Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 October 2018

Two and a half hours after my tech guy began trying to uninstall Norton, he had purple smoke coming out of his nose and mouth. Well, Vimto-flavoured vapour. Sucking on this pseudo-crack pipe like a junkie, he was, and I was itching all over from a bad case of techno-hives. ‘What on earth is happening?’

Real life | 27 September 2018

‘I’m just going to pop yourself on hold,’ said the girl from the online shopping firm who was trying to find my amazing disappearing bed. First a bed I ordered arrived with half of it missing. Then, when I rang to complain, they upgraded me to a better bed by way of apology and when

Real life | 20 September 2018

The little lodger is moving in. I chose her after an exhaustive search of twentysomethings looking for accommodation, during which I met a terrifying selection of millennials and members of generation snowflake. The highlight has to be the 22-year-old engineer who came with his parents. They toured the house and inspected the room on offer.

Real life | 13 September 2018

A big part of my problem is that I don’t understand why people do the things they do. I was walking my dogs across a meadow and I looked behind to see a large, tan vizsla running towards us. He was entire, so I called Poppy and Cydney to heel and put Cydney on the

Real life | 6 September 2018

Leaving Norton, the antivirus software package, is a bit like trying to leave the EU. You may think, once you have decided to click the ‘X’ button in the box that says you don’t want to subscribe to this expensive protection outfit any more, that you have left. You may think that it was your

Real life | 30 August 2018

When I made a joke about ragwort being like Islamic extremism, I expected someone to write in. I was fully braced for a complaint from a sympathiser of Islamic fundamentalism, saying look here, Missy, comparing our noble struggle to an invasive weed is beyond a joke. However, the modern world has surpassed my expectations and

Real life | 23 August 2018

After I had been glossing the woodwork for a few days, I started to feel light-headed. It hadn’t occurred to me that the paint was solvent-based, of course. Not until I caught sight of the writing on the tin one evening while painting a bedroom doorframe did it make sense. But it was too late,

Real life | 16 August 2018

When I placed an advert for a lodger I really did expect potential tenants to want to come and see the room. But of course, things have moved on. My theory about human beings is that they are evolving into emoticons. A lot of people now go into seismic avoidance when you try to get

Real life | 9 August 2018

The engineer from Beko arrived and got to work trying to mend the new fridge. Having spent a very long time on the phone to customer services being grilled about my part in its apparent downfall, I was under no illusions that he was going to try and pin this on me. During two extremely

The evil weed

A sea of bright yellow flowers in a sun- drenched meadow… what could be more idyllic? Sadly, all that glisters in the English countryside is most definitely not gold. Ragwort. A few stray stems of this iconic weed growing in a field of grass is enough to draw a stream of expletives from any horse

Real life | 2 August 2018

Beko. I always want to sing that song by Peter Gabriel from the movie about the South African freedom fighter when I look at my new fridge freezer. But the anti-apartheid activist was Biko, and the appliance manufacturer is, in fact, pronounced Becko. I know this because I’ve just had to ring the Beko customer

Real life | 26 July 2018

Stefano came back to paint the front of the house. I have never been so pleased to see his red and white van. He emerged with a startling new crew cut instead of his wavy black hair. He was wearing a red and white T-shirt with his company logo on it. But otherwise, he was

Real life | 19 July 2018

Instead of carpeting the upstairs of the house, I had grass fragments removed from the dogs’ ears. I can’t say I enjoyed the grass removals as much as I might have enjoyed having carpet to walk on. I had picked out a lovely stripy pattern that wouldn’t show the dirt, and was really looking forward

Real life | 12 July 2018

This was going to be about how a major phone company surprised me by delivering a fantastic service. I was quite excited because secretly I have always wanted to be forced to admit that in spite of my rock bottom expectations, all is right with the world. It began when I went into the Carphone

Real life | 5 July 2018

Opening a button of my shirt to get the horse lorry through its MOT is the sort of thing I like to kid myself about. I know I’m not really getting a lorry through its MOT by unbuttoning my shirt, but at my age it makes me feel good to think that I might. So

Real life | 28 June 2018

Finally, I got my hands on a gun. About the size of a sawn-off shotgun it was, just under 20in long, a fine specimen of a weapon. It was surprisingly light and easy to wield. I held it and thought of all that I might now accomplish. Everything I had dreamed of could now become

Real life | 21 June 2018

Every day in every way we are paying for more and more. I realise this increasingly. Things we took for granted as free are added inexorably to the list of things we are charged for. And now we have rural parking charges, by which I don’t mean we are going to be charged for parking

Real Life | 14 June 2018

After sanding floorboards for two days I became even more demented than usual. The hand sander was the exact right size to make it horribly arduous but just about possible to do the entire downstairs floor this way, and so I persisted even when I should have given up and hired a large machine. By

Real life | 7 June 2018

Dear customer, we are invading your privacy and sending you this unsolicited email in order to tell you that you are entitled to not get any unsolicited emails from us under new data privacy laws. Here at Easi-Equine (…or fill in name of company you have never contacted and never wanted to have anything to

Real life | 31 May 2018

Now I know how the Karate Kid felt. Two hours after I began oiling the newly laid deck in my garden, I could barely move my arms. Wax on, wax off, I kept repeating. I knelt until I had rib marks in my knees so deep they looked as though they might never come out.