Melissa Kite

I’m a sucker for insurance. If you are naturally suspicious and inclined to pessimism then insurance is a drug you have no control over. You are either fantasising about how you can get more of it, or else desperately trying to make do with less of it. No matter how you adjust the dosage you

Melissa Kite says that the PM is ill at ease with female colleagues. No surprise that it was the women — Blears, Flint, Kennedy — who rebelled while the men hid under the table Remember the Brown Bounce? Yes, there really was one. It was back in September 2007 and Gordon was riding high on

My chestnut mare has almost as many emotional problems as me. There was a time when this suited us both, being two badly behaved women together. I bought her when I was feeling rebellious and free spirited. I liked the flash of defiance in her eyes. I enjoyed being accosted every time I turned up

There was something hideously inevitable about the whole thing. I should have known it was going to happen. It was the most obvious thing in the world, when you think about it. I picked up my car from the Peugeot garage, having spent £1,200 on repairs taking two weeks and more arguing with mechanics than

Being a naturally negative person I make it my business to subscribe to something called ‘Marty Dow’s positive-thought service — We can change the world one thought at a time!’ These are nice little ‘affirmations’ which arrive in my personal email exhorting me to breathe, fill my thoughts with light, visualise myself as a child

After my triumph in extracting strong antibiotics from a local GP surgery, I decide to press ahead with this exciting project of getting something back for my taxes. I want to help myself to some of the services at those women’s health clinics one is always hearing about. Ministers are forever singing their praises and

‘Do not go to the NHS walk-in centre, it will only upset you.’ This was the advice from a friend last week as I drove around Tooting with earache searching in vain for St George’s Hospital. How a building with 1,000 beds and 6,000 staff is undetectable to the naked eye is a wonder to

With good reason, I get suspicious and frightened when things go right. I have learned certain truths during my time on this planet, not least that all events in the end conspire against me and that every rule and regulation I encounter has been tailor-made specifically to frustrate my progress. And yet. And yet. A

As a useful rule of thumb, I tend to think that if Joan Bakewell can’t handle something then I oughtn’t to try. So I’ve given those pay-by-phone parking meters a wide berth since the BBC presenter ended up in court for failing to operate one properly. Last week, however, I found myself in need of

Another night without sleep because of the upstairs neighbours’ remarkable capacity for impromptu nocturnal romance. What I don’t understand is, why do these people always end up living in the flat above mine? Everywhere we read about the declining libido of the human species, the fact that fertility is down, that people are too tired

We don’t like change My Siciliana pizza arrived with three artichoke slices missing last night. Three artichoke slices, two anchovy fillets and a chunk of mozzarella missing to be precise. I know this because I am a creature of obsessional habits and when I get accustomed to a thing, I tend to get neurotically accustomed

Paying off your credit cards is an odd way to end the year. It just doesn’t feel very seasonal for a God-fearing Christian who ought to be marking the time of Our Lord’s birth by loading up their debts at Marks & Spencer in the traditional way. But I think I’m going to make it

My friend Stephen rang me in a tremendous huff, just as I was trying to eat a mince pie. ‘I no longer wish to be a part of this society. You can cease referring to me as a British citizen. I no longer accede to the precepts of this system we call Britain.’ I tried

The boots I have been looking for all my life turned up the other day. They were in a little shop round the corner from my house, which goes to show that what we are seeking is often right under our nose. I had not gone out looking. I had just popped into the shop

With a sense of weary inevitability, I discover that it is not possible to have a washing machine delivered in my street without paying £100 in washing machine delivery protection money to Brixton town hall. Yes, indeed. I turned into my street the other day to find a lorry unloading outside my neighbour’s house in

With alarming synchronicity, the horse lost a shoe and my computer screen blew up within minutes of each other at the start of my week off. So, for a gruelling 72 hours, I couldn’t ride and I couldn’t write. I could have dealt with either of these two mishaps singly. But together they formed an

I have been living in hotels for so long I am beginning to hallucinate. For example, at an EU summit on Saturday I could have sworn that Nicolas Sarkozy winked at me. I was fighting my way to the front of a media scrum at the Elysée Palace and almost fell over the rope. I