Melissa Kite

‘We don’t take cash,’ said the boy behind the counter in Pret after I tried to hand him a £5 note and two pound coins. ‘My’ ham and cheese baguette and bottle of Coke sat in a brown paper bag on the counter and a woman standing beside me grimaced as she waited to be served in the otherwise empty shop. I say ‘my’ in inverted commas because I have since looked into the legal rights concerned and what I might have said to handle this in an effective way. As it was, I got it wrong. Not one of these people in this queue had any cash on them. It was astonishing ‘You have to take cash, it’s legal tender,’ I said. ‘I’m just following orders,’ he said. I can’t believe people actually say that, but they do.

‘Next!’ shouted the bouffant-haired lady dressed in a terrifyingly crisp green and white skirt suit. She was sitting behind the glass-screened reception desk of the private hospital where my mother had just had her knee replaced. This formidable dame I took to be a positive sign of the excellence of a healthcare establishment where one can simply buy and have competently fitted a titanium knee, without the need to beg the state to botch you one up for free, and throw in MRSA. This place was bright, white and sparklingly clean, and I would be happier to spend a weekend within its walls than at some budget hotels. It was nicer than a Travelodge or a Premier Inn but not quite as nice as a Ramada.

When we put the house on the market, my environmentally conscious neighbours disappeared on a holiday so long I asked another neighbour where they had gone. ‘On a cruise,’ she said, but I thought that unlikely, because these people have a book on climate change on a shelf near their front window, so how on earth could they have gone on a ship for a month, churning out more carbon than the entire village put together? Why would it be scary to encounter fairground people, or adventurers by the public toilets at night? They can’t have done, obviously. But in any case, they were gone a month and when they came back they seemed very happy, wherever they had been.

The man in the phone shop greeted me with what I presume is a look specifically designed and reserved for those asking to cancel their contracts. This look could best be described as ‘You are dead to me. Get out.’ I have been trying to cancel this contract for many years. I never use the phone, I have another one, with another company. But the bill for the old Sim card still comes out of my bank account and I can’t work out how to make it stop. I rang them as usual at the start of the year – this has been my New Year’s resolution for seven or eight years now – and a nice enough man on this phone line explained to me that he couldn’t possibly cancel my contract over the phone, I would need to go into the shop.

Driving through the road widening works at junction ten, I noticed a horse being ridden down a muddy passageway that was about to become the hard shoulder. It had not yet been tarmacked, but the diggers had cleared away the trees from the slice of heathland and it was being flattened, in readiness for surfacing works. A woman with a determined look on her face was coaxing her mount along this clearing, next to the machinery and the workers in their Day-Glo outfits, the Portaloos and logging machines, the lorries taking vast piles of felled trees away, and the hundreds of cones dividing this stretch of cleared woodland from the existing dual carriageway.

‘My pronouns are xe and xem’ said the name badge on the supermarket checkout person’s uniform. And I thought, good for xem, because that wasn’t ruining grammar. How to explain that the transgender community are doing my head in because they are stealing words? (I don’t mind them inventing new ones.) I want to explore my anguish about this in a way that enables me to go on a journey of self-discovery, identifying the way I feel. However, I also desperately want not to offend the trans community, because if I do that I’m done for, because they are the most powerful people on the planet. When I say they, in that context, that is the correct use of a plural pronoun.

‘No way am I having it now,’ said a friend, as she insisted on discussing the latest scare stories. And she shook her head so violently that her long blonde hair was flung sideways across her face, and the resemblance to an anti-vaxxer in the throes of hysteria was extremely convincing. But then she regained her composure and said: ‘No. I’ve had my two jabs. That’s enough.’ ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘so you are vaccinated?’ ‘Oh yes, but I’ve only had two. I’m not having any more.’ And she emphasised the ‘I’m’ with a smug look that said she was no fool, unlike others unspecified. This is what is happening now.

