Melissa Kite

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?).

‘What’s your call about?’ said the switchboard operator at the Department for the Environment. ‘You don’t need to know that. Just please put me through. They’re expecting me.’ ‘But I have to say what your call is about.’ ‘Well, my call is about having just spoken to the minister and him not having time to talk to me and telling me to call his office so I can raise some important concerns with his people.’ ‘What people?’ ‘Well, I don’t know, do I? The people in his office. Look, just put me through.’ ‘But I can’t put you through unless you tell me what it’s about.

How much screening does a person have to go through in this country to obtain a rabbit? Being recently lagomorphically bereaved — and newly single — I am in desperate need of new pets. I always adopt a stray after a break-up. It’s how I came by the legendary giant black rabbit BB, now passed on, God rest his soul. He was the creature I brought home to make myself feel like living again after the wedding I called off. No wonder he grew to the size of a dog. It was a big job. Oh, and by the way, to anyone thinking of consoling me, please do not even think of telling me in a squeaky voice that my beloved BB has gone to ‘bunny heaven’. Just because I am 38 and let rabbits run loose in my house does not mean I am retarded.

Switching energy suppliers is very much like switching boyfriends. As soon as you do it, the one you just left immediately drops their prices while the one you’ve switched to starts changing their terms and edging their prices back up again. It’s a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ conspiracy. Three years ago, for example, I was stuck in a dead-end relationship when another guy came along and gave me a sales pitch that made my eyes pop out on stalks. He said all the buzz words: marriage; children; Nissan Qashqai (it’s a family car). So I switched. Three years later I have only now been told about the small print.

‘Are you sure it’s got snow tyres?’ That sentence will be burned into my memory for a very long time. I was standing at the Avis desk at Geneva airport French side, and my boyfriend was grilling the girl behind the counter about the exact spec of the vehicle we were about to drive into the mountains. He asked her the snow tyres question seven times before I stopped counting. Then he started forensic interrogation about the make and model. Upon learning it was not a BMW X5 but something called a Peugeot 4007 he demanded pictures. And if he hadn’t asked, I would have.

At first glance they didn’t look like they were going to be trouble. A boy and a girl in their late teens, possibly early twenties. He wore glasses and looked preppy, she was demure with her hair neatly tied in a ponytail. When they began talking during the overture, I thought little of it. As they chattered and giggled their way through the opening number, I kept telling myself they were probably excited to be at the theatre and would quieten down soon enough. When they were still talking during the second number I tried not to panic. When they were getting stuck into a full-blown conversation about life as Oliver began to sing ‘Where Is Love’ I started to worry that they didn’t know what the theatre was.

The strange message left me squinting into the middle-distance in abject confusion. I had just emailed a friend to ask if she was still able to meet me that evening. ‘I’m meditating right now :),’ her reply said. And it was crowned with the addendum: ‘Sent from my iPhone.’ After a few disorientated seconds spent trying to process this bizarre sophism, I finally decided to be outraged. Why on earth had she taken her iPhone into a ‘meditation’ session? How was I supposed to know not to email her because she might be ‘meditating’ with a twitching mobile at the edge of her crossed knees? The more I thought about it the crosser I became. I drafted several retorts, one of which particularly pleased me: ‘Wow!

Forget all the talk about health and wealth inequalities. At the basis of the north-south divide is something quite simple and it is this: in the north people talk to each other, in the south we do not. This rule remains in place for many good reasons of taste and propriety. But chiefly it is there because, as everyone knows, if you engage with another human being you’ve just come across in a street in London he will turn out to be Mad Jack ‘The Madman’ McMad from the secure wing of the nearest insane asylum. My friend Janet from Manchester, however, refuses to acknowledge this rule and, whenever she visits, remains resolutely wedded to her deeply alarming habit of holding conversations with strangers.

A perplexing email has arrived from one John Roskam at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia. In the subject field it says: ‘Hey! What did I miss? Xxx’. I have racked my brains but am reasonably sure I have never met Mr Roskam. What’s more, I’m comfortably of the opinion that I have never solicited kisses from him. As I read on, he informs me that the Australian government has just passed a new law stipulating how much insecticide you’re allowed to have in goat fat. What I’m supposed to do about all this — the goat fat, the kisses, the things Mr Roskam might have been missing — is not made clear. But it is now weighing heavily on my mind. Perhaps Mr Roskam would like to get in touch again to let me know how I can help.

Is it any wonder people get depressed in January? Something really sinister happens at this time of year. It begins, of course, with the boiler breaking down. This is only to be expected in heavy snow because boilers are not machines. They are sentient beings with malicious personal agendas. They wait patiently until it gets really cold then start dripping and spluttering and making pathetic choking noises that sound ever so slightly like ‘help! I’m dying!’ until you are forced to call out Tony the plumber. There are many baffling things about plumbers but by far the most baffling thing about mine is that he always charges exactly the same amount of money — £326.20 — no matter what you ask him to do.