Melissa Kite

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 It warned me that unless I re-registered for my single occupancy discount by 30 August, the discount would be rescinded ‘from the date that it was first issued’.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.

‘Piccolo problemo.’ Luigi, the hotel manager, delivered the fateful news as he served me my first lemon soda of the holiday on his sun-drenched terrace. Francesco, an old flame, had discovered that my mother and I were booked in at the hotel this week and had rung to inquire about the date of our arrival. ‘I say maybe you come this week, maybe next, I don’t know,’ said Luigi, smiling enigmatically. He never approved of my liaison with a local. It was several years ago now. My family had been regular visitors to the small Italian resort for a long time when, one summer, after calling off my wedding and other rushes of blood to the head, I started dating Francesco, a waiter from a nearby town with no very astonishing prospects.

You know you’re in bad shape when you need to make a list before you go to the GP. Admittedly, the list was on a Post-it note but it was in alphabetical order. Coincidentally, it also worked its way from the top of me, starting with my mouth Abscess, through the Eczema on my hands and then further south to something which landed me with the dilemma of not being able to decide whether to list it by its scientific name, which would begin with H, or in the vernacular, which would be P. In any case, every section of my anatomy from my face to my feet was afflicted with something gruesome. While I am usually the first to admit that the only thread in my varied illnesses is hypochondria, all the conditions on my Post-it list did have a valid common denominator.

This is the story of the amazing, disappearing car warranty. It is a cautionary tale that all second-hand car buyers should heed. And it goes like this. The amazing, disappearing car warranty began life as an apparently normal car warranty issued to a Volvo XC90 I bought for a very reasonable price after the builder boyfriend helped me negotiate by deploying his best south London geezer tradesman banter. What clinched the deal was the salesman telling the builder he was so sure we would be happy with the car, he would issue his ‘wife’ with a one-year Gold warranty. ‘She’s not my wife — thank god! Ha ha!’ bantered the builder, sparking much hilarity, ‘but that’s a great offer. We’ll take it.

The sometime builder boyfriend spotted the Volvo on his way to a roofing job in Dorking. He rang me greatly excited. It had a few bumps and scratches but the pertinent facts were these: one owner. Never towed. A bike rack on the back. Haribo wrappers all over the seats. Oh, and the mark from an auction sticker still visible in the windscreen. ‘So it’s a mess,’ I said. ‘No,’ said the builder, who used to be a car dealer. ‘It’s a genuine family car that you can probably get cheap because it’s a bit dinged up. Trust me.’ The thing is, despite everything, all our stops and starts and offs and ons, I do trust him. But when I turned up to see the car, he wasn’t there so I sat in the car park waiting.

Once upon a time, it was perfectly possible to ask British Telecom to do something in return for money. You would ring an 0800 number and someone in India would politely accept the premise that if you paid them, say, £70, they would send an engineer to your home to carry out repairs. This used to be true of Sky TV as well, before they decided that there was virtually nothing about their £50 a month service they would fix other than by giving you instructions down the phone to make you fix it yourself. ‘But the box has blown up into a million pieces!’ ‘Yes, madam, and we are going to talk you through reassembling it using the simple principles of thermonuclear fusion.’ But that’s another story.

The Indian bellboy was sweetness and courtesy itself as he took my bags and escorted me to my room. But even he, with his impeccable manners, could not disguise his horror at my appearance. The word dishevelled doesn’t do it justice. My hair was standing on end, my clothes were rumpled, my eyes were red and puffy — the result of all the crying and tossing and turning I had done on the eight-hour flight. Understandably, the Oberoi is not used to welcoming guests who look as if they have made the journey in a cattle truck. Having known me for only 15 seconds, the bellboy couldn’t help himself: ‘Ma’am,’ he said, his brow furrowed in confusion, ‘what happened to you, ma’am?

‘Dealing with a bruised soul’ is how I read the headline on the front of Horse Scene magazine. When I looked closer, the actual headline was ‘Dealing with a bruised sole’. But sometimes you see what you feel. I turned to the article anyway, because I do, in fact, have a horse with a bruised sole. According to Horse Scene, a bruised sole can happen as quickly as stepping on a stone. (I imagine that a bruised soul can happen just as easily, but that is where my knowledge of the matter begins and ends, because there are no magazines on the shelves of Farrants newsagents in Cobham with articles on bruised souls, so far as I can see, which is a shame.) Gracie, the skewbald hunter pony, has a bruised sole precisely because she stepped on a stone.

The man at the next table looked down at my fidgeting spaniel and shook his head. ‘Not trained,’ he said. How rude. There I was, having a quiet drink with my friend at the local pub, when the man at the next table decided to give me some unsolicited advice about how to control my dog. There is nothing worse than unsolicited advice about techniques of cocker spaniel stewardship. As any cocker spaniel owner knows, if you manage to train one not to leap out of too many third floor windows, then you are doing well. I have to admit, however, that the man at the next table had some right to intervene. Cydney was driving the pub mad by whimpering and wriggling at my feet.

As well as buying vinyl records, I have begun collecting three-dimensional books constructed of paper that you hold in your hands and operate manually by turning their pages over. I buy them from bookshops. There are a few of these emporiums scattered across the country. My favourite one is called My Back Pages in Balham, and it has just put up a sign saying that it is closing down. This means I have only weeks to ransack its cramped shelves to loot them of all the books I have ever seen in there that I want to own. I contemplated telling the nice Irish man who runs it that I will order a lorry and simply take away the lot.

Are you stressed? Do you worry that your stress levels are not normal? Do you fret that your reactions to everyday situations are an indicator of your total inability to cope with modern existence? Then why not take my handy personal stress self-assessment test? It’s easy, fun and at the end there will be an opportunity to review your score and get totally unprofessional advice about what your stress levels mean and what you should do about them. Here we go. Question One: You open your eyes. It is not yet 6 a.m. and the dog is slapping your face with her paws.