Melissa Kite

‘This is the one I was thinking of for you,’ said the lady I might feasibly call my mother-in-law, in spirit at least. We were standing in her stable yard in a dingley dell corner of the south of England which is frozen in time. After driving down a winding track between well-tended paddocks, we found her as we always do, dressed in western-style clothing, tending to her animals in her own little world, far from the madding crowd. The builder boyfriend’s long-lost mother is a consummate horsewoman. I say long-lost because she ran away when he was a boy, leaving him with his father who brought him up alone. He always says he doesn’t mind because he was too young to remember her. Later they were reunited. He can appreciate her for how she is, a free spirit.

The bonfire burned and burned, choking out black smoke, and when my headache got so bad I could barely see straight, I decided I would have to look into it. I say this at every year’s end: I am so tired of fighting. I sometimes wish I could lose this supernatural gift I have for attracting causes, unearthing conspiracies and refusing to take the official line. It’s not a gift, it’s a curse. ‘I see dead people,’ said the boy in that film about ghosts. I see problems, underneath the surface of everything, no matter how shiny. It drives me mad. I wish I could become normal and believe in what things look like on the outside. But I came into the world suspicious. I was born a cynic.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ said the builder boyfriend to the Tory MP in his shooting jacket, as he made his way down the street handing out leaflets. The BB was standing outside his builder’s yard in suburban south-west London where he enjoys a good argument at election time. During the referendum campaign, he fixed a placard to his roof declaring his support for Brexit. When the London lefties walked past visibly struggling with their gag reflex, he disgusted them further by bidding them good morning in a cheerful, courteous tone. If they did stop to argue, they would soon regret it, as the BB is not to be argued with. He simply machine-guns you with facts. What the Remoaners in his street hate most of all is his grasp of the detail.

‘Thank you for calling Surrey Police. We want to help you with your inquiry as quickly as possible. Did you know you can go online…’ That is probably the most depressing sentence in the English language. It is not only preposterous to suggest crime will be better dealt with by a website, it is insulting. I was ringing 101 to persevere with the police after trying to solve the burglaries in the barn myself, and after almost catching the thieves red-handed. After putting up game cameras, I captured images of them when they came back a second time. But I needed help with the grainy footage, and if the registration could be read, I needed the police to run it, obviously. I can’t search vehicle databases.

She was a trade union activist, she told me. She wanted a second referendum. Well, they all do. I’m starting to think that none of them got out of bed on 23 June 2016. The pink tinge to her hair alarmed me from the start. I have often said that there is a certain type of left-winger who doesn’t care for foil highlights who fears me up more than the rest. I can’t explain it quite. They just scare me. I encountered this young woman out of context, as it were, as she came and went from the fields where I keep my horses. She rents from the same farmer. We have to be polite to each other. So I made an effort whenever I saw her, even though I got the feeling she knew something about me and took a dim view of my Conservative leanings.

My attempt at being Columbo was only taking me so far. In solving the mystery of who raided the barn, I was going round in circles. All I knew was that the thieves took a weirdly useless assortment of items, including four wrecked horse rugs, a broken lunge line and a wheelbarrow with a completely flat tyre. They left a brand new sack of horse feed and two battery packs, the only items worth stealing. We always assume thieves are men, but it seemed unlikely that a man or men would wheel away items as light as rugs in wheelbarrows. Also, they didn’t make enough of a mess. The horse feed was placed carefully on the floor. This just didn’t feel like the actions of two rural crooks.

The night after the fireworks display the barn was raided and our horse rugs were taken. Good job I’ve watched a lot of Columbo because I was able to quickly rule out a reprisal attack for us disagreeing with the fireworks. I believe I can categorically prove it was nothing to do with that, although it is possible the actual culprit decided to pounce at this moment using the fireworks upset as a distraction. We got through the dreaded event without injury in the end, me holding Darcy on the end of a lunge line as the rockets went off above her head. How horses cope with explosions like a battlefield, silver flashes that light the entire sky and bangs that ricochet around them I will never know. It made me think of horses in the first world war, God bless them.

Remember remember the 5th of November, when Britain’s most controversial pub chain stages a massive firework display in the middle of fields full of horses. I get the feeling that if my local were any other pub owned by any other chain, the fact that dozens of horse owners have been ringing up to plead with them not to go ahead would result in us being listened to. But Greene King is not just any pub chain. Google it and you will find that the comments on both TripAdvisor and employment websites like Glassdoor — in which former workers swap stories — are quite extraordinary.

Sitting on the train to Surrey, I was halfway home and texted the builder boyfriend to say when I would be at the station. But instead of texting me back to say he would be there, the BB messaged to inform me that I had driven my car into town. ‘What are you doing on the train?’ he asked. I texted back to say I didn’t know. The car was parked in Clapham. I leapt up as the train was pulling into Surbiton. I threw myself off, and ran up the steps and over to the opposite platform where a train to Waterloo was just arriving. I sat on this train puzzling about where my mind had gone. I have been wandering around in a daze since poor Gracie left us. Since her passing, I have been at a complete loose end, my routine in tatters.

‘This is your captain speaking, welcome aboard this flight to London Gatwick. As there is a passenger on our flight today with a severe nut allergy we will not be serving any nuts or nut products for the duration of the flight.’ That was the first announcement the pilot made, ahead of anything about flying the plane. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ the builder boyfriend said. He was holding a bar of hazelnut chocolate he was very much looking forward to, not least because on our outbound flight to Greece we discovered that since we last flew (which was, to be fair, almost in the last century) the complimentary meal tray has been replaced by a range of sandwiches and biscuits to buy at special 30,000 feet prices. ‘Put it away!