Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Log jam

Melissa Kite's Real Life

issue 24 April 2010

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 was a good idea all the way down the A3 until I pulled into my road, parked the car, got out, opened the passenger door, put my hands around the sides of the huge feed sack stuffed with timber and pulled. Nothing. Didn’t even budge an inch. How come no one mentions the weight of logs when they’re urging you to take your power back? How come there isn’t a chapter in all those self-help books entitled ‘Shifting Logs — the truth about being true to yourself’. I have options, of course. I could take the logs out one by one, or hire someone to come round to my house and haul the sack out of my Peugeot for hard cash.

But I don’t want to. The latter option is just too humiliating. The conversation I would have to have with Tony the odd-job man is just too awful to bear thinking about. He would ham it up mercilessly, gurning with every facial muscle to ram home just how sad it was that my life had come to this. Sensing weakness, he would have me exactly where he wanted me. After setting the sack down in my garden, he’d attach himself to a seat in my kitchen, drink at least five cups of tea and force me to talk to him all night about the possibility of Nick Clegg winning the general election. My dinner would congeal in the oven and I’d miss whatever inspiring show about single women being true to themselves I was looking forward to watching on the TV. Before he finally left he would make some tart comment about how I should make him a ‘proper’ list of jobs to do next time, to make it worth the £70 call-out.

That’s right, a huge sack of free logs would have cost me £70. Which rather defeats the object of not buying a smaller, more liftable pack from the Shell garage for £4.50. So that just leaves the unloading one-by-one option. I don’t know why I’ve taken so violently against this but I have. All I can say is that I unloaded about six — cradling them in my arms and hobbling inside the house with them like I’d just escaped from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale involving woodcutters — before becoming overwhelmed by such inertia-inducing hopelessness that I decided I simply could not go on with it. I think the reason is this: I want the bag lifted out in its entirety. By a man. Who is doing it because he is in love with me and sees it as his solemn duty to lift heavy objects on my behalf. No other log-transference solution will do.

Which is probably why I would rather leave the sack in the footwell and drive around London with my car stinking to high heaven of mouldy horse feed and wet pine than compromise myself by having it removed non-romantically. I feel that while the sack remains lodged in my car, there is still hope that I might one day find the man of my dreams.

My passengers have been pretty understanding about it. I have only to say, ‘I’m really sorry, you’ll have to balance your feet on that huge sack of logs because I’m hoping I will any day now meet the person who is meant to lift it out for me,’ and they give me a compassionate smile that says they know exactly how I feel. OK, so it’s a nervous smile designed to humour me and keep me calm as I have clearly lost it, but you can’t have everything. They climb in trying not to show panic and sit with their feet so high up that their knees are against their nose.

Initial attempts to find the heavy lifter are also proving controversial. I was flirting happily with a handsome guy at a party the other day when my friend dragged me off to the loo to admonish me: ‘Darling, for heaven’s sake, he’s gay!’ And your point is? I bet he can still lift logs.

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

Comments