Melissa Kite

Everything is a journey now, especially if it involves failure. The X Factor rejects, people having disasters as they build their own homes on Grand Designs, they’re all on a journey. ‘It’s been an incredible journey,’ they say, watery-eyed as they reflect on what is, in truth, a shameful mess of their own making. Very much in this vein, a new communication from Lambeth Council has come through my door explaining ‘the recycling journey’. Bear with me, because I want you to come on this journey in order to fully grasp the beautiful symmetry of what Lambeth has achieved. Imagine a flow chart made up of eight photographs.

The builder boyfriend and I have had a terrible row. In the heat of the moment, I said something truly awful to him that may have done irreparable damage. It wasn’t entirely my fault. I haven’t been sleeping. And when I haven’t been sleeping I become irrational. Fine, I become more irrational. Suddenly, the other night, I fell asleep while lying on the sofa watching CSI Special Victims Unit. The overcomplicated plot acted like a powerful anaesthesia and I found myself drifting into precisely the sort of deep, blessed sleep I have been craving for months. Before I drifted off, I had asked the builder to run me a bath.

‘Do you know...?’ said the Tory MP I was sitting next to, as he tried to introduce me to the transport secretary. But the transport secretary didn’t even wait until the Tory MP said my name. The transport secretary starts turning a funny colour whenever he sees me. On this occasion he hurried past saying, ‘Ah ha ha yes ha ha ah, erm…’ Before he got past, I grabbed his hand and shook it. I suppose I wanted to assure him that the small matter of him putting a high speed railway past my parents’ back garden needn’t necessarily mean he has to run across the Savoy ballroom. Or look like he wished a tunnel would open up and swallow him.

Like the heroine in Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, I stood in front of it with my mouth open in awe. It was a ship in the earth. I was looking at the tip of a flying saucer protruding from a field where it had become wedged thousands of years before after crash-landing. I had been walking across the farmland at the back of my parents’ house with the builder boyfriend and Cydney the spaniel when we came across it. Let me paint the picture: mile upon mile of rugged countryside stretched in every direction. Stubble fields were lit by a magical golden light. Cows ambled around grassy meadows.

Blind panic grips me at the thought that all over Britain there are people sitting in cosy home offices operating gizmos with ease. I imagine I am the only person alive who can’t print out something from an email without getting in my car and driving to a small shop with no name on Streatham High Road, where a monosyllabic gentleman in Islamic dress will allow me to log on to one of his ancient reconditioned desktop computers and send the document I want to print to his printer, and who will then slap the few stray sheets down on the counter with a look of disdain and ask me for £9.50.

Speeding down the farm track from my little country retreat, I came across the gamekeeper in his Defender. I wound down my window. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ he asked, looking askance at the dust cloud and no doubt wondering whether I had collided with any of his pheasants. ‘I’m going back to London for a rest,’ I told him. ‘Oh dear,’ he muttered, lighting a roll-up. Yes, oh dear. Very certainly, oh dear. As he obviously knows only too well, but neglected to tell me when I moved into my rented barn conversion, living in the country is absolutely exhausting. Coming to this tranquil farm for long weekends is taking it out of me. I used to do three days country and four days town.

‘Hello, good morning, my name is Gavin Moneypenny, and I’m your customer service representative for today and I’m pleased to inform you that during the course of this call I will be looking for ways to improve the service you are getting from us if I can, and if I can at any point make your experience easier in any way, for you, there, Miss Kite, I will endeavour to do so, and to let you know, during the course of this call, what I can do to help you, Miss Kite, if I can call you Miss Kite, or do you prefer...’ Stop! I only called my bank to pay a small bill over the phone but after a minute of pure waffle we were still on the introductory ‘pleasantries’. Not that I buy that these really are pleasantries.

‘Excuse me. I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I have to tell you, as a Catholic, I’m offended.’ The girl, a complete stranger, had walked up to our restaurant table to inform us she had been insulted while eavesdropping on us. I stared at her, not knowing whether to apologise or tell her to go away and mind her own business. I had been sitting at my favourite table in my favourite restaurant with my two favourite people having a spirited supper discussion with them about whether or not I, as a Roman Catholic, bore any responsibility for what the Catholic Church…oh, you know. Need I go into it again? I would really rather not. Once was bad enough. To be honest, it was a total car crash of an evening.

Natural horsemanship has a lot to answer for. After a cross country event the other day, I rode back to my trailer to find the two women parked next to me doing some very strange things as they loaded their horse. One woman led the pony up the ramp quite efficiently, flicking it with the rope to stop it hesitating and then shut it inside. Whereupon her friend shouted: ‘No! Get him back off, quickly!’ And she lowered the ramp, untied the pony and pushed him back down the ramp. ‘He’s got to choose to load,’ said the woman, who I now noticed was a little hair-brained looking. ‘He’s got to chooooooose to load.

