Melissa Kite

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!

Perhaps I should be flattered. There was I thinking I was getting old and frumpy. But it turns out the reason I waited for so long in the ambulance before they took me to hospital was that they thought I was on drugs. The boyfriend has just revealed this. He didn’t want to tell me earlier as I had enough on my mind, what with being left in agony on a trolley for 12 hours, then abandoned on a ward for a further seven hours before a supremely uninterested doctor managed to diagnose two cysts the size of golf balls.: Apparently, right after the paramedics accused me of misusing the ambulance service by calling them out when all I had was food poisoning, they shifted to an interrogation about illegal substances. I missed this bit because I had passed out from the pain.

Eerily enough, I was watching Catch-22 when it happened. We were just about to get to the part where Yossarian learns that the only solution to his problem is made impossible by a circumstance inherent in the problem itself. Suddenly, I keeled over on to my knees. The boyfriend looked at me askance. ‘What? What’s the matter?’ ‘Pain! Can’t breathe!’ I gasped. I crawled down the hallway to the loo and will leave out what went on in there for quality control purposes. Suffice to say that when I emerged the boyfriend had come to the conclusion that the organic salmon I ate for lunch had been altogether too organic.

The foal is out of hospital and back home. To recap: the foal cost £600 and her first veterinary bill, sustained when she threw herself on top of a fence post, cost £768. That’s fine. I know horse owning makes no sense. I’m coming to the conclusion that life in general makes no sense. What I’m slightly less sanguine about is the fact that no sooner had we put little Darcy in her stable and shut the door than one of the others started limping. Gracie, the skewbald sports pony, came out of her box lame for no apparent reason, though when we examined her it seemed more than likely she had an abscess brewing in her right forefoot owing to the slimy weather. So we bandaged her up and put her back in the stable next to the foal.

We were hoping the new filly might jump, but we were not expecting her to get started straight away. Ideally, we would have preferred her not to tackle the five foot post and rail fence of her paddock. It had all been going so smoothly. Famous last words with horses. We brought the foal home and settled her into a stable next to the boyfriend’s huge grey thoroughbred. The two of them greeted each other over the wall, big old Longman reaching over with ease to offer her a paternal snuffle and Darcy straining upwards on tiptoe to touch noses. The next day we put Darcy in the outdoor school so the other horses could get used to her. The day after that we released her into a small field next to the main paddock, where she grazed happily. But the next day, she decided to jump the fence.

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 up by the incompetent party planners, goddam them. Yes, well. I think we all know what that means. The bottom line is this: I have been deemed unfashionable. And when one ceases to be fashionable one must submit to the judgment of one’s peers and move on. I have only myself to blame. I have been spending most of my time in jeans and Hunters walking the dog or riding the horses. My metropolitan life has taken a back seat.

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 one of those iPad thingys, please?’ ‘iPad 2, or iPad 3?’ said the red-shirted assistant. Oh, the horror. I didn’t know there was more than one model available at any given time. I had blithely assumed that 3 usurped 2. If it was a choice, lord only knew which one I wanted. I stood there mutely. ‘Do you want the new one?’ said the red shirt, already losing interest and starting to fiddle with his smart phone.

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 trap this summer, although I can’t quite see the attraction myself. He tells me it will be fun, the two of us clip-clopping around Cobham on a shiny carriage pulled by a smart little trotter. So I went with him to inspect Jim Boy. I peered over the stable door at the black and white gypsy cob. He was munching his third hay net of the morning and stirring his bed up with his big unshod hooves. To say he was hairy was an understatement.

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 it up and down the distinctly flat A3, it was averaging 46. Now, let’s put this in perspective. I was averaging 26mpg in the Volvo. I used to dream of 27. Wild, fevered dreams I had, in which I became the only Volvo driver in history to get 27. But the best I ever got out of it was 26.9 — on the last day I drove it, ironically. So, in a way, Aviva did me a favour by slapping a huge insurance premium on me after my phantom crash, because then I had to get a more sensible run-around.

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 looks set to drag on for months, possibly years, dragging with it my Volvo insurance premium to £1,136 and rising. So I’ve bought myself a Fiat with just enough room for me and an embarrassed-looking spaniel in the back seat. Although Cydney is sceptical, I rather like it. It doesn’t matter what gear you’re in, they’re all the same. And if you can’t park, you just grab it by the roof rack and lift it into a space.

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 young grandchildren burst through the kitchen door, screaming and fighting with each other. I don’t know much about children, having never had any, but I do know that these were what you would call toddlers. ‘Where’s mummy?’ I shouted, above the din. ‘Waaaaaaaaaaah! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ they screamed back. ‘Woof! Grrrrr!’ said someone else. My spaniel was now tussling with my friend’s dogs, a Labrador and a bulldog.

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 experiences or if the Customer Experience Manager has gone rogue. In either case, she sent me a letter which she said was a full response to my complaint about the slow progress of my phantom car crash battle with the Slobs. I have been puzzled, as you know, as to why we do not seem to be easily defeating their claim for back injuries when I have mobile phone pictures of their unblemished car.

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 try to get them to explain the thinking behind the new figure. I spoke to a nice guy, let’s call him Steve, who went to great lengths to try to explain the increase. OK, so he didn’t go to great lengths until I threatened to commit suicide.

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 beating heart. He is also so butch he does home improvements without me even noticing. We were walking down the street one day with the spaniel, for example, when we passed a load of furniture piled up outside someone’s house with a note saying that if anyone wanted any of it they could help themselves. Without stopping, he scooped up a solid pine utensil rack with his little finger.

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 parking was free. I called this Parking Freedom Month. The first day of Parking Freedom Month was a lot like tax freedom day, when you start working for yourself, and stop working for the taxman. The only difference was, Parking Freedom Month only applied to me, because I could never persuade anyone else in my street to do it. Maybe that was not so surprising.

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 there’s Rusty the roan, who is the veteran of the bunch. These animals are not indigenous to south London, but then who is? At least mine gets to go to the country every other day where she flushes stray partridge to her heart’s content. She has learnt to trot alongside the horse and once a fortnight we go to Long John the spaniel trainer for gundog classes.

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 way some women get excited over a rack of La Perla underwear sets. Give me a velvet skullcap cover over a silk camisole any day of the week. This was a particularly swish-looking tack shop and as soon as I was inside I was emitting ‘Aaaah!...Oooooh!’ noises. There were Beagle caps and polo hats, hunting coats, tweeds and long black shiny boots. ‘Oh! Oooooo!