The loud clanging of metal poles woke me rudely from my sleep. I opened my eyes suspiciously, accustomed as I am to disasters creeping up on me when I least expect them. I lay for a few moments contemplating the sounds and what they could mean. Builders shouting, vans pulling up and driving away, heavy
When you start writing to-do lists that need paginating you know you’re in trouble. Also, a good to-do list should only ever have one major item on it. A bad to-do list looks something like this: Remortgage house, negotiate lease extension, buy car, book skiing holiday, remodel spare room, get pregnant, climb Kilimanjaro. I don’t
My local minicab firm has installed an automated booking system. This means ordering a taxi now generates so much bureaucracy that I have to factor in an extra ten minutes to my morning routine so I can process all the red tape. It is no longer a case of simply ringing up and speaking to
The mid-life crisis has arrived early. It took me by surprise. I woke up, made coffee and at the very point I would usually be thinking, ‘Oo, I must put the recycling out,’ I thought, ‘Oo, I must buy a Porsche.’ How can this happen? I hate flash cars. My motoring history includes two small
Some sadistically cheerful young popsy called Keeley or Tasha, I can’t remember which, terminated the call because I breached security. My own security. This is a bit rich, even if I didn’t keep completely to the rules. I always cheat during the beginning of the recorded message when the Patricia Hewitt sound-alike tells you to
Golden corn spread out on the road; women washing in rivers; pots and baskets and sugar cane balanced on heads; a dead man in his best clothes being carried to his pyre; goats, bullocks, monkeys everywhere; baby elephants ambling through traffic… After a week of it, I turn to my guide Rajai and announce somewhat
‘Hello, Miss Kite, this is the RAC solutions centre.’ Oh, dear god, it’s all over, I thought. Nothing except the exact opposite of a solution ever comes out of a place called a solutions centre. I had hit a curb while driving over Chelsea Bridge and my front tyre was in shreds by the time
‘Stop leading!’ said the poor man trying to dance with me as I dragged him around the floor. ‘Stop leading!’ said the poor man trying to dance with me as I dragged him around the floor. ‘I can’t help it,’ I said, pushing him under my arm and forcing him to perform a series of
Deck the halls with anti-wrinkle cream. Fa-la-la-la-laaa-la-la-la-la. ’Tis the season to be racked with insecurity. Fa-la-la-la-laaa… I don’t know why Christmas should remind us of failure and doom. It’s meant to be a celebration of the greatest beginning of all time, the birth of Jesus and the possibility of everlasting life (albeit it after death,
Insurance is a mug’s game. It begins with a sensible attempt to guard against catastrophe and escalates into risk hysteria. With the onset of the cold weather, I only wanted to take out some simple cover on my radiators, but I ended up in a frantic scramble to insure myself against everything bad or even
I once met a woman who claimed to have been incarcerated in an addiction unit because her family found her scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush. She said cleaning had become a mental and emotional obsession and that the amount and regularity of her scrubbing binges meant she had to admit she had hit rock-bottom.
As Stefano the builder positioned his drill, I sat watching him serenely. In a few minutes my home improvements would be complete. One last storage unit would be fixed to the kitchen wall, thus bringing to conclusion three weeks of painting, plastering, carpeting and shelving. It has been an exciting time. Stefano and I are
‘Please, please, do not touch the Sky cables.’ That was my unequivocal instruction to the builder as he set about repainting my living room. My furniture was piled in the centre of the floor covered with dustsheets. But poking out from the dust sheets were the wires coming from the TV, still connected to the
For those of us who don’t do it, parenting is a bit of a mystery. A strange, magical, glamorous mystery that we imagine is bedevilled by all sorts of complex and exciting challenges. What a mind-blowing experience it must be to manufacture another human being and steer him into the world, we think. Which is
Two years ago I had a spiritual experience while being pummelled by an Indian guru called Dipu. I was staying at a spa hotel in Porto Cervo where they had invited one of the world’s leading Ayurvedic practitioners to set up shop as a guest therapist. Being spa-sceptic (I was with a boyfriend who was
Only one thing is worse than noisy neighbours and that is neighbours who are almost noisy. Loud music and uproarious parties are covered by the law. Someone walking about all night in the room over your head is not. I have been unlucky in this arena. The owner of the flat above me moved to
On the face of it, giving my house keys to an Albanian builder I bumped into on the street might be deemed a silly thing to do. But to those traditionalists who quibble with such a sally, I would make certain points in defence of giving a strange man called Stefano unlimited access to all
‘I’m sorry. There is no one of that name booked into this hotel,’ said the receptionist. No, wait. That won’t do. She didn’t say that at all. And there is no point to this story unless I tell you what she really said, or rather shouted, which was, ‘I am sorry! Zer is no one
No matter how many scatter cushions they put on the beds, British hotels are just faking it. Thirty-five years after Basil Fawlty, we still can’t do hospitality. Oh, yes, we can do fancy little feedback forms and chocolates on the pillow. But we absolutely cannot do the basics. To visit a British hotel is to
Tack shops. You can’t live with them, can’t live without them. There is no logical explanation for how compulsively these places draw you in. It is entirely probable they put something addictive in the air supply. Or would they even need to? The intoxicating smell of leather and leather soap, of soft brown suede, of