When hunt supporters visit the office of a Tory cabinet minister these days, they like to turn up armed and dangerous. And so it was when a delegation from the Countryside Alliance arrived for a private meeting with the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson a few weeks ago, wielding an alarming new poll of their membership.
Speeding down the farm track from my little country retreat, I came across the gamekeeper in his Defender. I wound down my window. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ he asked, looking askance at the dust cloud and no doubt wondering whether I had collided with any of his pheasants. ‘I’m going
‘Hello, good morning, my name is Gavin Moneypenny, and I’m your customer service representative for today and I’m pleased to inform you that during the course of this call I will be looking for ways to improve the service you are getting from us if I can, and if I can at any point make
‘Excuse me. I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I have to tell you, as a Catholic, I’m offended.’ The girl, a complete stranger, had walked up to our restaurant table to inform us she had been insulted while eavesdropping on us. I stared at her, not knowing whether to apologise or tell her to
Natural horsemanship has a lot to answer for. After a cross country event the other day, I rode back to my trailer to find the two women parked next to me doing some very strange things as they loaded their horse. One woman led the pony up the ramp quite efficiently, flicking it with the
Walking the spaniel on Tooting Common, I was apprehended by a man on a bike. He was ashen-faced. His young daughter, pedalling behind him, had tears streaming down her face. ‘We’ve been attacked!’ he said. ‘My daughter…they set a dog on her…she’s been bitten.’ I looked ahead up the track…et voilà. Once a year, the
The Builder Boyfriend has nearly moved in. I say nearly because we are both quite nervous about committing to each other so we are doing it piecemeal. I don’t know why people say ‘never do anything by halves’ because doing things by halves has saved my sanity on many occasions. In this case, the builder
‘Congratulations! You’ve qualified for The Sunshine Tour!’ beamed the lady judge, as she pinned a rosette to my horse’s bridle. I don’t know what The Sunshine Tour is, but it sounds like it has nothing to do with equestrian pursuits and everything to do with putting old people on a bus and taking them on
Some call me paranoid, but I don’t think one can be suspicious enough when it comes to the activities of Lambeth Council. I guessed it might be up to another ruse when I received a more than usually threatening letter at the end of July informing me that it was undertaking a review of council
What is the point of living in a free country if you cannot do dangerous things every now and again? I enjoy galloping. There, I’ve said it. