Melissa Kite

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!

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 this: my friend Ingrid rang me in a state of considerable excitement last June. She had been shopping in Cobham and had got chatting on the street with a man in jodhpurs. She decided he would be perfect for me and, with a flash of extraordinary matchmaking flair, persuaded him on the spot to move his horse to the yard where we keep our horses. My friend Ingrid is a very persuasive woman.

‘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 disaster in the pheasant wood. On that occasion, he asked whether she was alright off the lead and I summed up her current state of obedience by saying, ‘Yes, most of the time, she just goes a bit funny at the end of a walk,’ when really I should have said, ‘No, absolutely not, she’s an unguided missile, totally mental.’ But I had not wanted Long John to think badly of me. Long John is Cydney’s birth father, by which I mean he bred her.

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. They would have to keep it in for a few days and send me a courtesy car. A boy wearing an iPod turned up on my doorstep an hour later and nodded mutely towards a shiny new BMW coupé parked outside my house. ‘Oh no, I asked for a hatchback,’ I complained. ‘I need to be able to put the dog in it.’ ‘No, is not this one,’ said the boy. ‘Is one before.

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 as I grabbed the dog and deposited her in the bath 20 minutes before he was due. Cydney was happy enough. There’s nothing she likes better than lapping warm water from a shower spray while skidding up and down a bath tub. ‘Got to get you nice and clean,’ I said, as I emptied half a bottle of fiendishly expensive organic, fair trade, ‘no tears’ baby shampoo over her wiggling body.

Is it too much to ask for the machines in my life to stop ordering me about? Am I reaching for the stars in wanting to be loosely in control of my car, my phone and my laptop, rather than me being at their beck and call? I’m not talking about the odd message telling me a battery is low or the petrol is running out. I’m talking about them treating me like a despised underling. The other day the laptop decided to kick ten bells out of me for no reason whatsoever. I did everything it asked from the second I switched it on. There was, as usual, a new version of Mozilla Firefox that it was desperate to download.

The Slobs are alleging ‘soft tissue damage’. I’m not surprised that this is the diagnosis of the doctor appointed by the lawyer pioneering their attempt to defraud my insurance company. The Slobs, you may remember, are the charming couple who claimed I had seriously injured them both when I rolled into the back of them at 3mph in a traffic queue on Streatham High Road, leaving not so much as a scratch on their bumper. I can only imagine what the medical examination to assess their claim was like. ‘Please, take a seat,’ a nauseous doctor must have said as one or other or possibly both of the Slobs put their clothes on and galumphed back out from behind the curtain. ‘Now, I’m going to say you’ve got soft tissue damage.