Melissa Kite

‘Welcome to Victims First. Please leave your name and number and we will return your call. Beeeeeeeeeeeep!’ I had rung the number given to me by the police to pay my fixed penalty fine for not having an MOT. This £100 I was trying to pay was coming out of an increasingly tight household budget,

‘Have you had your jab, Margery?’ said one Surrey lady to another in the queue for take-away coffee at the chintzy, shabby chic coffee shop. ‘Oh yes, I’ve had it for my country,’ said her friend. ‘I just can’t understand these people who won’t have the jab. I mean, how selfish…’ I looked at them

‘We’re sorry your experience with us has not been a good one,’ said the press officer at Surrey Police. ‘You misunderstand me,’ I told the chap. ‘I didn’t expect being cautioned for breaking the law to be a good experience. In fact, I think it’s very important that breaking the law and being caught is

‘Anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you have anything to say?’ I looked at the baby-faced police officer and tried to think of an appropriate response. I had been driving to Guildford station to meet a friend who every now and then comes from his nearby home on the train. I park

The street light as bright as the Dog Star was fitted with a shield, and I was assigned my own personal engineer who rang and texted me. Whether or not this was because I had threatened to throw myself out of the window, I can’t be sure. But it is certainly true that I got

Eventually, I got so bored I ended up at Burger King. For no other reason than to amuse myself one evening, after doing next to nothing all day, I entered the car park of the Ladymead retail park outside Guildford. I wasn’t hungry but I convinced myself I would like a bean burger, because it

The kitchen tap began dripping as if it knew perfectly well that this would land me in a predicament whereby I would have to brave a phone line. I tried a friend who is a plumber but he confirmed that getting a new valve would involve contacting the kitchen shop where I bought the tap,

An everlasting lightbulb brighter than the Dog Star was installed in the street lamp outside my house one morning as I watched the two engineers being lifted up on a crane. I knew it was trouble as they took out the soft yellow bulb from the antique holder and installed a bright-white LED. I had

Not long after he took on a smallholding for his cobs, the builder boyfriend found a couple walking through his fields with their dog. They had appeared out of nowhere, apparently by squeezing through a small hole in the hedge with a neighbouring property. As there is no footpath through his land, the BB was

Never mind Clap for Carers, I’m trying to start a new weekly morale booster called Scream If You’re Going Round The Bend. The idea is you come out on to your doorstep once a week and stand there screaming until you’ve got it all out. It could be fantastically cathartic and do much to help

Our battle with the EU has given me an insight into the parking disputes outside my house. Or is it that the parking disputes outside my house have given me an insight into Britain’s battle with the EU? Either way, I was reading through this Brexit trade deal we’ve accepted because we can’t be bothered

Bring back the men having sex in the undergrowth. This was the thought that occurred to me and my friend simultaneously in a magical joint epiphany as we rode out over the misty heathland the other day. Wistfully, we beheld the sandy tracks of Ockham and Wisley from atop our mounts as we suddenly realised

If the novelty of going for a walk doesn’t wear thin for the marauding masses soon, I am going to have to buy a laminator. I’ve bought so many warning signs off the internet telling townies what they can’t do around livestock, I might have to learn how to make signs myself. A bulk order

Now that our social lives are a Venn diagram that only mathematicians can understand I am officially becoming a recluse. I’ve been getting to this point for years, but since the latest Covid rules mean that what we can and can’t do until ‘vaccine freedom day’ can only be understood if you have a head

Pretty Man was a plump white pony in the forefront of a sad picture. The photograph showed the seizure by the RSPCA of 123 horses from a farm down the road from where I live. The picture came to summarise many aspects of a story that exploded on to social media and released so many

The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the sky and black smoke curling over the village, that was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When the builder boyfriend was shutting the field gate and could see a bright blue explosion, what he was witnessing was the

Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever be sane again? With apologies to Morrissey and Marr, I started singing a version of their seminal hit on the way back from getting the horse and dog food and I have been humming it