Melissa Kite

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.

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 has been asking me things constantly since I started it up. This is annoying because I made perfectly clear to Matt, my favourite computer geek at Curry’s, that he must make sure the laptop had everything it wanted before I took it home. Matt always has a terrible time with me. I ask for things like ‘a very small laptop with a large, square screen’.

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 them itching will that make it an emergency?’ I ask. ‘You’re very agitated,’ she says, with a scheming look. She intimates that she can probably have me committed to a secure mental ward if I continue to demand treatment from the NHS on a Saturday. So I leave. It’s time for the private sector. I phone my celebrity dietician friend and he tells me to get myself to the Princess Grace near Harley Street.

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 dissuade them from the notion that tatty old bare boards are fantastically chic and fancy and that they have an inalienable human right to walk upon said boards, making an unholy racket. I simply cannot understand it. When I was growing up, bare floorboards were a matter of shame. A family’s prosperity was measured by the depth and silkiness of their shagpile.

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 in the bags and squash the branches down to make things even neater. I sweep the pathway and put the leaves on top and rearrange them to make the bags match each other. I spread equal quantities of leaves evenly over the chopped-up branches and stand back to admire my handiwork. These must be the prettiest two bags of garden waste in all of Balham, I think. I swell with pride looking at them.

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 just get sick, I get sick and then my washing machine explodes and my roof starts leaking and my rabbit eats the Sky cables. I try to explain that if he really wants to help he will come over and hammer large pieces of crooked wood over my windows. But he won’t listen. He pitches up at my house and insists we take my car to the little French restaurant five minutes away on Wandsworth Common. I tell him this is madness.

‘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 like a bombed-out military airbase in a failed state mid Nato evacuation. People of all creeds and nations are swarming about. The chatter of a dozen different languages makes an impenetrable din. Some are desperate. Others resigned. The more robust ones are trying to make the best of things. I’m sure I spy someone firing up a portable camping stove. I could have misread it, of course.

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 there was a big X. Mr O is the Representation and Appeals Investigation Officer at Lambeth Council, according to the blurb by his ‘signature’. I have no idea why this senior bureaucrat funded by the taxpayer cannot give his surname on official letters. Possibly he is cultivating a sort of mystique. Possibly he fears that if he gives his full name I will go round to his house and complain to him in person about the ordeal he is putting me through. Possibly he cannot write.

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 until just when she thinks she is going to pass out from the pain she spots a small opening by the curb outside a shop. Thank goodness, she thinks, I can get some painkillers. There is an eerie atmosphere in the dark street as she parks. A climate of fear seems to prevail. If this were the opening scene from a horror film, some really creepy music would start to play as the girl steers her car into the space outside the shabby line of shops. Obviously the girl is me.

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 when I realised what I was doing. If you had written a sci-fi novel in the Sixties you could not have predicted that the year 2011 would see law-abiding, middle-class people riffling desperately through garbage. But as macabre as it sounds, it’s actually worth doing for the amount of money I could save. Despite government promises to change the law, it’s still a £1,000 fine for not recycling in my area right now.

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 realised that I had been helping Lambeth Council with anything, least of all a waste strategy. In fact, I would go so far as to say I had been under the impression that I had been very deliberately trying not to help Lambeth Council with anything, especially its waste strategy. But apparently this is not the case. ‘From 4 April 2011 every Lambeth resident must recycle their rubbish.