Melissa Kite

‘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.

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 Ireland. As soon as you say you want to buy somewhere you have to transfer money to the estate agent to become ‘sale agreed’, and it’s often as much as 5 per cent. I had found plenty of tantalising period farmhouses with 20, 30 or even 50 acres, but I couldn’t get too excited that they were ‘only’ £500,000, because that meant I had to come up with £25,000 to get under offer.

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 over to have a look at this farm we’ve had our eye on. Incidentally, I know this passport is meant to be dark blue, but it’s not, it’s black. And to make it more alarming, the picture of me inside it is bright orange. I had slapped cheap make-up on my face and was wearing an orange T-shirt when I went to a booth by the checkout at Sainsbury’s which turned out to have a Day-Glo orange seat. Consequently, I look like an Oompa Loompa.

Everything is well and truly burned to a crisp, and we are piling through hundreds of pounds of hay a week. When the sun shines relentlessly and it never rains, keeping horses gets awfully expensive. The poor gee-gees themselves are bored stiff. We heave mountains of hay into the fields but they miss the ability to mooch about foraging and munching the greenery. There is no greenery. Everything is brown and white. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing the fields white before. When the grass first burned off, the paddocks went a taupe colour. But after weeks and weeks of relentless sun and no more than the odd spot of rain, the ground became quite bleached. The builder boyfriend’s cobs loaf about or snooze under trees. They like being lazy.

‘That will be £7.50 please,’ said the girl in the bakery to the cyclist in black Lycra after he put a sandwich and a drink on the counter. By way of reply, he slapped down a fiver. He still had his aerodynamic hat on, and the straps and flaps on his booty feet. Click clack. Click clack. He moved with a waddle, like they do when they’re in their special outfit. They look like aliens to me in their pointy hats and clacky shoes and their behaviour is as alien as anything I have ever come across. He pulled this £5 note out of a little pouch in his pants and slapped it down on the counter. I imagined it was still warm, and smelt of Lynx, for my mind is overactive.

My phone buzzed and rang while I was doing the horses until I thought, fine, I’ll call the Defence Secretary back. I sat down on a picnic chair by the muck heap and dialled. He was extremely courteous. He just wanted to point out that he really didn’t want to be Prime Minister. The profile I had written of him was very good, he said, but the one thing he wanted to put me straight on was, well, the whole premise of the article. He didn’t want the top job, no matter what I had heard. I told him my sources were impeccable. He didn’t need to be so modest. But he insisted people had got him wrong. He really, really didn’t want it. He’s a nice chap, Ben Wallace. I could tell as much from talking to him.

As he grouted the last tile, five years after the bathroom was finished, I knew the game was up. ‘I guess this is it,’ I said, as the builder boyfriend used a filler gun to bring about closure. This single ungrouted tile where the bath meets the wall has been something of a symbolic fight between the two of us. It baffled and infuriated me until I simply gave up wondering and made my peace with it. I plastered it with Hippo tape, thinking that would shame him, but it didn’t. Why he stopped short of an otherwise perfect job two seconds short of completion, he never did explain. I came to various conclusions about the psychology of the ungrouted tile. I decided that whatever it meant, it went to the heart of our relationship.

The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came down the track. If this boiler service had a theme tune it would be Ennio Morricone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. The engineers parked up and got out of their vans in a cloud of dust. One was tall and lean, a good enough ringer for Clint Eastwood, given the circumstances, while the other was short and stout, making an ideal supporting character. They strode towards my house grim-faced and I opened the door. ‘Gosh, you’ve come mob-handed,’ I said, and Clint nodded. The little fella looked scared. ‘You know where the boiler is, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I assume that’s why they’ve sent two of you?

‘Your service contract has been completed,’ said someone or something from British Gas, in the chat box on its website. I had been watching the squiggly lines of the icon telling me a person or a bot was typing. When it finally spat that out as the reason I could not book an annual boiler service, I was baffled. Completed? Did they mean deleted? I had to do battle with the chat box because there was no way of booking my annual service by logging in under my username and password. Everything I pressed directed me back to a home screen asking me to take out a contract. But I was sure I already had one, which I took out last winter.

