Melissa Kite

‘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.

Drip, drip, drip. The noise of my downstairs London conversion flat, where the plumbing was fitted by turn-of-the-century sadists who booby-trapped the building so that if the upstairs neighbours ever dared to try to re-fit their bathroom, they would unleash a leak and never, ever be able to find the source. Drip, drip, drip. The water drips from their bathroom, through my ceiling into my bathroom through the middle spotlight of the false ceiling, which is now camouflage-patterned with damp patches and horrible yellow watermarks, into a big red bucket. Drip, drip, drip. It is like Chinese water torture. It started when the two brothers upstairs (I mean siblings. I’m not using the slang for black guys, before anyone gets too excited) put in a new bathroom a few weeks ago.

Don’t do it. Do not, whatever you do, even think about doing it. I was happy not doing it. And then I weakened and did it. And now I am living to bitterly regret it. I speak of switching my broadband provider, of course. Like any ‘switch’, it promised to be many things — cheaper, faster, shinier — and turned out to be a living nightmare. What made it worse was that my BT service was very good. It was expensive, but it worked. I remember the fateful day I decided to ditch it. I knew deep down it was the wrong thing to do. I loved you, BT broadband. You weren’t superfast fibre-optic. But I loved you all the same. Then I had a rush of blood to the head and decided to ring Sky to ask whether I could get a cheaper TV package.

‘How often do you de-frag this?’ said the Good Geek in the phone shop. I had gone in finally to buy an iPhone. Trembling, I produced my laptop so we could download some software and save all the contacts in my BlackBerry and then port them back over to the new device. Or something. The Good Geek is so called because, unlike the other whizz kids who look at me like I’ve got two heads when I come in and ask for ‘a phone with buttons’, he always tries to help me. But he still terrifies me. He had only had my laptop open a few seconds before he typed something into it that made it display its brains all over the screen.

‘Hello, I’d like my money back, please,’ I said to the nice lady on the other end of the line. And if the nice lady on the other end of the line had been working for anyone other than a utility company, I would probably have had my money back a few moments later. As it was, my request to be refunded the £113 that my gas and electricity accounts were in credit triggered a journey into the first circle of hell (limbo). ‘Right,’ said the lady, after I had given her my meter readings, which bore out the fact that my gas account was in credit by £88.13 and my electricity by £25. ‘I see you are due an assessment in March. If, at that time, you are still in credit, you can ask for the amount to be refunded then.’ I tried again.

Just the three resolutions for me. I am keeping it simple. Number one: no more boyfriends. The definition of insanity is repeating the same mistake while expecting a different result and I have been repeating this particular mistake for 42 years. The truth is, I cannot do romance. I am elated to finally discover this and move on. The evening after it all finished with the builder, a friend rang me to see if I was alright. His tone intimated he thought I might have my head in the oven. In fact, I had my meal-for-one in the oven and I was in the best mood I had been in for several years. ‘How are you coping?’ asked the friend, his voice grave with compassion. ‘Fantastic!’ I whooped. ‘Did you know you can get little fish pies for £3.99 from Waitrose?

The Daily Telegraph's excellent interview with the head of the Countryside Alliance today tells us what many people in the countryside have known for a long time: that the RSPCA has become a malign organisation. I wrote my own expose of the 'charity' in February this year in which I compared it to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. More and more people are realising that the RSPCA is a powerful group of snoopers who seem to exist for nothing so much as to further their own power. The RSPCA is really now so political it should not be able to call itself a charity and it should not carry the Royal prefix when it loathes everything the Queen does in her spare time — hunting, shooting, fishing, going to the races, and so on. I am amazed Her Majesty has not told them where to go.

A very cross letter arrives from someone who wants to tell me I’m a ‘silly woman’. ‘You are a silly woman,’ says the letter. It is from a lady called Mrs Inglis who lives in Edinburgh but gives no more exact address or email so that I can reply. If I could reply, I would write back and say: ‘Dear Mrs Inglis, Of course I’m a silly woman. That’s kind of the point.’ Mrs Inglis also sends me a copy of my own article. She sends it to me, in the post. She has cut it out of the magazine and put it in an envelope. This is not the first time such a thing has happened. When I was a political correspondent on the Telegraph I was inundated with people sending me my own articles on a daily basis.

Emmylou Harris and the McGarrigle sisters wrote a song called ‘All I left Behind’. My version is called ‘All They Left Behind’ and is a sort of inventory of my life, according to the items left in my flat when relationships have ended. Tea cups from Tim, a coffee bean grinder from Jim, T-shirts from Francesco, and a goose-down pillow from Ed. It doesn’t scan very well, but I’m sure Emmylou could make something of it. Some might call it sad that my romantic history comes down to the reverse of a wedding list. But actually, it’s not that sad. The bean grinder is terrific, although, to be strictly accurate, Jim didn’t really leave it. He came to pick his stuff up and I hid it.