take men out of gainful employment in the run-up to the birth as well as after it, nowadays. I’m sure this never used to be the case. As I understand it, my father, for example, was able to work right to the moment my mother went into hospital to have me.

The mechanic hooked the Volvo up to his special laptop. He had kindly offered to come to me in order to diagnose the different warning codes that were flashing on the dashboard. After about an hour, I asked him if he was sure he didn’t want a coffee. ‘No, I’m fine,’ he shouted from inside the car. ‘Is everything alright?’ I asked. Silence. I knew there were a lot of warnings. I had counted about ten different messages on the dashboard from ‘Transmission Service Required!’ to ‘Engine Service Required!’ to the terrifyingly ambiguous ‘Immobiliser!’ which had been flashing for the past few weeks. This was in addition to the usual running commentary. ‘Driver door open!’ it says, every time I get in or out.

‘Can I go and play with Twiggy?’ If dogs could talk, this is what my spaniel Cydney would be saying to me every five minutes. She has made friends with the spaniel in the house up the track and the pair are beginning to show signs of folie à deux. I leave my door open because it’s nice weather and one minute my dog is lying on the front lawn, the next minute she’s gone. Either she sneaks off to find Twiggy, or Twiggy comes to call for her. Sometimes I catch her wiggling under the gate and trotting off with the little brown spaniel.They look back over their shoulders at me before starting to run.

The Volvo has turned into a monster. It always did have a mind of its own. Fellow owners warned me when I got it that the sensors are incredibly sensitive. It is always faking injury. I had only had it a few weeks when the warning light flashed and demanded a transmission service. In the interests of good relations — and also because I bought it from a dealer who was raided by police and trading standards a week later — I thought I would show willing. But a few days after the mechanic changed the transmission oil, we were driving along and the light flashed: ‘Transmission Service Required!’ I took it back in, had it hooked up to the computer and the mechanics declared it fine. A few days later the warning light flashed: ‘Transmission Service Required!

All the way around a cross country course I went, then I got back, tied the horse up at a wooden post and a splinter from the post landed me in A&E. This is what is known as Sod’s Law. I’m never quite sure who this Sod fellow is. But I do know the main thing Sod seems to want to demonstrate is that health and safety rules are a joke. There is, as we all know deep down, nothing you can do to make yourself safe in this world. We kid ourselves if we think we can stop bad things happening. They say God laughs at our plans. I reckon he splits his sides when he sees the guff that comes out of the Health and Safety Executive. I turned up at the cross country course in a body protector that made me feel like my torso was in a vice.

This horse-rearing business is not for the faint-hearted. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought an eight-month-old filly out of the racing industry. Well, I wasn’t thinking, was I? I went to see the Builder Boyfriend’s mother one Sunday for a nice trip out. She owns a small private yard in Sussex and had just picked up a few acquisitions from the sales. The Builder had asked her to get him a driving pony and, as the pair of them looked over the stable door at the speckled blackand-white cob he was going to hook up to a trap, I made the fatal error of looking in the next stable. A little bay foal put her head over the door and said hello. And that was it.

‘Question 2. In which year did the Berlin Wall come down?’ shouted the quizmaster. And then he repeated this with dramatic pauses, as quizmasters are apt to do: ‘In which year…did the Berlin Wall…come down?’ ‘Oh, yeah!’ said the youngest person in our team. ‘I just got that!’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she said, with a huge grin on her face. ‘1989,’ hissed one of the team members. ‘Yup, 89, definitely,’ whispered another member. ‘I remember because I’d just got divorced and I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway and…’ But the youngest member of the team was still having something of an epiphany. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she kept exclaiming.