The gamekeeper at the Surrey farm where I keep my horses has been banned from his local pub for looking too scruffy. Like the two farm workers in Berkshire who made headlines when they were turfed out of their local a few weeks ago, the gamekeeper has been left in no doubt that his muddy
When I was growing up, the Dallas theme tune was like a call to prayer. As the Copland-esque trumpets rang out, we ran to the television set. A hushed silence descended as cattle stampeded beneath the snazzy gold title credits. To watch the glamorous travails of the Ewing family from a sofa somewhere near Coventry
Eerily enough, I was watching Catch-22 when it happened. We were just about to get to the part where Yossarian learns that the only solution to his problem is made impossible by a circumstance inherent in the problem itself. Suddenly, I keeled over on to my knees. The boyfriend looked at me askance. ‘What? What’s
The foal is out of hospital and back home. To recap: the foal cost £600 and her first veterinary bill, sustained when she threw herself on top of a fence post, cost £768. That’s fine. I know horse owning makes no sense. I’m coming to the conclusion that life in general makes no sense. What
We were hoping the new filly might jump, but we were not expecting her to get started straight away. Ideally, we would have preferred her not to tackle the five foot post and rail fence of her paddock. It had all been going so smoothly. Famous last words with horses. We brought the foal home
Parking tickets I can cope with. Not being invited to a close friend’s daughter’s wedding is the final straw. I am told there are complicated reasons why I have been excluded from a glittering event everyone I know is going to. One story being leaked to placate me is that the invites have been messed
My love affair with the iPad lasted only a few days before it all went horribly wrong. This is tragic, because I overcame several major planks of my obsessive compulsive disorder and conquered some of my most rampant technological demons in order to walk into that Vodafone shop and say the words: ‘Can I have
Somehow or other, through some sort of oversight, I seem to have acquired a racehorse. It all happened very quickly, as these things tend to. I was with the boyfriend, visiting his mother’s yard, where she deals horses. The boyfriend was inspecting a coloured pony for driving. The boyfriend fancies himself on a pony and
Fuel crisis? What fuel crisis. I’m driving around in a car that does 50pmg. Well, it said 50 on the gauge when I bought it from the nice City worker from New Zealand, and he was driving it up and down the vertiginous slopes of Forest Hill. Within days of me owning it, and driving
Predictably enough, Aviva ruined Panda purchase day for me. Never mind that it’s their fault I’m having to buy a car the size of a Tonka toy with a hairdryer for an engine. I can’t afford the Volvo any more, of course, because I’ve got the outstanding ‘injury’ claim by the Slobs against me. That
My friend operates an open-door policy on her country home. So when I wandered into her kitchen the other day to find it deserted I decided to make myself comfortable, as she has often stated I should, and put the kettle on while I waited for someone to appear. As I did so, her two
Someone calling herself the Aviva Customer Experience Manager has been in touch. I’m not entirely sure what sort of experience she was intending to give me but she ended up giving me a thoroughly horrible one. I wonder if Aviva employed the Customer Experience Manager on the basis of her ability to give people horrible
Before Wayne and Waynetta Slob pretended I had run into the back of their car, my annual insurance premium was £372. Now that Mr and Mrs Slob’s ludicrously spurious claim for ‘soft tissue damage’ is well under way, can you guess what my renewal premium is? I’ll give you a clue. I rang Aviva to
Just three months into our relationship, the builder boyfriend overwhelmed me with some serious romance. He took me to B&Q for new kitchen units. I was breathless with excitement as we drove to New Malden in his pick-up truck. That’s right. My new boyfriend is so butch he has a Mitsubishi L200. Be still my
Childishly, fatuously, I used to play a little game with Lambeth Council that saved me £20 a year. The game went like this: every time my residential parking permit was up for renewal, I used to not renew it for a month, during which time I would park my car five streets away where the
A very chic lady turned to me at a dinner party recently and in tremulous tones confided that she was being investigated for benefit fraud. ‘Infernal cheek,’ I said. ‘How typical that our chaotic benefits system should make such a stupid mistake. Instead of going after the layabouts, some idiot pen-pusher has put two and
We few, we happy few. South London-based working cocker spaniel owners, I mean. We meet up on Tooting Common most days to exchange tips for cocker crisis management. The dogs play together as we have our group therapy sessions. Cydney’s best friends are Betsy and Mable, both black with white bibs like her, and then
Wandering along a smart west London street after lunch, I happened upon a little tack shop. I have a strict policy of never passing by equestrian suppliers, as you know. I am quite hopelessly addicted to the smell of saddle leather. The sight of shiny new bridles hanging in a row makes me swoon the
Do you xxxx? Sorry to be impertinent. Perhaps you simply xx or x? I’m not a natural x’er, but it’s hard to resist when everyone else is x’ing all over the place. Besides, if someone x’s you, it would be rude not to x back, right? Truly, in this age of emotional incontinence, the etiquette
Miraculously, mysteriously, almost supernaturally, I found a man. I’m sorry for not mentioning it earlier but it crept up on me. I didn’t realise I had found him until ages afterwards. I had to have the whole thing signposted in neon, and even then I did my best to drive past it. What happened was