Melissa Kite

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?

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.

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.