Melissa Kite

My clownfish is clinically obese and agoraphobic. He has been refusing to come out of his bamboo log for three years now, except occasionally to poke his whiskered nose out of the end to snaffle food. I hadn’t seen the whole of him in all this time until it occurred to me the other day that perhaps he couldn’t come out because he was stuck. This has happened to me before. I had an angelfish who took to his bed and eventually had to be mechanically extracted like the subject of an ITV documentary on fat people. I had to go to Travis Perkins and hire a saw. ‘Will this cut through a polyresin bamboo-effect aquarium log under water,’ I asked the youth in overalls. ‘It will, yeah,’ he said, far too quickly.

The really useful thing about relationship break-ups is that you get to eat up all the out-of-date stuff in the fridge without fear of food poisoning. It took me a while to work this out. There was I going around moaning, ‘Oh, I want to die’, and it not occurring to me the many positive benefits of being in this morose state of mind. Until I came back from town one night having failed, again, to interrupt my state of mourning to go to Waitrose and, finding one piece of Nando’s chicken still in the brown paper bag on the third shelf down, hit upon an idea. I know, I know. Only men are meant to live like this after someone has ditched them. The thing is I’ve always had a very well-developed male side. I’ve always been in touch with my ‘inner man’.

Have you ever attempted to open the front door to your house by pointing your car key at it? Please say you have. I did it twice this week and what is worse it took me ages to work out why the door was not opening, despite frantic clicking of the Peugeot key in the direction of the Yale lock. I shudder to think that a passing neighbour might have seen me. The reason for my befuddlement, it turns out, is that whatever I happen to be doing, I am not there as I’m doing it. This is all to do with something fantastically new-fangled called ‘being present’. I hadn’t spotted it myself — as I refuse on principle to read books called The Power of Now. But a couple of friends have been instrumental in diagnosing the problem.

The following events took place in a Lambeth Council parking shop just off Streatham High Road. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. This report contains scenes that some readers may find deeply disturbing. Melinda, a Lambeth resident, has just walked into a stark, white, newly refurbished ‘customer centre’. She is greeted by a dozen service desks, all of which have women sitting idly behind them. She approaches the nearest one. A frowning cashier warns her to desist from approaching the desk unannounced and tells her that she must take a ticket from the supermarket cheese-counter-style dispenser in the corner. Melinda tries to take a ticket but the machine requires her to enter certain data first. She must tell it whether she has booked an appointment.

God must have an extremely thick skin. I do hope so anyway. I just had a shocking insight into the sort of thing He probably has to put up with all the time. The incident in question took place at a Neil Diamond concert in Birmingham. I had not gone to the National Indoor Arena prepared for an epiphanic moment of spiritual revelation. Which just goes to show that life’s mysteries are revealed to us when we least expect them. Sometimes while singing along to ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’. To say the crowd that night was enthusiastic would be an understatement. Before it began, we Mexican waved around the stadium. As Neil launched into our old favourites, we were on our feet dancing, swaying, singing along, arms punching the air.

Iam a great one for omens. So the arrival in my inbox of two emails, completely unconnected, from two different people called Dirk had to be interpreted as a sign. The chances of two people in Britain being called Dirk outside the pages of comedy science fiction are pretty slim. The chances of them both emailing me within minutes of each other are remote to the point of being science fictional. Now, here’s what is even weirder. Both Dirks sent their emails twice. So my inbox had four Dirks lined up one after the other between the hours of 4.38 and 5.08 p.m. The usual nonstop flow of spam halted mysteriously between those times, so that no one else interrupted the flow of Dirks. The first Dirk was Dirk Ingram.

‘Do you mind if I just put a bag of garden waste next to yours if you’re having it collected?’ said the friendly lady who lives next door. I was piling up my regulation green canvas bags for ‘heavy garden waste’ and white bags for ‘light garden waste to be composted’ when she popped the question as she opened the door to her house. A harmless enough request in days gone by. But in the current climate? Reader, I panicked. I froze to the spot. I had already informed Lambeth council of the amount of waste, almost to the nearest ounce, to be collected. I had counted the bags three times over to make sure I was giving them the right information.