‘Do you care about the woodland? Do you care about the wildlife?’ shouted the bearded Woodland Trust volunteer from his table of tree-hugging paraphernalia set up outside Waitrose. He had pitched his camp – a trestle table covered in leaflets and bedecked with pictures of foxes and badgers – so close to the supermarket entrance on Cobham High Street that it was impossible for customers to get through the doors without running the gauntlet of his leaflets. No doubt these leaflets explained that the Woodland Trust is the largest woodland conservation charity in the United Kingdom and is concerned with the creation, protection and restoration of our native woodland heritage. It has planted 55 million trees since 1972.

The LED streetlamp outside my house was fitted with a ‘compromise’ shield acceptable to a vegan that looked as if it had been made on Blue Peter using sticky-back plastic, and that was bad enough. But a few weeks later, we were sitting in our living room and the light from this streetlamp seemed almost back to full strength, despite the makeshift strip of black gaffer tape. We had been forced to accept this most rubbish of solutions – which wasn’t a solution at all really, and which I’m sure totally breached our human rights if I wanted to be that sort of whinger – because our neighbour, the vegan, had the proper shield removed. She claims she likes the LED bulb at full blast, although how can she?

If I could ban one question ever being asked of me again it would be: ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ I don’t know how many times I’ve answered this in the negative, 57,983 times at least, but the question just never stops being asked. Nobody wants to use even a fraction of a penny of the almost limitless text and call capacity in their perfectly affordable phone packages to send a text any more. What they want is totally free, completely limitless blathering capacity. Consequently, everything has a WhatsApp group attached to it. Every activity I take part in, every hobby, every social group I belong to, now comes with its own WhatsApp group. The effect of this is that the hobby or social gathering never ends.

If you want to understand Surrey, look at the house names. Keepers’ Copse, Meadow View, Weavers, Highfields… What do all these names have in common? They describe something rural that used to be there before it was destroyed to make way for the house named after it. Surrey is where London will one day join Guildford and Woking, making the outer banlieues of our capital city very nice indeed, but obviously destroying the countryside that makes Surrey nice in the process. So not all that nice, in fact. For now, it amuses me to drive along the lanes of chintzy villages in prime commuter belt, grimacing at the names of the houses.

The dynamics of the village can only be understood with reference to what’s happening to the parking. Unless you study the parking, you have no way of understanding the village. Not really. You may think you understand it, but you are just scratching the surface of the alliances and enmities that make the village go around. For example, we recently lost the residents’ parking sign relating to the dozen spaces down the unmade track that leads to my house which had been used by those of us stuck down this track through no fault of our own, other than we had a rush of blood to the head and decided it would be nice to live on a village green. My lawyer friend at the time I bought my house warned me not to, but I wouldn’t have it.

‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message. The builder boyfriend and I were lying in the garden having a well-earned sunbathe on Sunday, his only day off. Meanwhile, as we full well knew, the builder b’s fellow livery customers were hard at work shovelling horse muck out of the fields at the country estate where he has been grazing his two cobs until we can move them to be with my two horses at the new stable yard we have just taken a lease on. This mania for ‘poo picking’ is all very well if you are talking about paddock maintenance. I’m out there with a shovel every day in the small private paddocks where we now keep my thoroughbred and pony.

The girl wound down her window, stuck her mobile phone out into midair, and started to take pictures of the sun. I was behind her Mini on the southbound slip road off the A3 to the Cobham roundabout. On the left was the backed-up turn for Hersham down the Seven Hills Road which is always busy in the morning. I was queueing in the less busy right hand lane to go around the roundabout to Cobham to do the horses. It should not have taken me long, even at 8 a.m. But the woman in the cream Mini in front of me was busy with her phone pointed up into the sky at a sun so blazing it was impossible to look anywhere near it. What she captured I have no idea. It’s hard to think of anything more pointless than trying to photograph a blinding heat haze.

During the Afghanistan crisis last summer, Ben Wallace decided that he had what it took to be prime minister. He had suspected it before then, according to friends, but during the evacuation of Kabul the Defence Secretary came to a definitive conclusion. His prediction that the Taliban would take Kabul had been proved correct, when other senior ministers involved had failed to see it coming. And as the desperate situation played out following the US withdrawal, he hit his stride. His row with the then foreign secretary Dominic Raab over the fall of Kabul was a turning point for the way he saw himself, insiders say. Raab was caught off guard, on holiday.