Melissa Kite

Parking tickets I can cope with. Not being invited to a close friend’s daughter’s wedding is the final straw. I am told there are complicated reasons why I have been excluded from a glittering event everyone I know is going to. One story being leaked to placate me is that the invites have been messed

My love affair with the iPad lasted only a few days before it all went horribly wrong. This is tragic, because I overcame several major planks of my obsessive compulsive disorder and conquered some of my most rampant technological demons in order to walk into that Vodafone shop and say the words: ‘Can I have

Somehow or other, through some sort of oversight, I seem to have acquired a racehorse. It all happened very quickly, as these things tend to. I was with the boyfriend, visiting his mother’s yard, where she deals horses. The boyfriend was inspecting a coloured pony for driving. The boyfriend fancies himself on a pony and

Fuel crisis? What fuel crisis. I’m driving around in a car that does 50pmg. Well, it said 50 on the gauge when I bought it from the nice City worker from New Zealand, and he was driving it up and down the vertiginous slopes of Forest Hill. Within days of me owning it, and driving

Predictably enough, Aviva ruined Panda purchase day for me. Never mind that it’s their fault I’m having to buy a car the size of a Tonka toy with a hairdryer for an engine. I can’t afford the Volvo any more, of course, because I’ve got the outstanding ‘injury’ claim by the Slobs against me. That

My friend operates an open-door policy on her country home. So when I wandered into her kitchen the other day to find it deserted I decided to make myself comfortable, as she has often stated I should, and put the kettle on while I waited for someone to appear. As I did so, her two

Someone calling herself the Aviva Customer Experience Manager has been in touch. I’m not entirely sure what sort of experience she was intending to give me but she ended up giving me a thoroughly horrible one. I wonder if Aviva employed the Customer Experience Manager on the basis of her ability to give people horrible

Before Wayne and Waynetta Slob pretended I had run into the back of their car, my annual insurance premium was £372. Now that Mr and Mrs Slob’s ludicrously spurious claim for ‘soft tissue damage’ is well under way, can you guess what my renewal premium is? I’ll give you a clue. I rang Aviva to

Just three months into our relationship, the builder boyfriend overwhelmed me with some serious romance. He took me to B&Q for new kitchen units. I was breathless with excitement as we drove to New Malden in his pick-up truck. That’s right. My new boyfriend is so butch he has a Mitsubishi L200. Be still my

Childishly, fatuously, I used to play a little game with Lambeth Council that saved me £20 a year. The game went like this: every time my residential parking permit was up for renewal, I used to not renew it for a month, during which time I would park my car five streets away where the

We few, we happy few. South London-based working cocker spaniel owners, I mean. We meet up on Tooting Common most days to exchange tips for cocker crisis management. The dogs play together as we have our group therapy sessions. Cydney’s best friends are Betsy and Mable, both black with white bibs like her, and then

Wandering along a smart west London street after lunch, I happened upon a little tack shop. I have a strict policy of never passing by equestrian suppliers, as you know. I am quite hopelessly addicted to the smell of saddle leather. The sight of shiny new bridles hanging in a row makes me swoon the

Miraculously, mysteriously, almost supernaturally, I found a man. I’m sorry for not mentioning it earlier but it crept up on me. I didn’t realise I had found him until ages afterwards. I had to have the whole thing signposted in neon, and even then I did my best to drive past it. What happened was

‘She’s a strange one, isn’t she?’ said Long John the spaniel trainer as he put Cydney through her paces. We were in the enclosure in the field behind his house, where he had decided to train Cydney behind ten-foot-high fencing because the last time we went for a lesson we had a bit of a

The Volvo only went in to have a parking light changed but, of course, it ended up being taken to pieces. Somehow, whilst fitting a bulb and then securing the exhaust pipe, which had come a bit loose, they found a leak from an indeterminate origin. It was probably the gearbox fluid, the mechanic explained.

The visit from the accident assessor appointed by the insurance company sent me on a cleaning spree involving industrial quantities of bleach. I spent the hours preceding his arrival subjecting every corner of my flat to a thorough going-over. Then I lit scented candles and brewed fresh coffee. ‘What am I doing?’ I muttered dementedly