Once a year, usually at the beginning of summer, it suddenly occurs to me that the entire house is about to fall down. The realisation that every job I’ve allowed to accumulate is about to visit disaster on me — my DIY judgment day — usually occurs around the May bank holiday when the air is filled with the sound of good people drilling. This year I knew the day of reckoning had come as soon as I opened my eyes. I looked to the left and my giant black rabbit BB was sitting on the bed chewing through my mobile-phone headset, his mouth full of wires disappearing upwards like so much spaghetti. Everything is going to break today, I told myself. I opened the bedroom door and it fell off its hinges.

If television bosses ever get really desperate for cheap viewing, they could always follow me with a hand-held camera as I pigheadedly attempt to drive my car around London. This once simple act now generates an unfeasibly high number of dramatic incidents which would make for excellent prime-time entertainment. I’ve thought long and hard about why this should be so and it seems to me that my enmeshment in chav-esque motoring dramas bears a direct correlation to Labour assuming power in the capital. I can only conclude that, as a subversive who has defied massive financial penalties to continue driving, I have been singled out by agents of the state to suffer more radical punishments designed to extinguish my desire to move myself about.

The most interesting thing about relationship break-ups is not so much what is said but what is not said. For example, last week I parted from my boyfriend of eight months and the thing I really wanted to say was not ‘why has it come to this?’ or ‘how dare you call me co-dependent’. No, the thing I desperately longed to say was, ‘I want my brown trousers back.’ I don’t know why break-ups bring out the territorial in people. There is no natural or primeval reason why human beings should argue over record collections when their hearts are broken. Did Neanderthal men and women fight over who got to keep the extra large stone with the sharp, pointy bit? Do dung beetles ransack the dung heap when their beetle partners inform them they are moving out?

While J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons, I prefer to chart mine with the daily passing of one hundred pounds. Hence, and though there must be many ways to evaluate one’s existence, I feel my days are best quantified as follows: Monday: Scented candle, £16; bottle of moisturiser, £30; horse physiotherapy, £50. Tuesday: Train ticket, £3.80; food shopping, £40; petrol, £55. Wednesday: Congestion charge, £8; lunch with a friend, £35; dinner with a friend, £60. Thursday: Car MOT and service, £119. Friday: Horse x-rays, £110. And so on. I grow old …I grow old ...I shall go into overdraft and then fold. But I know what you are thinking.

My favourite television advertisement at the moment is for EDF energy, which promises us that it can make our bills lower. All we have to do is use less gas and electricity. Please, do not snort. I snorted initially. Then a few days later I received my gas bill from EDF. It was the largest household bill I have ever received. It was the size of a mortgage. It was eye-watering. It was heartstopping. It made me gasp for breath and clutch at the kitchen table until my knuckles turned white. The panic only subsided partially once I had investigated my savings portfolio and ascertained that if I moved large sums of money around and sold a few shares I could probably just about pay it.

Why can’t anyone agree to the smallest thing any more without asking you to put it in an email? I rang a friend and asked him to have lunch with me this week and he said, ‘Can you put that in an email?’ Well, I told him, I suppose I could put it in an email but the email would only say, ‘Will you have lunch with me?’ Yeah, he said, that will do. Turns out he was suffering from aide- memoire syndrome, the need to see something in writing. The urge had apparently overwhelmed him to the point where it had become impossible to enter into any form of human encounter without an exchange of letters agreeing the terms of engagement beforehand.

Despite efforts not to be superstitious, I am much obsessed by the idea of disaster seepage. That is to say, when one thing goes wrong, a hundred others usually follow. So it was that a leaking roof segued seamlessly last week into blocked drains, a broken catflap and a stolen mobile phone. Have you noticed how we don’t have rain any more? Hence Britain was in the grip of seasonal flash flooding — much more terrifying — when my living-room ceiling emitted the first ‘plip’. It wasn’t long before the plip turned to a plop then a splat, then an ‘oh my god the roof’s coming in I’ll be homeless by the morning is the building even insured where did I put that renewal letter?

Since when did we become incapable of doing anything for ourselves? It started off with cleaners. In the bad old days only rich people had cleaners. Now everyone has a cleaner. Cleaners have cleaners. The golden age of cheap foreign labour means that nobody has to tidy up their own mess. Or cook their own dinner, or dig their own garden, or feed their own cats, or, indeed, do their own job. My friend Catherine has a PA. My friend Catherine is a PA. Since when did a PA need a PA? And what happens when the PA’s PA needs a PA? Doing boring things for yourself is just so Nineties. Outsourcing, that’s the buzzword. Whereas our parents rolled up their sleeves and got on with it, we are the generation who said, ‘Get someone in.