The nurse fixed me with a disapproving stare: ‘Why is there such a gap between these prescriptions?’ I had gone for a blood pressure check so I could get my HRT, but when she looked at my notes she could see that they last prescribed it years ago. In return for countless thousands of pounds of national insurance my parents got my mother’s phone charged The honest answer to her question was simple: ‘Because you were working from home.’ For this was the nurse who, when I last tried to get HRT from an NHS GP, was WFH. During lockdown, I was told to buy a blood pressure machine online and send in a week of readings before they would repeat my prescription.

The county council insist the unmade track leading to my house is nothing to do with them, while the parish council change their position depending on how they feel on the day. If they want to boss us about, they infer they are leasing the land from Surrey county council, along with the rest of the village green, and therefore we must do what they say when we are using it. So, for example, they charged us for a weekly permit when we put a skip outside our house while renovating. At other times, including when the track needs repairing, they infer that it is not really that much to do with them. They chuck the odd bag of gravel into the holes but otherwise let the rainwater build up all winter.

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 shortly after midnight until about 3 a.m., I awoke during the night, at that dead of night time when ideas come out of nowhere into your dreams, and sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Oh! That’s it!’ I exclaimed. And I got up the next morning and spent the first day of the year not celebrating my 51st birthday in order to deal with the fallout from the latest assault on my friend the bricklayer, who is being banned from AA meetings.

‘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 end of the stick.’ Next to me, the builder boyfriend was wearing his glassy-eyed look of panic. We can feel a dinner-party vaccination lynching coming a mile off. But this was peculiarly alarming. The last time I saw this fellow he had been fuming with me for not having the jab. Barely a year later, he was fuming because he had had it. How am I getting the blame for the other side of the argument as well now? How is that even remotely possible?

‘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 hairdresser mode, and having not heard what she had said, perhaps, was ploughing on regardless, assuming the chatter was about her holiday. ‘I’m sorry, what do you mean?’ said the lady who had been admiring herself in the mirror as he worked and now turned her head a little to look round at this carefree, handsome man in his mid-forties who was crimping her. The hairdresser must then have rerun the tape in his head and realised what she had said, and what he had said in reply.

‘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 south to a proper country practice and a chap recommended by my horse vet. He was old-fashioned, I was assured. An old-fashioned vet simply means a vet who will make a diagnosis by using his expertise and experience, causing minimal distress to the animal, and not charging you many, many thousands for high-tech invasive testing that will get you no further forward. I could pay a specialist to scan, biopsy and aspirate every lump and bump in my dog until she gave up the will to live.

‘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, not just the dog, behind my back – because I had pointed out a mistake. The more astonishing thing is that the mistake was not made by them, but by another vet who had missed an infection my spaniel was suffering from, which was why I took the poor pooch to this other vet, who did find it, and who I had repeatedly thanked and praised ever since.

‘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 a vaguely expressed malaise about his liking for the ladies, and it was actually quite simple. In this new age of safeguarding, it’s clear that the only way you could make Alcoholics Anonymous into an organisation that passes muster for all the corporate compliance big charities either have to or want to do is by banning anyone with a drinking problem.

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 I am 65, never mind 55. They write to me all the time, asking me to verify this or that by scanning a QR code and entering a reference, along with my National Insurance number, but it never works. ‘Sorry, we are unable to find your details in our system. Please make sure you have entered all of your information correctly. If the problem persists, please call us on…’ Persists? It never stops. It’s been defeating me for years.

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 struck me, as it always does, how disturbing bonfire night really is, especially when it’s done with this much enthusiasm and attention to detail. A tractor was pulling a livestock trailer upon which were sitting on chairs two figures wearing fancy dress, adorned in heavy make-up, looking like nothing so much as the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter, and all to the tune of a marching band.

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 it was, nearly a thousand pounds sitting there, doing nothing, and the builder boyfriend and I were agonising over whether we could afford to go to West Byfleet for a kebab. British Gas had emailed me to inform me that it was giving me this £66 a month. And I had emailed back to complain bitterly about it.

‘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 seeing what it was they were looking for, they had approached the counter where the owner and I were having a chat. We were setting the world to rights, as usual, as he put through a bottle of floor cleaner for me, and we had come to the conclusion we always do, which was that we wanted to get away from it, whatever it was. But even if we knew what it was, where should we go to get away from it?