The same resolution every year goes nowhere. Stop fighting battles and just have a nice, quiet life, I tell myself – and by the second day of the year I’m up to my eyeballs in kerfuffles. Having sworn off helping anyone with anything ever again for the grand total of three hours of 2023, from
‘You’re one of them anti-vaxxers,’ said the brusque northerner who was seated opposite me at a friend’s supper party. ‘Why do you think I got Covid and was really ill even though I’m up to date on my jabs?’ And he fixed me with a murderous stare. I said: ‘I think you’ve got the wrong
‘Then I got taken hostage in Iran,’ said the lady sitting next to me in the hairdresser’s as she was having her hair crimped. ‘Really?’ said the hairdresser, who had the flat irons on her hair and was making her look like an 1980s pop star. ‘And how was that?’ He was obviously stuck in
‘You’re very easy to deal with, I must say,’ said the tall, handsome vet who was examining the spaniel. I laughed. ‘That’s not what the last vet said.’ The last vet sacked me after I asked to see my dog’s notes. After a long and arduous battle with corporate vetdom, I made my way down
‘Notice from your vets’ said the email subject. I clicked and there was a letter telling me that my vet was sacking me as a client with two weeks’ notice, even though I had a sick dog. This was because I had asked to see my dog’s notes and discovered they had been discussing me,
‘If AA wants to make its meetings safe, then maybe it should ban alcoholics,’ said the builder boyfriend and I had to admit, he had cracked it. There was me getting all wound up about why more and more of the meetings in Surrey won’t let the bricklayer in because of his criminal convictions and
With only five to ten more years to work out how to log in to my pension plan I need to get a move on. The Fidelity website is so impenetrable to someone like me that, aged 50, I fear I will have run out of time to get access to ‘planviewer’ by the time
The children walked with flaming torches ahead of the float bearing the bonfire queen which was headed for the towering monstrosity of pallets and tree branches on the village green. The builder boyfriend and I stood at the front of the crowds lining the road as the procession came through in the darkness and it
By the time I got through to someone at British Gas to complain about them holding £491 of my money in credit, they were holding £924. This was made up of £858 of my own money plus £66 from the government support scheme, the first instalment of which had just hit my account. So there
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for something to catch a mouse that won’t cause it any distress,’ said the young chap who had walked into the hardware cabin at the farm shop with his girlfriend. The pair of them had briefly perused the shelves where the well assorted pest control items were neatly stacked and, not
‘I’d like my money back please’ was what I was waiting to tell British Gas, if they ever stopped the deafening rock music of their recorded hold message to answer the phone. My account was £490 in credit, like it was a savings account. Only it wasn’t a savings account for me, and now energy
A cleverly worded email has arrived from British Gas to explain why, despite the Prime Minister’s announcement, my gas and electricity is going to rise to £3,761.60 a year. When I say this email was well worded, I mean it was a master class in stating the indefensible while making it appear reasonable. You could
The support group groupies have issued another ban. They have attempted to slap an exclusion order on another long-standing member, in addition to the one they have meted out to my friend, the bricklayer. This latest victim hasn’t been to a meeting in Surrey for seven years because the last time he went, the local
The cyclist was on the wrong side of the road coming towards me head-on. It was a winding country lane with blind bends and as I came round one, there was the cyclist, pedalling furiously along the lane on his hard right hand side. I slammed on my brakes, but instead of beeping my horn,
A lot has been going wrong lately in the support group I’ve been attending for more than 20 years. I wasn’t going to write about it, of course. But then a fellow member stuck her iPhone in my face at a meeting and filmed me. So rather than sitting here waiting for the footage to
The ladies in the bank now wear badges telling you to Be Kind and not do anything that might upset them in any way. Be Kind is in big capital letters on this badge and beneath is a lot of small print explaining the well-known global problem of upset bank employees, which has reached such
My favourite vet came to see Darcy and immediately put his finger on the problem. Dusk was falling when he climbed out of his battered 4×4 in khaki shorts and crumpled T-shirt, sun-burned, muddy and sweaty from the day’s call-outs. He is a victim of his own brilliance, and the decades of experience that have
‘If you think about it, Frankie Dettori is to blame,’ said the builder boyfriend, because when things are really bad he deploys satire. One thing leads to another with horses, the joke goes, so we may as well trace our problems back as follows. If Dettori had not ridden a horse called Marienbard to victory
From the veranda of a small Irish farmhouse, I looked out over the sun-drenched West Cork peninsula. All I could hear was the clank of the boat yard below. ‘How much is the booking deposit on this one?’ After two days of viewing farms, I was tired of asking this question. Conveyancing is different in
When my black passport arrived in the post, I decided to take a trip. I’m not a good flier, so the absence of foreign travel for three years had to be making my fear of flying potentially insurmountable. A one and a half hour flight to Cork felt manageable. The builder boyfriend had already been
