Melissa Kite

‘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.

My gay best friend is cheating on me with another woman. I saw him with her the other day and now I’m prostrate with grief and shock. I don’t think I will ever be able to bring myself to forgive him. Even if he begged me to come back to him, we can never be the way we were. I don’t even know how to tell him I know about the affair. He is carrying on as if he doesn’t know that I have found out. All I keep thinking is: ‘How could he do this to me? How? After everything we have been through? The long discussions about Botox, the episodes of Kath & Kim, the endless gossiping...I wouldn’t mind so much, but the gay marriage law was already making it harder than ever for sad, forty-something single women like me to hang on to their gay best friends.

A letter arrives from David Cameron, asking me to vote by post in the European elections. Presumably he means vote by post for the Tory party. The letter has a postal ballot application form all filled out with my name and address. I just have to sign and return it in the envelope provided. ‘Apply for a postal vote today and help us secure an EU referendum… If I am Prime Minister after the next general election, there will be an in-out referendum by the end of 2017. This is my personal pledge to you…Yours sincerely, David Cameron.’ I stare for a long time at this letter feeling strange, conflicting emotions. The main thing that hits me is this: things are obviously much worse for the Conservatives than I had thought.

The look on her face said it all. I can always tell my friend Denise is upset about something when she is sporting an especially wide grin. Denise is from Jamaica and is a devout Jehovah’s Witness. She takes most catastrophes by being alarmingly cheerful about them because they just go to prove that the end is nigh. Whenever I am with her and something goes wrong, she invariably laughs and exclaims: ‘No good, Mey-lissah!’ She then treats me to a lecture about how wicked the world is and how the day of judgment is coming any day now. I’m inclined to agree with her most of the time. And this time was no exception. I had invited Denise to Surrey for a day in the country. I keep promising her I will put her on a horse.

‘Quick, let’s slip one in the menu,’ said the builder, taking a leaflet from my handbag after we had paid the bill at the pavement café where we had just had lunch. As he did that, I put one inside the menu on the next table, which was empty, and the table beyond that. As we walked down the high street, I slipped a bunch into one of those property magazine holders outside an estate agents. Then we passed a community noticeboard on a wall. The builder slid a leaflet through a gap in the glass door. ‘Good one,’ I said. Then I put a stack of them on a cashpoint machine. This week, I have mostly been distributing leaflets emblazoned with the legend Say No To A New Town At Wisley.

‘Please, I beg of you, take me to see André,’ was my mother’s heartfelt plea. And so it was that we turned up at Wembley Arena — she, my father and I — to experience the global phenomenon that is André Rieu. André Rieu is a Dutch violinist and conductor who tours the world staging big venue classical concerts featuring all the popular classics you most want to hear. But that description really doesn’t do him justice. You cannot possibly grasp what André Rieu is and does before you see him in action. When you see him perform live with his Johann Strauss Orchestra you realise he is not so much a violinist and conductor as a force of nature. His name could be a verb, if it were not so unpronounceable.

Seeing a poodle on the London Underground wearing a red vest with the words ‘Diabetes Medical Dog’ has given me an idea. I have been trying to think of a job for my working cocker spaniel. Currently she is employed one day a week during the shooting season, picking up pheasants. She likes the work and has a great talent for it. I was advised to get her into employment as soon as possible because working cockers are renowned for needing an occupation. They like to have their brains tasked and little Cydney is no exception. If I don’t give her something to do, she finds something to do and that can be problematic. When she was just two, I discovered a pile of all the important letters I had never received, but people swore they had sent me, behind the living room sofa.