Walking the spaniel on Tooting Common, I was apprehended by a man on a bike. He was ashen-faced. His young daughter, pedalling behind him, had tears streaming down her face. ‘We’ve been attacked!’ he said. ‘My daughter…they set a dog on her…she’s been bitten.’ I looked ahead up the track…et voilà. Once a year, the caravans appear on Tooting Common. There were about seven this time. The usual kids and dogs were milling about. The child didn’t look injured and had probably just been nipped round the ankles. The dog the father was complaining about was a small yappy thing. All the same. They were shaken up. ‘Oh, dear,’ I told him. ‘They come every year. But they usually leave after a few days.

The Builder Boyfriend has nearly moved in. I say nearly because we are both quite nervous about committing to each other so we are doing it piecemeal. I don’t know why people say ‘never do anything by halves’ because doing things by halves has saved my sanity on many occasions. In this case, the builder and I are dividing our time and our possessions between my flat in London and the converted barn rental in Surrey. This means if one of us gets cross with the other we simply split up and inhabit them separately.

‘Congratulations! You’ve qualified for The Sunshine Tour!’ beamed the lady judge, as she pinned a rosette to my horse’s bridle. I don’t know what The Sunshine Tour is, but it sounds like it has nothing to do with equestrian pursuits and everything to do with putting old people on a bus and taking them on a day trip to the seaside. Whatever it is, it must be very undiscriminating because I qualified for it by coming last at my local horse show. It was my first attempt at ‘showing’ and wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t put in so much effort. The Builder Boyfriend and I had got up at 6 a.m. on Sunday to shampoo Grace, the skewbald hunter pony.

Some call me paranoid, but I don’t think one can be suspicious enough when it comes to the activities of Lambeth Council. I guessed it might be up to another ruse when I received a more than usually threatening letter at the end of July informing me that it was undertaking a review of council tax discounts. Actually, I didn’t receive it at the end of July, because I was on holiday. Along with thousands of other people who will have been sent the letter at that time, I only read it when I returned from various summer trips. It warned me that unless I re-registered for my single occupancy discount by 30 August, the discount would be rescinded ‘from the date that it was first issued’. Let’s think about that. The discount was first issued to me in 2001.

What is the point of living in a free country if you cannot do dangerous things every now and again? I enjoy galloping. There, I’ve said it. Luckily, the girlfriends I ride with enjoy galloping too. As we are all safely in the bracket known as ‘middle aged’ this scandalises the world but we don’t care. Our proudest moment was when a farmer ran from his house shouting: ‘There’s a load of old women galloping around my field!’ This behaviour has its risks, of course. The other day, for example, my friend Sarah fell off her horse.

At last. I’ve waited a long time for this moment. I’ve been through years of torture at the hands of excitable twenty-somethings, experimental thirty-somethings and Booker-prize-winning forty-somethings. I’ve had nothing but adventurous, liberal-minded, free-spirited sorts living in the flat upstairs. But I don’t want happy, joyful and free people living near me. I don’t want successful artistic types. No good can come of it. I remember only too well having to knock on the door the night my next-door neighbour won the Booker prize. ‘But it’s a big celebration,’ said a girl, swaying from side to side, as she explained why they were making such a racket. ‘That’s as may be,’ said my then partner John.

If you are bullied at school, you see, you never stop feeling bullied, no matter how old you are. It is absurd that I am 41 years of age and a group of women can still reduce me to tears. To be fair to the bullies, I was an awkward, argumentative, pedantic nerd of a schoolgirl. I know, shocking isn’t it? To make things worse, I arrived at secondary school from a convent primary not knowing any swear-words. The way I expressed myself — arguing pompously with the other students, arguing pompously with the teachers, and spending lunchtimes in the piano practice rooms playing Bach two-part inventions — didn’t come into its own until the sixth form when I was suddenly declared achingly cool.

My spaniel has been pronounced ‘too thin’ by a lady who rescues dogs from Greece. I had stopped to chat with her in the park, as I often do, because I like the lady who rescues dogs from Greece. I’m not one of those people who say, ‘Well, how disgraceful. Fancy spending all that money rescuing dogs when the people are starving.’ No. I say that if a soft south Londoner wants to spend thousands of pounds importing waifs and strays from the collapsing Eurozone, rename them Bunty, feed them up until they are fit to pop and take them for a waddle around Tooting Common, good on her. There is enough misery in the world that can’t be solved. It makes a nice change for a mongrel who was begging outside a supermarket in Faliraki to have a happy ending.