Melissa Kite

Silly really. Although it seemed like a good idea at the time. A girls’ poker evening. I forgot that trying to persuade a group of women to do anything involving a certain absence of men is like trying to get them to turn up to their own funeral. I’ve tried to organise these sorts of escapade before and it has inevitably been like pulling teeth without gas. Everyone spends the night looking at their watches and fiddling furiously with their mobile phones under the table. You can hardly hear the sighs of despair above the frantic tapping of text messages to real people, i.e., men. At 10.30 p.m. sharp the entire gathering simultaneously announces that it is absolutely shattered and whilst it has been a lovely evening it really is time to go home to bed.

The curtain of my upstairs neighbours’ flat has been hanging by a single hook for three weeks, and if something is not done about it soon I am going to call the police. There must be a part of Blair’s legacy, a piece of legislation on a statute book in Westminster somewhere, which includes a clampdown on this sort of thing. If the nanny state stands for anything it must stand for minimum standards of household drapery. A socialist administration so authoritarian that it can oversee the baking of cakes at village fairs can surely enforce interior décor regulations in the smarter parts of south London as a way of safeguarding property prices. In the present climate, the economy cannot withstand shocks like this. Let’s be clear.

Your ordeal starts innocuously enough. ‘Welcome aboard the south east trains service to London Waterloo. This train will be calling at...’ You settle back in your seat and for a few moments wallow in blissful ignorance of the ruthless campaign of mental torture that is about to be unleashed on you as part of a complete moral and intellectual reconditioning by state agents for anti-democratic purposes. ‘The ticket inspector will shortly be making his way through the train.’ You recognise the silkily patronising voice of Patricia Hewitt but think no more about it. She can’t have had that many offers when Gordon took over, and it’s regular work.