Melissa Kite

As if by magic, a long-lost cousin will every so often appear. They come from the sticks and ask if they can stay in my south London flat. I always say yes, on the basis that I was once taken in by kind people who took pity on a fugitive from Midlands farming country. Jim and Caroline, husband and wife and two thirds of an alternative rock band, sheltered me. I found them in a dog-eared copy of Loot. I didn’t even know where or what Balham was when I answered the ad. Jim opened the door, showed me in and grilled me about artistic things. He told me I had got the room after I revealed that I had a copy of Crime and Punishment in my bag. ‘Say no more!’ the dear man cried. ‘And I know Caroline is going to love you because you’re wearing yellow.

Eighteen months into my car injury battle with The Slobs, I slump over my kitchen table and throw my head into my hands. Through bitter tears, I email the ‘customer experience’ people at Aviva the following cri de coeur: ‘Right, that’s it. It’s official. I can’t take any more. I can no longer fight this Kafkaesque bureaucracy. ‘Nearly two years this has been going on and yet again I am about to be screwed for more money than I owe for my car insurance. The phoneline is a ten minute wait and I’m being played mindless pop music...’ ‘Sweet about me, nothing sweet about me.’ That was the annoying tune they played. This is despite the fact that I selected two for classical.

Sadly, I was being over-optimistic when I declared that if all went well with the builder boyfriend I would never need Stefano the Albanian again. It turns out that  I never stopped needing Stefano. I needed him while I was dating the builder, because builders never do any building work in their own lives — a case of ‘builder, renovate thyself’ — and I need him more than ever now that the builder and I have decided it is really not working out. When I had to move furniture to the new country place it was Stefano, therefore, who transported the items from London to Surrey. As we made our way down the farm track, Stefano following my little Fiat in his white van, I pulled over to chat to the gamekeeper.

My nerves were already shot to pieces when my phone rang and a faint little voice said, ‘Hallo, this is Vodafone, we’re just ringing to let you know we’ve got some offers for you.

‘Have you been flossing?’ The four most terrifying words in the English language. The dental hygienist peers down at me through her scary goggles and speaks in a strange, muffled voice through her mouth mask. Despite all the face furniture I can see that she is arching her eyebrows. ‘Have you been flossing?’ I’m more inclined to lie in answer to that question than in response to any other situation, no matter how intimidating. The time the banker boyfriend had me cornered in his swanky mews house and was throwing a wobbly about my phone ringing late at night was a doddle in comparison. I’d rather account to an irate City boy screaming ‘Who was that on the phone?’ than a dental hygienist asking ‘Have you been flossing?

After a lot of false starts, I am now the proud occupant of a small weekend rental in the country. It is very exciting. No more commuting from Balham to Cobham to ride the horses. I wake up on Saturdays in a converted barn down a farm track and drive two minutes to the stable yard to see Tara, Grace and Darcy. The three mares have now moved from their expensive livery yard to what we horse-owners rather disingenuously call a DIY yard. I say disingenuous because it’s not really DIY. A nice lady called Sue looks after them on weekdays and I ‘do them myself’ at weekends. Somehow, it saves a lot of money. I had to move from the livery yard in the end because, despite the high prices, it was turning into a right dump.

The new rabbit is turning into a bit of a slob. The other day I caught her trying to order a takeaway. I had opened the rabbit enclosure to let the two bunnies run around the kitchen and when I came back a few hours later, there were no fewer than 18 takeaway menus scattered across the floor. They had been tucked away at the back of a shelf but Wendy Pink had pulled them all out and was sitting among them perusing, by which I mean she was very deliberately picking up a menu from the pile, setting it to one side, looking down at it for a few moments, then repeating the exercise with the next menu. She was trying to decide between Lebanese, Cantonese, two different Chinese, three Indian, a Nepalese, seven pizza places, Japanese, and a list of Flavas fried chicken meal deals.

Throwing oneself at the feet of the transport secretary at a posh lunch is not a dignified thing to do. I realise that. But since my parents found out that the HS2 rail link is going past the end of their garden — though just a few metres far enough to mean they won’t get compensation — I have not been feeling very dignified. And before some Lib Dem blogger reports me to the Standards Commissioner for lobbying, I didn’t lobby. I begged. On my knees. There’s a difference. Poor Patrick McLoughlin didn’t know where to put himself. There he was, having a perfectly nice time at the Savoy, when a suicidal woman in a bright red dress threw herself in front of him like he was an oncoming train.

When it is too painful to go forward any more, it is time to go back. And so it was that I found myself in the Oxfam bookshop down a little cobbled street, buying second-hand vinyl records. I had not gone into the Oxfam bookshop to buy vinyl records. I had gone in to see whether they stocked such a thing as a desk diary. I have been having an awful time since 1 January searching in vain for this most obsolete of items — an A4, one-page-to-a-day, wide-ruled desk diary. ‘Why don’t you just put all your appointments in your BlackBerry like a normal person?’ said a girlfriend snootily. ‘Because I don’t want to. I want to write them down. Then, when I look back over the pages in the months or years to come, I can orientate myself.

Sitting opposite me in an elegant restaurant, my male friend looked deep into my eyes and said three little words. And with those three little words, he changed my world for ever. ‘You need Swarfega.’ ‘Swuh…swuh…’ I said, feeling a lump forming in my throat and my whole identity crumbling. ‘Swarfega. You know, the heavy-duty hand-cleaner in the red and green tubs. You can buy it on the internet.’ I looked down at my hands. But they weren’t there. Someone had put the hands of Albert Steptoe on the ends of my arms instead. ‘Oh my god! Where have my hands gone?’ I gasped. The waitress came and topped up my water glass but she needn’t have bothered.

‘They all have very distinct personalities,’ said my friend Hannah, as she invited me to come to her house and pick a bunny. In truth, I hadn’t given much thought to the preferred personality of my forthcoming rabbit. I confess I wanted a quick fix of a bunny, a companion for Tinkerbell Butch Cassidy, so called because she started life as a girl and then morphed into a boy when, upon closer inspection, I panicked and declared the vet’s earlier pronouncement misguided. Tinky had been bought as a companion for TT, the two-tone bunny I found in a box by the side of the road. They had been happy when I thought they were boy and girl, and just as happy when I declared them boy and possible boy.

‘What do you mean, your ex-ex-boyfriend is still living with his ex-girlfriend?’ said my friend Sarah, pulling a disgusted face. To summarise the many questions that followed, this bosom buddy of mine dared to ask me to explain why I was now referring to The Builder as my ‘ex-ex-boyfriend’, and why said ex-ex-boyfriend was still living with the girlfriend he was going out with before he met me. Talk about impertinent. Sometimes my married friends give me absolutely no leeway for how complicated modern romance is. They have no idea what singletons have to cope with in this godless age. The last time they were single, women used to be ‘courted’ or go on ‘dates’, or get ‘marriage proposals’.