Melissa Kite

You couldn’t make it up If I’m ever stuck for a plot for a dark and twisted dystopian sci-fi novel I must remember to open my front door and start a conversation with a traffic warden. You are always guaranteed a richly surreal and deeply macabre experience when you engage with the bizarre regime of local authorities which charge people to park outside their own homes. The other day I went out to remonstrate with a warden over a fine that had been issued to my father for parking slightly to the left of the correct bay for visitors. He’d only been there a few minutes, and as the visitor bay was empty it was obviously an honest mistake. But of course we know that is not how it works.

Hotels frighten me. I can only approach them armed with industrial-strength earplugs, a box of teabags, a jar of Marmite, an orthopaedic pillow, a towelling robe and slippers that fit, a large bag of apples, some bottles of mineral water, a scented candle and a DVD boxset of Columbo. ‘What the hell have you got in this case?’ asked a colleague as he helped me out of the taxi at the hotel where we were staying for the Tory conference in Manchester. ‘Too many outfits,’ I said. Because I really didn’t want to list the sad collection of home comforts I had packed in a bid to get myself through the next four days without throwing a tantrum at reception. Why does it have to be this way?

Just when I thought the junk mail on my doormat couldn’t get any more pointless, a record-breakingly worthless form of advertising has begun to pour in. It’s from my local Labour council showing off the inventive new ways it has found of spending my money. The other day I got a leaflet telling me about a ‘community action fund’ which has been mysteriously allocated a quarter of a million pounds — apparently it just fell out of the sky — to spend on three local projects and I get to choose. Whoopee. Would I like to spend the money on...drum roll...

The insufferably smug family in the BT commercials is now more than an annoyance to me. Whenever I see them, I throw whatever I have in my hands at the television set and scream, ‘Liars!’. I have hated the BT family for years. Unlike the Oxo family, which was reassuringly grouchy and came to the table sulking murderously only to be cheered up partially by Lynda Bellingham’s instant gravy, the BT family is ‘modern’ and politically correct. It consists of a gormless-looking young guy with ruffled hair played by the idiot son from My Family, who has fallen in love with a kooky, tawny-haired, twinkly-eyed divorcee with a dazzling array of children of all ages who he is now attempting to father by being pally and ‘modern’ with them.

What a pleasure it has been to have workmen digging up my street. No, seriously. I want to pay tribute to British Gas and Morrison and all the other contractors who have been tunnelling into my home, tearing out shrubs and ripping up floorboards in order to lay horrible-looking pipes attached to huge and hideous new gas meters. Normally, of course, I would complain gustily about the fact that I have been mired in the most colossal inconvenience, bereft of gas for hours on end, subjected to endless drilling and digging, day after day for weeks. But it has been an absolute pleasure, every minute of it. And do you know why? Because of the abundance of real men it has brought along.

When I arrive on my deathbed the thing that will torment me most is the amount of time I’ve spent on the phone to Vision Express arguing about when my eye test is due. It reduces me to tears when I think of the wasted hours spent trying to reason with twenty-somethings puffed up into merciless autocrats by an optometrist-assistant training course. Hours when I could have been doing something more life-affirming, such as rearranging my socks. The thing about optometristic autocrats is that they worship the computer more than anyone else on the planet. If the computer at Vision Express pronounced that you were to be boiled in oil, the people who serve behind the counter there would happily put you in a vat and stir you with a big spoon.

One of my enduring preoccupations is that somehow, some day, I will figure out a way to ‘beat the system’. Every now and then I get a little spurt of ‘system-beating’ activity when a particular injustice I am fighting — I have several dozen on the go at any one time — comes to a head. My efforts with one such issue reached fever pitch a few weeks ago when I had a flash of inspiration on the subject of my residential parking permit, which was up for renewal. They put the price up from £60 to £130 and I was not going to take it lying down.

Writer’s block On my to-do list: ‘Write letter to sponsored child’. It’s been there for months but I can’t shift it. It’s proving more stubborn than ‘send tax return stuff to accountant’. I had been really looking forward to it in the beginning. I had imagined myself sitting in my study like Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, writing long, meaningful letters to the unknown child. Then, quite unexpectedly, as I agonised over what I would write in my first missive, I received a letter from the little guy. ‘Hello dear sponsor!’ he said in a flourishing ornate script in his own language, with the English translation below. He informed me that he is a seventh grader and likes natural sciences.

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 can never get it right. If you are also superstitious there is an added dimension. I’m not only hooked on the insurances I have, I’m hooked on not having the insurances I don’t. For example, I did not take out a pet plan when the vet suggested it, so now the cat and rabbit must remain uncovered forever. This is because I have since spent thousands on vet bills so am committed to making my non-insurance strategy work by not adding to the expense by also taking out insurance.

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 at the yard by another owner striding towards me shouting, ‘Your mare!’ From biting the top of a bald man’s head to pulling the rug off another horse’s back and ripping it to shreds, her misdemeanours demand frequent apologies and offers of financial compensation. Her temper is as erratic as mine and she is just as expert at throwing tantrums.

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 the astronauts of Apollo 13 must have had to go through as they were fashioning an escape pod out of the lunar landing module. When they finally brought my car out to me it was all shiny and perky looking. Even the alloys had been polished. It was, to all intents and purposes, perfect. I got into it, drove it into town, and promptly crunched the front right wing into a bollard at the entrance to an underground car park. You see, inevitable.

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 of God, and so on. The other day a particularly inspiring thought arrived, all about making a conscious decision to think of a world filled with love and hope. I did the guided meditation which followed, relaxing, letting go of past experiences, releasing the old patterns, becoming open to God’s design for me. The problem was, I then had to deal with the Peugeot garage.

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 begging us to visit them. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that you are not a good citizen until you submit to a gamut of embarrassing tests yearly, thereby saving you and the NHS further bother down the road. I don’t make the mistake of trying to drive to St George’s Hospital this time. I pay a taxi to ferry me around Tooting, and the vast campus of the hospital itself, until the unit in question magically materialised amid much Urdu swearing.

‘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 me. But it really is the case that this place exists in a Bermuda triangle. Not one sign indicates its presence. My friend explained: ‘They don’t signpost it because they don’t want you to find it by car. They want you to take public transport.’ They? Who are ‘They’? And why do They care if I travel to hospital by car?

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 lot of things have been going right lately. The system seems suddenly to have completely turned around in order to work with me, not against me. I don’t want to be churlish about this. I want to give credit where it is due — to the gods and/or the ruling authorities on earth — but I also want to register extreme anxiety bordering on panic because some of the appealing things that have been happening to me are downright weird.

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 parking in Harley Street, the very place where Ms Bakewell came to grief. With nowhere in sight to dock the Peugeot other than the dreaded pay-by-phone spaces and with time running out for me to present myself for a blood test, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the hour had come for me to face my fears. ‘Come on, Melissa. Gather. Gather.’ (I have been practising Kate Winslet-style self-mustering techniques.