Melissa Kite

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.

By the time you read this I shall probably be 40. I say probably not because I am thinking of ending it all to ensure I remain for ever young in people’s hearts. I say it because the way things are going, the event may go completely unnoticed. It may be so ignored by my nearest and dearest that I may just wake up on 1 January and forget that I am 40. I tried to plan a party, you see, a big bash, but unfortunately I came up against RSVP evasion. I suppose it doesn’t help to be born when people are traditionally busy drinking mint-flavoured Bailey’s and going to far-flung places to visit relatives they don’t like.

‘You don’t have long. That dog won’t be a puppy for ever. Don’t waste this precious time.’ Those were the wise words of my friend Vince when I brought Cydney home. ‘Get out there with her,’ he explained. ‘Walk her in all the big parks. Maximise your pulling opportunities.’ Vince claims he never had so much luck with women as when he paraded his pug puppy around Hyde Park and, notwithstanding my disaster-prone nature, he was sure that even I could manage to attract a mate whilst walking a cocker spaniel as cute as Cydney. The little black hound does indeed have powerful magnetic qualities. I cannot get down the street without a dozen people stopping to tell me how adorable she is, and, yes, some of them are men.

Do the right thing and the right thing will follow. Right? After my encounter on the Queen’s highway with Wayne and Waynetta Slob, I decided I had better ring my insurance company and warn them that there might be a fraudulent claim. The couple had screeched off from the police station in their shiny new Ford Galaxy (Motability range) having accused me of a crash that had not happened and fleeced me of my insurance details. The police were no help at all, insisting that I fill out a serious-injury accident form. They didn’t give two hoots for my protestations that there had been no accident, or injury, just a shunt in a traffic queue after which a pair of ne’er-do-wells cried whiplash whilst clutching their lower backs.

Hilarious as it would be to say I had a crash on my way to trade my car in for a new one, I’m not entirely sure that was what happened. I was driving very slowly down Streatham High Road on my way to Croydon where the new Volvo awaited me. The traffic was bumper to bumper and we were crawling at a few miles an hour. Barely moving, I gazed out of the window and when I looked back I had shunted almost soundlessly into the car in front. It was one of those prangs where you are not entirely sure the other party has felt it. I could see there was no mark on the car in front. But it pulled over immediately so I did, too. I jumped out smiling. ‘Gosh, I am sorry,’ I called as the driver got out. ‘But you’re all right. No marks or anything.

If 40 was the question, climbing a mountain was not the answer. I don’t know why people go looking for themselves when they approach middle age and I always swore I wouldn’t do it. But then I found myself a few months off the dreaded landmark birthday and off I went up Kilimanjaro. All I can say is I had a good look for myself over a distance of 80 miles, half of them uphill, and I couldn’t find anything. Apart from an irrepressible ability to moan and a total lack of intrepidness. If anything, I discovered that my capacity for pessimism and can’t-do spirit was far more robust than I had realised.

A wise man once said it is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. I say never go on a trip that ends with you sealing your laundry into vacuum packs before disposing of it like nuclear waste. Honestly, these Kilimanjaro climbers are mental. My own team was dominated by six previously sensible family men who faced with a mountain peak were ready to trample women and children underfoot in order to get to the top first. Consequently, we took the second toughest route and went way too fast. I know we went too fast because we kept passing Mr Switzerland. Seriously. Mr Switzerland 2009 is now a top mountaineering guide and was leading a party of Swiss climbers, mostly women. He was dressed in skin-tight ski pants and a belt with studs in the shape of safari animals.

What I know about mountaineering you could write on the front of a postage stamp. But I’m willing to bet Sir Edmund Hillary did not have bright pink, ergonomic insoles in his boots called ‘Superfeet’. I have. I was sold them along with vast amounts of other gear I’m fairly sure must be extraneous by the people at the intrepid outdoorsy store where I went to kit myself out for Kilimanjaro. I’m afraid of intrepid outdoorsy stores. They are full of long-haired, weather-beaten extreme para-snow boarders called Brad who look as if they would quite happily lop a finger off if it was frostbitten or just for a laugh to pass an idle hour if the après-ski wasn’t exciting enough. I am not intrepid.

Sometimes I don’t suspect the world has gone mad, I know it. For example, I took a black cab home from the theatre the other night and, as we passed Tooting Common, the driver wound down his window and threw a handful of raw sausages out of it. I tapped the glass politely and asked him what he was doing. ‘I’m feeding the foxes,’ he said, reaching down for another sausage. The vermin of Tooting were, of course, delighted. A hungry pack raced alongside us drooling and snaffling up the raw, pink meat as the cabbie cooed and called out pet names for them. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, leaning forward and tapping on the glass again, ‘but I’d like to point out that it’s your fault I have to live with this lot ripping apart my bins and running amok.

Don’t even ask me how fast I had to go to get to the speed awareness course on time. The rush-hour dash was made even worse by the fact that the letter from ‘the UK’s leading provider of occupational road risk management, driver assessment and training for corporate organisations and speed awareness’ warned me that if I was not there at 4.45 p.m. precisely I would be vaporised in a process called ‘renewal’. Actually, it didn’t say that it said something about three points on my licence. Same difference. I screeched into Guildford yelling, ‘Come on, get out of the way, I’ve got a speeding course to get to,’ as old ladies dived for cover.

Sanity is subjective. It depends very much on where you are. I know this because I spend half my time in south London and the other half in the country. Talking to strangers in the supermarket is fine in Surrey, for instance. In Waitrose, Cobham everyone talks to you. The check-out lady there told me her innermost doubts about the nature of existence the other day, and I had only popped in for a romaine lettuce. She scanned the lettuce in five seconds and then, totally unprompted, spent ten minutes telling me how she sometimes wondered what it was all about. If you try to engage a stranger in an existential discussion in Waitrose, Balham you risk getting yourself committed to a psychiatric ward.