Melissa Kite

The spaniel was given specific instructions. ‘This is your big moment, Cydney. In fact, this is our big moment. Do not embarrass us.’ We were driving up the long track to the elegant estate where the annual shoot barbecue, marking the opening of the season, is held.  It is a huge deal to be invited, the equivalent in parenting terms of your daughter being invited to the Queen Charlotte ball for debutantes. Cydney has had to work hard for this. Hours and hours of lessons in deportment around game birds have led up to this point. We go out with the gamekeeper and he gives her jobs to do, like moving stray pheasants from one field to another.

Success. Finally, I have made someone in a call centre do what I want, when I want and how I want it. I stumbled on the secret formula for getting jobsworths to co-operate quite by accident. It was an ordinary day. I was sitting in my kitchen waiting for British Gas to arrive to change my meter. The way I look at it, I’m doing them a favour by letting them change my meter. Since I have no meter-changing desires or ambitions myself, their request to rip out my old meter, which works perfectly well, and install a new meter, for reasons unknown, means that they should, at the very least, go to the trouble of knocking on my door when they arrive. I forgot that no one knocks on the door any more. I don’t know when door-knocking became obsolete but it has. Taxis are the worst.

Some years ago, I had a boyfriend who left himself logged into his Facebook account on my computer. When I sat down at my desk after he had gone to work I was confronted with the screen he had left behind which contained a long list of messages. ‘Oo, goody,’ I thought, ‘suddenly I seem to have acquired lots of friends who have sent me lots of messages.’ Facebook was still in its infancy, you see, and I had never had a message on my account before. I was really excited. It wasn’t until I started clicking on the messages that I realised they were all from blonde women I didn’t know. The top one was from a particularly fruity young lady chiding me for ripping all the buttons off her dress the night before. ‘How rude,’ I thought.

Friends with children all seem to agree that there is a general rule on numbers: if you’ve got one child, you may as well have two. But you must never, ever be tempted to think that if you’ve got two children you may as well have three. Apparently, the apophthegm breaks down at that point. Three children pushes you over the edge. It is no longer manageable using the techniques or financing you have previously been employing. It will turn your entire life upside down, drain you of all available resources, fiscal, mental and emotional. I can now confirm that the same thing goes for horses. (It may not be much use to anyone that I have discovered this.

Being blonde and female, I should have known better than to take my Fiat to a main dealer to get it serviced. It’s not that I’m stupid, per se. It’s just that main dealers have an invisible automatic scanning system so that, when a blonde woman walks through the door, an alarm goes off inside the service centre, a red light starts flashing, a till ringing sound reverberates throughout the workshop, and greasy mechanics stand ready with their spanners and clipboards bearing long checklists of mechanical failings. I always swear I will never do it again, but like most women I’m a stickler for doing things by the book.

‘So, you’re a supporter of Julian Assange, then?’ said my friend the radio presenter as we were live on air. Oh, dear. This was going nowhere good. It was far too early in the morning for me to get myself into an un-PC fix. My friend the radio presenter has me on his breakfast show every now and again to review the papers and have a light-hearted chinwag about current affairs. Why, oh why, did we have to discuss the Assange thing? ‘Ehem, ha ha, I think supporter is a bit of a strong term. I wouldn’t say supporter, so much as...er, um...Look, all I said was he might not be guilty. We don’t know yet.’ The presenter fidgeted on the edge of his seat, his antennae twitching at the row that was about to erupt.

Being the girlfriend of the world’s most devastatingly handsome gay celebrity nutritionist has its disadvantages. I know, how could that statement possibly be true? What could be more divine for a girl than lounging by a Spanish poolside with an eye-wateringly handsome, gallant, kind, generous, caring, courteous, accomplished, witty and charming forty-something gay man and his similarly attributed friends? For the first few days it was very heaven. He and his first handsome, gallant, kind, caring male gay house guest treated me like a princess. I didn’t lift a finger. They laid a fresh, immaculately laundered beige Ralph Lauren towel on my sun lounger every morning and then lay down either side of me on their sun loungers, draped with matching beige Ralph Lauren towels.

Horses are dreadful hypochondriacs. They also hate work. We may kid ourselves that horses enjoy being ridden. But horses, if truth be told, just want to be left alone to eat. They are willing to do almost anything to achieve this end. Tara, the chestnut mare, has over the years tried every ruse. She once bucked me sky-high in the woods, then galloped home on her own: down the main road in Cobham she went, reins and stirrups dangling, stopping traffic all the way. She negotiated several major junctions before swerving into the yard and putting herself to bed in her stable where, after trudging back on foot, I found her happily munching.

