Melissa Kite

When you start renovating your home, it is like pulling the loose thread of an old jumper. Everything unravels. I only tried to fit a dimmer switch, and now my entire flat has come apart. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I was having Stefano the Albanian builder fit wardrobes in the spare room. It was almost done. He was just fitting the dimmer switch for the spotlights when he pulled a little too hard on the delicate invisible thread that holds everything in my world together. Suddenly the entire flat was in darkness. Fiddling with the lights in the spare room had triggered a catastrophic failure of the wiring system, which then revealed itself to be ancient, made of fabric, and about to burst into flames.

Ikea is a totalitarian state. When you drive under the overhanging barrier preventing reasonably sized vans from gaining access to its car park you are entering sovereign territory. Should you get stranded in Ikea for any number of reasons, the best way out is to call the British consulate. Alternatively, you might try the Ecuadorian embassy. I hear they are very good. In any case, I got stranded in Ikea. This is my story. The spare room was nearing completion, so Stefano the Albanian builder and I went to buy a day bed. Stefano manfully crashed his van straight into the overhanging barrier, then drove the wrong way up the ramp with cars tooting. It was brilliant, like being in The A-Team.

In sympathy with New Yorkers, albeit inadvertently, I have had virtually no power for weeks. Worse, I have been warned that my lights are on an ancient system of fabric wiring which could burst into flames at any moment. I have been trying to fix things, but have come up against a vicious circle of energy industry red tape. Or should I say blue tape? It is, after all, the deregulated version of petty bureaucracy. There is so much blue tape, in fact, that I, a collector of shares in every utility company to go on sale since I was 18, am beginning to question my commitment to privatisation. Hush my mouth! To summarise: British Gas, my electricity supplier, came out when the lights blew two weeks ago and said the whole place needed rewiring.

Stefano the Albanian was delighted to hear from me. He was really cross when I got myself a builder boyfriend, which he regarded as a terrible sort of betrayal. He knew something was up when I rang to cancel the spare room renovations. The builder boyfriend had promised to do it for free. On no account was I to commission my beloved Stefano to do the job. The boyfriend insisted that he would take charge of all my interior design and DIY needs from the moment we started dating last November. And to prove he was serious, he set about ripping out my kitchen units in his spare time and installing new doors and drawers, including several that didn’t open or shut properly and one that was totally wonky because he did it at ten o’clock at night after a hard day on a roof.

Any half decent guide to the countryside should include the following tip: if you find an owl by the side of the road, don’t pick it up. I was riding along the lane on the skewbald pony when I suddenly realised there were two huge eyes staring up at me. It was a beautiful brown owl that kept falling over on to its side and then righting itself as the traffic swept past. I got off Gracie and bent down to see. He was pretty beaten up, poor thing. I put my hand out and he hopped into the ditch and fell over. This was clearly a job for the gamekeeper, the source of all natural wisdom, as well as logs and legs of venison. Plus he is always 30 seconds away. ‘What’s up, mate?’ he said, on a muffled line. He was having his lunch in a village three miles away.

The roads seem to be rigged to detect particularly low grade offences nowadays. And when you’ve done nothing wrong at all, the police seem to get ferociously cross. I was once read the riot act by a bearded cop on a motorbike who banged on my window as I sat in gridlock on the Albert Embankment and told me that I was not paying sufficient attention to what was going on around me. When I asked what he would like me to do he didn’t seem to have any specific ideas; he just thought I didn’t look adequately focused. I pointed out that I had been sitting motionless for half an hour and so letting my hands drop from the ten to two position and staring despairingly into space until the car in front moved again seemed entirely reasonable.

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.