‘This clean sock regime is really annoying,’ said the builder boyfriend, as he rummaged through his newly inaugurated top drawer. I had toyed with the idea of giving him two small drawers as I did last time he graced my domestic arrangements with his presence. But this time I gave him the entire chest: that’s
‘Don’t touch anything sharp. Don’t saw anything or drill anything or sand anything,’ said the builder boyfriend as he left the house. ‘I generally agree,’ I said, mindful of the fact that this is what the keeper used to say. ‘But I’m disappointed you include sanding, because I think I made a very good job
My mother is a classy lady. I have always known this, but it still affected me in a way I can’t quite describe to see that her handbags have bags. I was helping to move the folks into their new home when I discovered this rather wonderful fact about my mother. Praise be, by the
Russian Doll is a brilliant new Netflix drama in which a woman relives the same night over and over again. It is particularly enjoyable for me to watch because I feel like that is exactly what I am going through. The same problems present and re-present themselves, quite as though I never come to grips
‘What do you mean, you have no ID?’ I asked the farmer, starting to feel dizzy with the mind-boggling convolution of it all. ‘They took all my personal documents. I keep asking but no one gets back to me,’ he said. The farmer, you may remember, was the subject of a police and RSPCA raid
‘Is it for your daughter?’ said the sales assistant as I pointed to an expensive skincare product. She had glided over to me looking concerned as I stood in the pristine shop dressed in muddy boots and quilted coat, a woolly pompom hat on my head and not a scrap of make-up on my face
Since posting some of my research into the RSPCA on Facebook, I now better understand the way social networking works. Social networking is local as well as global. So if you live in Surrey and ride horses you can join a Facebook group full of people in the same area doing the same thing. Only
‘I see you’ve got the posters up then?’ said the little lodger as she came home from work. She’s got the idea now that she is living with a person who could best be described as eccentric. But she seems to really like it. She seems to find all aspects of living with me thoroughly
Under a blood moon, that was how Tara went down in the end. The old chestnut mare sure knew how to make an exit. She knew how to do most things, having lived 35 years entirely on her own terms. The builder boyfriend and I stood speechless in the field afterwards, marooned in that strange
The frustrating thing about rights is that when you give them to people they don’t cherish and appreciate them. They turn them ungratefully upside down like a modest-sized Easter egg and shake them vigorously to try to work out if something better might be inside. Right to roam is like this. You would think walkers
Splitting the atom is nothing compared to figuring out how to get hold of your farrier. Why is the farrier more capricious than a rock star? Why does he hardly ever turn up on the day, much less time, he says he is coming? Why does he not keep a diary? Why does he never
Oh, I suppose I might as well give it a whirl, I thought, as the recorded voice began its dirge: ‘If you are calling to cancel your BT service, please press one…’ It would have been more accurate to say: ‘If you never use your landline and have only now, while doing your New Year
1 January. Rooms left in house to decorate: 1 (only the attic, therefore doesn’t count).Walls plastered by self with no help from man: 1 (vg!!). Reconciliations with ex-builder boyfriend for the festive season owing to total collapse of self-belief right on cue at year end, notwithstanding evidence of self-sufficiency in newly plastered walls: 1 (must
Ebenezer Grayling sat busy in his counting house. It was a cold, bleak day at the Department for Transport. Big Ben had only just struck three but it was getting dark already and the lights were going on in the grand buildings of Whitehall. Grayling stared down at the papers in front of him. He
Decorating a tree on the unfinished minstrels’ gallery was an appealing idea if only for the health and safety violations. The little lodger was up for it and between the two of us we heaved the six-foot tree to the kitchen, preparing to hoist it aloft. As things stand, the gallery above the kitchen doesn’t
The horse dentist is handsome, with blond windswept hair and a weather-beaten face. There is something Heathcliffian about him, something wild and sexy. On the other hand, he dresses in overalls, brandishes grim tools, and looks a lot like a medieval torturer. He cheers me up with his gallows humour, but also he scares me.
Lying in bed one night as the rain pounded down, I became aware of a yellow patch forming on the bedroom ceiling. It took shape as I lay there watching it, and before long it had spread into a glorious stigmata of impending ruin. This would happen. Because it’s not as though for the first
Left at the Dementia Café, right at the Sleep Office, past the Spiritual Care Centre… This was my journey through the ground floor of my local hospital until I came to the physiotherapy department where the Calf Stretching Education Group was being held. Hospitals are very different places nowadays from the forbidding buildings of my
If you are wondering, any more than usual, how your tax is being spent, you should know that I have been summoned to a Calf Stretching Education Group. According to the letter from the NHS, it has come to the attention of my local hospital that I have tight calf muscles. ‘We would like to
‘This isn’t so bad,’ said my friend, as we knelt at my old mare’s side as she lay on the ground beneath a tree growing weak. Aged 33 in horse years, or ninetysomething in human years, Tara had been enjoying an extraordinary renaissance since Darcy the thoroughbred had been turned out to live with her