The phantom car accident injury claim is progressing. Aviva has just rung me with big news. About time. It is now eight months since I sparked the insurance claim from hell by pranging into the back of the car in front whilst in a traffic queue moving at 3mph. Despite the fact that neither car has so much as a scratch on a bumper, my no-claims bonus has been suspended since then, my premium has more than trebled and I’ve had to ditch the new Volvo and buy a car with an engine the size of a hairdryer. I’ve given a three-hour statement to investigators; I’ve been the subject of a police inquiry because I was accused of leaving the scene of the accident.

One second the spaniel was sitting in the window seat, looking out of the third-floor attic window at the dogs playing in the garden below. The next second she was gone. Time slows down when things like this happen. I remember looking and her being there, and I remember looking back and wondering where she was. And I remember hearing the yelp as she landed 30 foot down. In truth, the space between me looking and her not being there and the sound of the yelp can only have been half a second but it felt like a lifetime. After the yelp, time speeded back up again but I wanted it to slow down. I didn’t ever want to get to that patio.

On your marks...get set...bah humbug! They can keep their Olympic traffic lanes and their Olympic copyright laws preventing me from cooking five fried eggs and placing them in an interlinking pattern on my breakfast plate — although I just did, so there. I also arranged the apples into Olympic ring formation in the fruit bowl, now in a prominent location in the window of my front room. My plan was to call the London 2012 authorities to turn myself in and become an Olympic martyr but I didn’t have time to hang on the phone, so if you are reading this, 2012 people, please contact me to let me know how you wish to proceed.

Luckily, I got The Ridiculous over and done with when I discharged myself from my local hospital in south London.  Now it was time for The Sublime. ‘Good evening, madam, and welcome to the Princess Grace. If you would please take a seat for a few moments, someone will show you to your room.’ It really was a few moments, too. A cheerful porter grabbed hold of my bags and swept me into a lift taking us two floors up to a pristine room overlooking St Marylebone church. When I say pristine, I mean pristine. Never mind eating your dinner off the floor. You could have eaten your dinner out of the loo if a white satin-effect ribbon had not been tied across the bowl. I made a mental note not to disturb it if at all possible because it just looked so nice.

Farewell then TT, the two-tone bunny rabbit. Your name was not particularly innovative, but in every other respect I feel you had a good innings. You were found at the side of the road in a plastic box. Whoever left you had not even put straw in there to make you a bit more comfortable.  You arrived at the Kite family zoo one Christmas and settled in immediately. That was back in the days when BB, the giant black bunny, was alive. Yes, I have always struggled slightly with the naming of rabbits.  When black bunny arrived, via a friend who was struggling to cope with how big he was getting, it was obvious that he would need a catchier name than black bunny and so BB it was.

‘Police Notice,’ said the police notice nailed up on a fence post at the entrance to the common land where I ride my horses. ‘It has become apparent that activities of an unacceptable nature are taking place in this area, together with offences of litter and criminal damage.’ At first I thought they were talking about Iranian New Year. Nothing wrong with Iranian New Year per se, of course, but this year they decided to hold it in Surrey and the celebrations all but brought the area to a standstill. I had never seen so many BMW saloons doing three-point turns in one narrow country lane. The fabulously dressed and bejewelled owners kept winding the windows down and shouting at me for directions as I rode my horse: ‘Excuse me! Where is lake?

‘We’re going to have to shoot you,’ said the man from the auspicious publication about to feature an article on my new book. I naturally assumed he hated it so much he was going to put a bullet through my head, until he said, ‘In fact, we need to photograph you as soon as possible…’ ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ I said, making out I did this sort of thing all the time. Actually, I’ve been the subject of a photo shoot once before. Now I’ve done two, I can confirm that they follow a pattern. They always take place in a loft-style apartment with bare brick walls.

‘Have you thought about moving these sofas around?’ asked the builder boyfriend. ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re identical. There’s no point.’ ‘They’re not identical. One is a sofa bed and slightly bigger. It would fit better if they were the other way around.’ ‘Please leave them,’ I said. ‘I like them the way they are.’ ‘But the bigger one doesn’t fit in the window. It should be where the smaller one is. That would make it so much better. Don’t you want it to be better?’ No, I don’t. That’s the whole point. I don’t want things to get better, I just want them to stay the same.

You know you’re getting old when the pharmacist puts your medications in a carrier bag. ‘Here you are, dear,’ said the nice lady, who works behind the counter at my local chemist. And she handed me a bag. Now, the exact dimensions of this bag are crucial. I’ve measured it. It is 30cm long, or nearly 12 inches for those of you not yet participating in the metric era. Or for those who think more literally than that, it is a foot long. A whole foot, including toes. As to the width, we’re talking 21cm or eight and a quarter inches. But that isn’t the worst bit. The worst bit is that the bag has handles. Handles, I tell you!