‘Do you mind if I just put a bag of garden waste next to yours if you’re having it collected?’ said the friendly lady who lives next door. I was piling up my regulation green canvas bags for ‘heavy garden waste’ and white bags for ‘light garden waste to be composted’ when she popped the
Once a year, usually at the beginning of summer, it suddenly occurs to me that the entire house is about to fall down. The realisation that every job I’ve allowed to accumulate is about to visit disaster on me — my DIY judgment day — usually occurs around the May bank holiday when the air
If television bosses ever get really desperate for cheap viewing, they could always follow me with a hand-held camera as I pigheadedly attempt to drive my car around London. This once simple act now generates an unfeasibly high number of dramatic incidents which would make for excellent prime-time entertainment. I’ve thought long and hard about
The most interesting thing about relationship break-ups is not so much what is said but what is not said. For example, last week I parted from my boyfriend of eight months and the thing I really wanted to say was not ‘why has it come to this?’ or ‘how dare you call me co-dependent’. No,
While J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons, I prefer to chart mine with the daily passing of one hundred pounds. Hence, and though there must be many ways to evaluate one’s existence, I feel my days are best quantified as follows: Monday: Scented candle, £16; bottle of moisturiser, £30; horse physiotherapy,
Melissa Kite lives a Real Life The tuner who delivered the news could barely look me in the eye. After prodding at the keys of my piano for ten minutes he called me back from the kitchen where I had been making him a cup of tea. I knew the diagnosis was bad when he got up
My favourite television advertisement at the moment is for EDF energy, which promises us that it can make our bills lower. All we have to do is use less gas and electricity. Please, do not snort. I snorted initially. Then a few days later I received my gas bill from EDF. It was the largest
Why can’t anyone agree to the smallest thing any more without asking you to put it in an email? I rang a friend and asked him to have lunch with me this week and he said, ‘Can you put that in an email?’ Well, I told him, I suppose I could put it in an
Despite efforts not to be superstitious, I am much obsessed by the idea of disaster seepage. That is to say, when one thing goes wrong, a hundred others usually follow. So it was that a leaking roof segued seamlessly last week into blocked drains, a broken catflap and a stolen mobile phone. Have you noticed
Since when did we become incapable of doing anything for ourselves? It started off with cleaners. In the bad old days only rich people had cleaners. Now everyone has a cleaner. Cleaners have cleaners. The golden age of cheap foreign labour means that nobody has to tidy up their own mess. Or cook their own
I realise that I have for some time been approaching my life with all the flexibility of an Orangeman. Every day I march my traditional route to a well-known sandwich shop. I buy the same sandwich and march back. Anyone who gets in my way is treated with the sort of courtesy that a member
Ten minutes into Les Misérables my boyfriend turned to me and whispered, ‘Is it just me or is this Charlie Rap?’ As the thunderous clatter of a large prop being unceremoniously dropped backstage reverberated around the mournfully tatty Queen’s Theatre, I concurred that the legendary musical was indeed a load of Mr Charles. It was
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
