Melissa Kite

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.

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. I have no idea why it was called this. I can think of nothing very symbolic about those numbers. I thought at first it was something to do with the street number but it wasn’t. This is the sort of thing I worry about. I worried so much about why the TenSixTwo was called the TenSixTwo that I was very quickly more stressed than when I went in. I looked at the treatments on offer.

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 date with an older man. When the conversation hit a lull I mentioned that I was on prednisolone and we were away. You couldn’t shut us up. He had been on it for three months, because of a bladder operation, which rather trumped me, but it was still terribly jolly trading stories about side effects. It was with great sadness, therefore, that I popped the last little 1mg pill at the end of my decreasing regime.

‘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 the A3 almost every time I go to the stables to ride my horse. I always order a tuna mayonnaise baguette with salad no onions. And he and I always have a little flirt with each other while he makes it. Steve has spiky peroxide blond hair, a ring through his nose, and lots of tattoos. But I’m getting to that stage in life when such things are no longer a bar to romantic progress.