Dr Google’s verdict? Anthrax poisoning
Six months into the renovations and I have so much dust in my lungs I have had to give Stefano…
Life is tough at the bottom of the equality heap
The incident I am about to recount I make no judgment about, other than that I believe it tells us…
Sorry for touching your knee Michael Fallon – I exploited you to get ahead
I took advantage of men to get ahead
Are my horses conspiring against me?
When it comes to horses, troubles come in multitudes. Multitudes of lame legs. Gracie, the hunter pony, kicked things off…
The poetry of kitchens
‘The colour of this kitchen is inspired by a blend of heather, bracken and the mountains of the Isle of…
How to get builders to do what you want
The Albanian builders have started a turf war in my kitchen. The hostilities broke out suddenly. One minute the builders…
Beware the hit-and-run skip lorry
Although it seemed unlikely, I did not immediately dismiss the possibility of a hit and run skip lorry. The witness…
Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put Melissa on the top?
They are building the bonfire already. In the dip where winter flooding sometimes creates a small lake, the wood and…
The painful legacy of the builder boyfriend
How reassuringly like old times it is, going to a God-forsaken retail park with Stefano. We mooch about the DIY…
What it cost me to stay with British Gas
Assuming someone had moved house before, and put a new boiler in their new house, while remaining a customer of…
BT and the seventh circle of junk-mail hell
BT have just put the phone down on me for asking them to stop sending me junk mail, which is…
The stealth campaign to ban horse-riding
Stefano and his boys got to work with gusto and within a few days the upstairs of my house started…
Why they call me Mad Melissa
Stefano the Albanian turned up in a brand new Audi off-roader, cutting quite the dash. He looked older, with some…
The Lib Dem march for pettifogging power
My friendly neighbourhood Lib Dems have put some campaign literature through my door. In a covering note, they intimate that…
My horse has no taste for the high life
Darcy is high-maintenance, so I decided to leave her in the posh livery yard, with its luxuriant shavings beds and…
My Village is a Liberal Democratic nightmare
Easier by far to load up my horses and move them to the next village than try to fight the…
The builder boyfriend has gone – again
Like Steve McQueen gone slightly to seed, the builder boyfriend strode off into the sunset. Nothing becomes him so much…
Is this Surrey or Rorke’s Drift?
‘This situation is Rorke’s Drift,’ said the builder boyfriend, after our proposed renovations were objected to at the parish council’s…
I nearly have a house in the country, but not quite
Quite stoically, I was mountaineering on my hands and knees over a sea of rubble to get to the temporary…
My journey to hell with Sky TV
Two months after I cancelled Sky, a strange letter arrived in the post. ‘We are writing to you because we…
Is this Britain’s bossiest village?
‘What do you think it means?’ I asked the builder boyfriend as we stood in front of the sign. A…
When the builder boyfriend works late, I have to hunt for food alone, like a lioness
Last night, I had dinner at the M25 services. I don’t mean I stopped for a break mid-journey. I mean…
Am I the only non-Lib Dem in the village?
Since moving to my dream home in the country a month ago, I’ve only had to fight a parking dispute,…
I’m being terrorised by a Surrey family of optometrists
All had gone suspiciously quiet down our little track on the village green, and we had begun to think we…
There’s no escape from mindfulness
And so, as it must, the pilgrimage to find a local GP surgery begins. This is a great British tradition,…
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