One day in the early Nineties, a trainee recruitment consultant looked down at their carpet and thought, ‘I wonder what’s under there.’ And so began a mania for exposed floorboards that has had the British professional aspirant class in a vice grip ever since. My twenty-something upstairs neighbours are currently in this grip. Nothing will
A friend offers to take me to lunch to cheer me up. I tell him, ‘No, really, don’t. I’m a disaster area when I’m under the weather. You don’t want to get involved.’ I try to explain my theory of cross-catastrophe. I am one of those people for whom troubles come in multitudes. I don’t
My appeal against a fine for stopping for a few seconds on a faded zigzag line in a dark, deserted suburban street has been rejected, unsurprisingly. What is more surprising is the letter I received telling me about this. It was signed by someone called Okiemute O, and where his signature ought to have been
As if by magic, a letter arrived with answers to all my composting questions. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had received warning from the council that I might be in a food waste recycling area. Nothing was definite about it. It hadn’t seemed to occur to the form-shoveller pursuivants that they might
A dimly lit street in a drab south London suburb at 8 p.m. on a weekday night. A girl driving to her friend’s house for dinner. Suddenly the girl gets a blinding headache and needs to pull over. She searches in vain for a space but cannot see anything. The headache gets worse and worse
That it should come to this. I suddenly realised I was bent double over my wheelie bin, my head inside it, riffling for rogue bits of plastic or cardboard thrown in by neighbours or passing drunks, or passing drunk neighbours. ‘I’m a civilised person, reduced to the status of a bum!’ I screamed in outrage
Nothing makes me want to move to Cobham more than a letter from Lambeth Council that begins like this: ‘Dear householder: We have made changes to our recycling and refuse services. These changes are the result of a waste strategy that we have been developing over the last two years with your help.’ I hadn’t
One of the joys of spring is my annual nose around other people’s houses. Or it used to be. It seems things have changed in the house-hunting world. Estate agency has become automated. I had spotted a nice three-bedroomed place near Tooting Common and had rung the agent to ask them to show me round.
Never download anything strange from the internet. Never put your credit card details into a site you are unfamiliar with. Yes, I know. But I was desperate. I couldn’t make my father’s new laptop work and having bought it for him as a gift I was miffed. So I started clicking on all sorts of
After saying the word ten times I realised I was fighting a losing battle. I was sitting in the back of a taxi at Cardiff station and I could not get the driver to understand where I wanted to go to. This was distressing because, so far as my family has been able to make
Every time a man tells me he doesn’t want to marry me after all I buy a horse. This is getting very expensive, as you can imagine. Tara Lee appeared weeks after I inquired of a fiancé about the possibility of us having children. I can’t remember whose idea she was now, but she proved
As soon as I realised my lucky whip was missing I should have put the horse back in her stable. But my riding companion was tacked up and ready to go and so in a moment of madness I decided that it was time to stop this superstitious nonsense. I grabbed a spare whip with
Another date with a younger man is not ideal. But as I only get asked out by men in their 20s nowadays — something to do with evolution, no doubt — I have decided to go with it. So, to drinks and dinner with a very handsome 26-year-old student. Actually, he is retraining to be
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
