Melissa Kite

Some sadistically cheerful young popsy called Keeley or Tasha, I can’t remember which, terminated the call because I breached security. My own security. This is a bit rich, even if I didn’t keep completely to the rules. I always cheat during the beginning of the recorded message when the Patricia Hewitt sound-alike tells you to enter your membership or connect card number. I did enter the details once, you see, and the automated hell into which I descended was so macabre that I vowed never to risk an encounter with it again.

Golden corn spread out on the road; women washing in rivers; pots and baskets and sugar cane balanced on heads; a dead man in his best clothes being carried to his pyre; goats, bullocks, monkeys everywhere; baby elephants ambling through traffic… After a week of it, I turn to my guide Rajai and announce somewhat dramatically, but meaning every word, ‘I think I have lived more in the past seven days than ever before.’ ‘That’s India,’ says Rajai matter-of-factly, as if I’m just one more Westerner having an epiphany. Rajai, a multilingual expert on art history and architecture, is a little frustrated by my emotional approach to sightseeing and is, I suspect, not convinced that I’m up to scratch as a tourist.

‘Stop leading!’ said the poor man trying to dance with me as I dragged him around the floor. ‘Stop leading!’ said the poor man trying to dance with me as I dragged him around the floor. ‘I can’t help it,’ I said, pushing him under my arm and forcing him to perform a series of impromptu pirouettes, ‘you keep going wrong.’ ‘That’s not the point,’ he gasped, as I half strangled him in a headlock. ‘I’m meant to lead. You follow.’ Follow, shmollow. I had been taken to a Ceroc dance class in the genteel confines of Esher civic hall by my friend Amanda, a devotee of the pastime, who told me it was just what I needed to put a smile on my face.

Deck the halls with anti-wrinkle cream. Fa-la-la-la-laaa-la-la-la-la. ’Tis the season to be racked with insecurity. Fa-la-la-la-laaa... I don’t know why Christmas should remind us of failure and doom. It’s meant to be a celebration of the greatest beginning of all time, the birth of Jesus and the possibility of everlasting life (albeit it after death, although I’m not fussy — I’ll take everlasting life in whatever format it’s being offered). And yet all it does is make me think about how old and lonely I am. It doesn’t help that my birthday is on 1 January, or that I sat next to a famous chef at a Christmas party the other day and he guessed my age to be forty.

Insurance is a mug’s game. It begins with a sensible attempt to guard against catastrophe and escalates into risk hysteria. With the onset of the cold weather, I only wanted to take out some simple cover on my radiators, but I ended up in a frantic scramble to insure myself against everything bad or even just mildly annoying that could possibly happen to a human being, ever. Last winter, my boiler broke down so I made sure it was heavily insured this year. Naturally, therefore, my boiler did not break down this year. My radiators leaked. Or rather one of them leaked and fell off the wall for good measure. I rang British Gas who confirmed that I had opted out of radiator cover so I took the hit and called Tony the plumber.

As Stefano the builder positioned his drill, I sat watching him serenely. In a few minutes my home improvements would be complete. One last storage unit would be fixed to the kitchen wall, thus bringing to conclusion three weeks of painting, plastering, carpeting and shelving. It has been an exciting time. Stefano and I are now joined at the hip. We had gone to Ikea to buy the shelving unit together in his battered Skoda estate, which lurched its way eccentrically around the South Circular because Stefano only uses fourth gear, including when trying to pull away from traffic lights. As the car wrenched and choked, I kept encouraging him to try first or second. But he was too distracted. He was talking about corruption in Albania. ‘You know they charge extra to get passport quickly?

For those of us who don’t do it, parenting is a bit of a mystery. A strange, magical, glamorous mystery that we imagine is bedevilled by all sorts of complex and exciting challenges. What a mind-blowing experience it must be to manufacture another human being and steer him into the world, we think. Which is why it was such a disappointment looking after a friend’s teenager for a week. I now realise that parenting involves only two things: persuading a child to eat and persuading a child to put on a coat. That’s it. There is nothing else involved. Which is not to say that it is a simple matter. Oh, no.

Two years ago I had a spiritual experience while being pummelled by an Indian guru called Dipu. I was staying at a spa hotel in Porto Cervo where they had invited one of the world’s leading Ayurvedic practitioners to set up shop as a guest therapist. Being spa-sceptic (I was with a boyfriend who was a devotee of pampering) and only wanting to lie by the pool and read, I dodged the hotel manager’s entreaties to try Dipu, until finally I got so sick of being told I was missing out that I agreed to give him a whirl. I entered the darkened treatment room wrapped in a bath robe over my bikini but before long was lying face-up, naked as the day I was born. This was a worrying opening proposition. However, any suspicions I had were quickly allayed when Dipu got to work.

On the face of it, giving my house keys to an Albanian builder I bumped into on the street might be deemed a silly thing to do. But to those traditionalists who quibble with such a sally, I would make certain points in defence of giving a strange man called Stefano unlimited access to all areas of my life seconds after meeting him when he was repairing the windowsills of my next-door neighbour. Stefano is special. Stefano is fixing everything. After I admired his handiwork, he offered me ‘good price’ and got to work on my sills and frames. Then he branched out. After taking a quick look at the outside of the building, he surveyed the interior, went home that evening and emailed me a quote for everything.

‘I’m sorry. There is no one of that name booked into this hotel,’ said the receptionist. No, wait. That won’t do. She didn’t say that at all. And there is no point to this story unless I tell you what she really said, or rather shouted, which was, ‘I am sorry! Zer is no one of zat name booked into zis hotel!’ And in case anyone is thinking this is prejudice against Germans, she wasn’t German. She was from the Baltics. I started to mutter apologetically about the booking perhaps being for the Telegraph. ‘No! Zer is no booking for you here!’ she shouted, as if trying to communicate with a very deaf, very stupid vagrant who was begging for a fiver to buy a can of Tennent’s.

No matter how many scatter cushions they put on the beds, British hotels are just faking it. Thirty-five years after Basil Fawlty, we still can’t do hospitality. Oh, yes, we can do fancy little feedback forms and chocolates on the pillow. But we absolutely cannot do the basics. To visit a British hotel is to embark on a Ray Mears-style expedition into a hostile environment. Granted, it’s all very nicey-nicey down at reception, where the youngsters with gold lapel badges and tight waistcoats have got their degrees in Catering and Customer Care Technology from the University of East Grinstead and know a thing or two about raising your expectations — ‘You’ve been upgraded to a junior suite, Miss Kite,’ is just one of their cunning hope-raiser ploys.

Tack shops. You can’t live with them, can’t live without them. There is no logical explanation for how compulsively these places draw you in. It is entirely probable they put something addictive in the air supply. Or would they even need to? The intoxicating smell of leather and leather soap, of soft brown suede, of waxed jackets, of hoof oil, of rubber and neoprene Hunters, ooh aah... Sorry, I’m having a moment. I know it’s not just me who suffers from addiction to specialist shops. Morrissey once made a very persuasive argument that he was in the grip of an obsessive compulsion involving Ryman’s the stationers. Every time he saw one he was rendered powerless. He had to go in and bulk buy paper products.

The last time I hired a car it nearly killed me. This is because Avis Geneva, in its infinite wisdom, issued me with a 4x4 and waved me off to a ski resort cheerily insisting that the great hulking thing had snow tyres and that as such I should feel free to climb every mountain, ford every stream, etc. Till you slip over the edge and plunge to your death, it should have added. Because it didn’t have snow tyres at all. And 4x4 + normal tyres + sheet ice = unstoppable death trap. I know Avis is hoping I’ll forget about this, but weirdly enough I remain intrigued by the process that led to me hurtling towards the edge of a precipice and only crashing non-fatally because a car coming up the mountain put itself in the way of my death plunge trajectory.

If you’re Eric Pickles, please look away now. I think it only fair to warn the Secretary of State for local government, in case he happens to be reading this in a precious moment of relaxation, that I’m about to have another rant about the catastrophic events that unfolded after one of his advisors sent me a text message while I was riding my horse one Sunday afternoon. For those who don’t know the back story, this thrusting young spin doctor, probably thinking he was being really on his game in a retro-Alastair Campbell sort of way, attempted to monster me for a news story I had written which he took exception to. As his own office had briefed me the story, I took exception to this.