Melissa Kite

‘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.

Stupidly, I left a pile of money on the fridge while I was in Italy and told the cleaner to come as usual. I thought it would be nice for her not to lose the business. But my cleaner is not some fly-by-night who takes money for nothing. My cleaner is serious about cleaning. She often leaves me cross little notes complaining about how ‘not dirty’ my house is. Being obsessive compulsive myself, it’s a constant battle to stop her resigning. Usually I dirty the house up for her before she comes. She is rarely satisfied unless there is a trail of destruction throughout, which takes some organising. Unfortunately, I was in a rush before I went away and I didn’t have time to untidy. When I got back from Italy, she had gone berserk.

Melissa Kite’s Real Life I’m prepared to do almost anything rather than apply to Lambeth Council for a bulk waste collection. Every human being has their limits of endurance, a line of suffering beyond which they begin to contemplate committing terrible atrocities themselves in order to make the pain stop. It’s just that most people never get pushed to those limits. I’m sorry if that is a deeply cynical world view, but I have come to believe, through bitter personal experience, that we all have the capacity for evil if only we are pushed to a place where we are forced to deploy it.

When the only man I’ve ever come close to marrying moved out after I broke off the engagement, he left me with his tropical fish. I begged him not to, but the separation arrangements included the absolute stipulation that I keep the fish tank. If I insisted on him taking the fish tank, he made clear, he would be forced to terminate the fish. After the termination of our relationship, the termination of the fish was too much. So I offered a safe haven to the little mites, unfathomable to me though they were. If I had known how long they would live, I would have felt a good deal more daunted. Blithely, I thought fish conked out after a few years, tops.

You know you’ve officially become a slob when you look down at a puppy chewing a pair of £350 Manolos and think, ‘Oh, thank heavens, she’s gone quiet.’ I started this spaniel-raising business with a million good intentions about being firm and using every difficult moment as an opportunity to teach and improve. ‘No, Cydney, leave,’ I said endlessly for the first 72 hours. ‘Cydney, Cydney, leave, leave, Cydney, leave...No, no...’ On and on it went. ‘Leave it, leave it, leave it, leave the rabbit, Cydney! Leave it! CYDNEY! Not the phone, NO! Leave the BlackBerry! Leave, leave it...’ After a few days, I was whimpering, ‘Oh, god, please, Cydney, have the empty bottle of Highland Spring.

My local cab firm has gone global. Its drivers are now so fantastically cosmopolitan they no longer speak any English or know anything at all about Britain. The situation reached crisis point the other night. ‘Royal Opera House,’ I kept saying, very slowly. ‘Royal ...Opera ...House.’ ‘Roya’ Oppa How?’ said the minicab driver. ‘No. Listen. Ro ...yal ...Op ...er ...a House. It’s a big building with opera inside it.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Raya Open Horse?’ ‘Fine, just drive, we’ll work it out when we get near.’ ‘Poss Cod,’ he said, looking panic-stricken. ‘WC2,’ I said. He put WC2 into his sat nav but of course that only narrowed it down to 300 possible destinations.

The experts keep telling me I’ve got to put her to bed and leave her, but I can’t do it. I know I’m making a rod for my own back but when she starts crying in the night I get up and bring her into my bed. I try to sleep when she sleeps, but I’m so besotted with her that I tend to just stay awake staring at her as she’s lying in my arms. I don’t want to miss the slightest thing: a furrowing of her brow, a twitch of her tiny nose. As I type this, she’s lying in my lap looking adoringly up at me. I’m hoping I can put her down for a nap soon because I feel as though I will pass out if I don’t get some rest. I’ve barely eaten. My brain has gone to mush.

‘What are you doing on Sunday evening?’ asked my friend Colin. ‘The usual,’ I said. ‘Feed the horses, drive back into town, have a bath, make cheese on toast, go to bed.’ I’m all about the glamour. ‘Well, come over for dinner. It’s just a few friends hanging out. I’m cooking chilli.’ My friend is a clever man. He managed to make it all sound so innocuous. But as soon as I got to his neat, suburban house I knew I was about to be roped into something. A collection of very fit, very selfless-looking people were sitting in his living room. I could tell from one look at them that they were used to doing voluntary work in the developing world. My fears were confirmed by the presence of a projector. ‘What’s all this?

What an aptly named place Hook junction is. My mind wandered for only a few seconds but that was enough to land me in peril. I was driving down the A3 and as the road narrowed from three lanes to two I failed to slow quickly enough. At the precise moment the road goes from a 70 to a 50 there is a camera and I had only slowed to 61 as I passed it. Captain Hook was not actually on the bridge above the speed camera yelling ‘ahaaaa, me hearties!’ in anticipation of his booty but he might as well have been. I have been driving on this road for ten years and have never made this mistake before. But that was not admissible as an excuse. Nor was the fact that my mind had only wandered because I was worrying about getting home before the teenage looters started marauding. No matter.

I always suspected that I liked bread a bit too much, but ensconced inside a gated villa with only the finest, gluten-free food in the fridge and the dangerous nature of my dependency is writ large. ‘This is how teenage looters must feel about Nike,’ I ponder, as I imagine all kinds of scenarios in which I obtain bread, crisps, potatoes and pasta. (I’m afraid that some of these scenarios do involve me climbing over walls.) My friend is not only a leading authority on food intolerances and healthy living, he is also a coeliac. So he doesn’t just talk about nutrition, he lives it. I don’t know what I was expecting, but when he opens his cupboards it is clear that he does the rather inconvenient thing for my purposes of practising what he preaches.