Melissa Kite

Every so often I like to visit the ‘service’ centre of Lambeth Council, mainly because if I’m feeling down it is good for a laugh. So proved to be the case on my annual outing to renew my residential parking permit, surely the highlight of the season for appreciators of vintage left-wing madness. When I arrived at the fabulously well appointed building in otherwise totally neglected Streatham, it was virtually empty. Only three people were sitting on the designer seats in the waiting area, and, what was more, there were eight members of staff sitting behind a long row of gleaming desks. Eight servers to three customers is the sort of ratio even Lambeth could not fail to turn to its advantage, I thought, as I settled myself in for a medium wait.

What I want to know is — what’s easy about it? EasyJet, I mean. I’ve just used it to go to the south of France and I’m struggling to accept that ‘easy’ best describes it. I haven’t been on a budget airline for a while but I well remember the era of package trips when going on holiday meant queuing for hours to check on to some battered old charter plane called SunTours or GoldenFly, so I’m not a total novice when it comes to no-frills flying. It’s just that for years now I’ve been enjoying this golden age of cheap air travel which means you can usually get a perfectly reasonable British Airways flight to most places. But this summer I couldn’t get from Gatwick to Nice on BA so I decided to try easyJet.

I’m not exaggerating. There used to be a lovely big Books Etc on Victoria Street where you could lose yourself for an hour and find all sorts of unexpected treasures: while browsing in the sports section there I bought a copy of Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, which had me in tears after ten minutes. But when I went to where Books Etc had once been the other day, I discovered that it had transmogrified into something called Oliver Bonas. This sounds like the sort of place that might sell dog treats but in reality it was not nearly so useful.

‘It’s not all about you, you know.’ Where did this nonsensical phrase come from and how did it enter into common parlance? I had a boyfriend who used to say it regularly, with particular vigour during times of crisis. I would arrive back from a trip to the Middle East bursting to tell him about how I’d passed out on a Hercules jet in 120 degree heat and been revived by the head of the British army and he would huff and puff and say, ‘It’s not all about you, you know.’ I had a similar run-in with a girlfriend recently.

On the basis that nothing is simple any more, I knew that renewing my passport was going to be a feat of mental and emotional endurance. However, I had not expected it to turn into an image consultation with the world’s most insulting women. One of them, I hasten to point out, was a machine. A passport photo machine. Have you been in one of these recently? It is a breathtakingly rude piece of equipment. I remember sitting in a photo booth the last time I got a passport and having no more interaction with the strong arm of the state other than being told to adjust the stool up or down and press the button when I was ready.

I can’t help it. When I look through my front window and see two super-cool-looking young black guys dressed from head to foot in Nike screaming obscenities, it quickens my pulse. I can’t help it. When I look through my front window and see two super-cool- looking young black guys dressed from head to foot in Nike screaming obscenities, it quickens my pulse. I’m sorry, it just does. No doubt I will be taken to the Equality and Human Rights Commission just for admitting that I find such a sight interesting and exciting. Maybe I need to get out more. In any case, on this occasion, I came out of my house to see what the commotion was. It turned out the pair were jumping up and down and screaming: ‘Rat! There’s a rat! It’s massive! Aaagh!

For nearly a year now, I’ve been promising my father I will brave the BT call centre to order him broadband. He knew that what he was asking me to do was a far greater thing than any father should ask of his daughter, so when the day finally dawned for me to make good on my pledge he volunteered to sit down with me as I made the call. Perhaps it was a good thing that we went in together, for within seconds of dialling the eighth circle of hell on speakerphone we were clinging to each other in sheer terror. Something called Talk and Surf was £15.99 a month for 12 months, but also, somehow, £7.49 for three months then £14.99 for the rest of the 18-month contract, or possibly it was none of those things.

The following conversation with Lambeth council pest-control unit took place a few days before a fox attacked two babies. I had rung them to ask for advice about how to control the hordes of foxes roaming my street like hoodies. As I reported last week, the initial signs of a sensible response were not encouraging. Then an animal warden got in touch. Let’s call her Kelly, for she had a cheerful, suburban name a bit like that. ‘We don’t remove foxes,’ said Kelly, ‘but we give advice about how to deter them. If you’ve a family of foxes living in your garden, I can send you some information.’ ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Do you mean to tell me some poor sods have whole families of foxes living in their gardens?

