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
‘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
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
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
Looking for ways to de-stress and cure my eczema has become my new obsession. It is very, very stressful. It often involves hurtling to the corner shop to buy chocolate. I was doing this the other day when I happened upon a little spa next to the Spar. It was called the TenSixTwo treatment rooms.
When the steroids stop All good things come to an end. I had to stop taking the steroids sooner or later or I would start to look like one of those sprinters of indeterminate gender. It was fun while it lasted, and came in really handy when my friend fixed me up on a dinner
I’m sick of being scared by scientific studies Tall women are more likely to get cancer. As research findings go, this has to be among the most randomly vindictive scientific conclusions ever to spill out of a university research department into a screaming newspaper headline, and lord knows there have been a few. Women who
‘I need to ask you something,’ said Steve the sandwich man, looking me up and down suggestively as he buttered my baguette. ‘I need to ask you something,’ said Steve the sandwich man, looking me up and down suggestively as he buttered my baguette. I like Steve. I call at his sandwich hut just off
Within three clicks of using my new laptop I am apoplectic with frustration. Why does technology always get more complicated, not less? When is someone going to make a computer that is easier to use than the last one, not more difficult? And, above all, when will my new laptop stop talking to me? It
Melissa Kite’s Real life After three hours waiting, I am taken into a cubicle to be told by Nurse Ratched that there is nothing she can do. ‘Dermatology is not an emergency,’ she says sadistically, as I sit scratching myself into small pieces in front of her. ‘If I cut my hands off to stop
One day in the early Nineties, a trainee recruitment consultant looked down at their carpet and thought, ‘I wonder what’s under there.’ And so began a mania for exposed floorboards that has had the British professional aspirant class in a vice grip ever since. My twenty-something upstairs neighbours are currently in this grip. Nothing will
Midway through my pruning session I realise I am cutting the wisteria up into really neat pieces. I mean, seriously neat. Each branch is carefully chopped into three and then placed in a garden waste bag. I do the same with the ceanothus until I have filled both my regulation green bags. Then I stand
A friend offers to take me to lunch to cheer me up. I tell him, ‘No, really, don’t. I’m a disaster area when I’m under the weather. You don’t want to get involved.’ I try to explain my theory of cross-catastrophe. I am one of those people for whom troubles come in multitudes. I don’t
‘Every job we do starts by listening to you.’ I stand staring at this sign for a long time as I queue at St George’s Hospital, Tooting. The waiting area of the X-ray unit is like the easyJet check-in zone at Gatwick when they’ve just cancelled a flight to Alicante. No, that’s not right. It’s
May God forgive me, but I paid the fine. I couldn’t fight them any more. Wearily, shamefully, I picked up the phone and dialled. ‘Good afternoon. Welcome to the London Borough of Lambeth. Your life may be ruined for quality and training purposes. Please press the star key on your keypad if you have any
My appeal against a fine for stopping for a few seconds on a faded zigzag line in a dark, deserted suburban street has been rejected, unsurprisingly. What is more surprising is the letter I received telling me about this. It was signed by someone called Okiemute O, and where his signature ought to have been
As if by magic, a letter arrived with answers to all my composting questions. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had received warning from the council that I might be in a food waste recycling area. Nothing was definite about it. It hadn’t seemed to occur to the form-shoveller pursuivants that they might
A dimly lit street in a drab south London suburb at 8 p.m. on a weekday night. A girl driving to her friend’s house for dinner. Suddenly the girl gets a blinding headache and needs to pull over. She searches in vain for a space but cannot see anything. The headache gets worse and worse
That it should come to this. I suddenly realised I was bent double over my wheelie bin, my head inside it, riffling for rogue bits of plastic or cardboard thrown in by neighbours or passing drunks, or passing drunk neighbours. ‘I’m a civilised person, reduced to the status of a bum!’ I screamed in outrage
Nothing makes me want to move to Cobham more than a letter from Lambeth Council that begins like this: ‘Dear householder: We have made changes to our recycling and refuse services. These changes are the result of a waste strategy that we have been developing over the last two years with your help.’ I hadn’t