Dividing my time between town and country leaves me pretty confused at times. The other day a fox streaked across a paddock at the Surrey farm where I keep my horses. The gamekeeper, who was having his tea break, stubbed out his cigarette enigmatically and went off to do whatever it is that gamekeepers do. I do not pretend to understand his dark arts — and I sometimes wish he didn’t walk around with quite so many dead crows hanging from his jacket — but I do know that as a result of his peculiar skills we get to enjoy fresh eggs from free-roaming chickens who lay neatly on the top of the straw banks in our horses’ stalls.

Can there be anything more disorientating than turning up at a restaurant to have dinner with someone who has brought a pair of digital scales with them to weigh their food? ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, as my friend pulled the state-of-the-art Salter slimline model from his briefcase the moment we sat down at our table. ‘I told you, I’m going to be weighing everything I eat from now on,’ he said assertively. ‘Don’t argue with me about this, I warned you I would be bringing them.’ My friend had indeed rung to warn me that he would be bringing a set of scales with him that evening, but naturally I assumed he was joking. Also, by set of scales I assumed he meant the sort you stand on.

Never do a good turn for anyone. What was I thinking, asking the lady if she’d like a lift up the Tube steps with her pram? I wasn’t even going in the same direction as her, for goodness sake. She was at the bottom of the steps looking up at the gargantuan climb ahead. I had just skipped happily down the steps on my way into town to have a nice, carefree night out. The mistake I made, as I caught sight of her standing helpless and alone with her buggy, was to allow my instincts to take over before my brain could say, ‘Whoa there, that’s got to be heavy, leave it to a passing man to lift. Look, there are about 37 of them walking towards you right now...’ Too late.

Dating must be God’s way of making you appreciate Gardeners’ Question Time. There is no other explanation for why it is so nerve-grindingly awful. I would rather do anything than go through this torture, including listening to people moan about the fact that the soil in their east-facing herbaceous border is too alkaline for an azalea. As I sit here quietly buzzing with shock and awe from my latest outing, I cannot help but reflect on dating disasters past, if only to reassure myself that it could always be worse. There have been some real stinkers. 1) The man who pretended he couldn’t see me. My friend Janet set me up on a blind date with a guy she met while sitting outside a café.

I have done something so utterly heinous that I cannot keep it to myself. Even though writing it down is going to get me into all sorts of trouble, for the sake of my sanity I have to confess. It’s something I’ve been doing for years but only just realised. I must have been in denial, because it is just so shameful. It was a terrible shock when I finally rumbled myself. I was sitting at the kitchen table ploughing through the latest election leaflets pushed through my door, searching in vain for a grain of policy that might apply to an insignificant little single girl like me — nothing, not even a hint of an acknowledgement that I might exist — when it hit me.

The consensus among my girlfriends is that it is simply marvellous that I’m free, that I’m being true to myself, that I have taken my power back. On the other hand, if I don’t find another man soon I’m never going to get this sack of logs out of the footwell of the passenger side of my car. The gamekeeper at the farm where I keep my horses loaded them in there three weeks ago and I’ve been driving around with them ever since. I don’t know what I was thinking. My head must have been stuck in ‘I have a boyfriend’ mode when I accepted them because it seemed a perfectly good idea at the time.

‘It’s not good enough just to appear on your doorstep at election times,’ says the leaflet from Chuka Umunna, my local Labour candidate. Which is presumably why he hasn’t. This is not to imply that I have never seen him. I once caught a glimpse of him galloping past my house. I think he was speed canvassing. One of his helpers knocked on my door for a chat, though, which was nice. She was one of those cheerful, ruddy-cheeked, capable-looking community organiser types. The kind who knows how to administer basic first aid to a severed artery. She wouldn’t necessarily save your life but she’d make you a bit more comfortable while you were dying.

As so often, the commuters of Cobham were treated to the sight of me disappearing down Old Lane on the back of a reversing horse. There is always a rational explanation for this behaviour, and on this occasion the horse was impressing on me that she didn’t much fancy going to Effingham Common today, thanks very much. She clinched her argument by threatening to throw us both into a waterlogged ditch. As we teetered an inch from the edge, we reached one of our usual compromises, which is to say I gave in totally and allowed her to turn herself around and head for home at breakneck speed.

Goodness knows how I did it, but I seem to have organised my life so that it runs out annually and needs renewing before the first of April. I do grasp the significance of the end of the financial year and all that. But what I cannot work out is how I managed to co-ordinate the rest of my affairs to this heinous deadline as well. Quite as if by magic, every insurance policy, yearly permit, pass or subscription I possess runs out about now. I’m never sure how this is possible because I cannot have done everything for the first time at the end of March — by which I mean buy a car, park a car, buy a horse, buy another horse, start my water supply, take out a 0 per cent credit card, get a ten-year passport, join Catholicmatch.com (for a laugh, OK?).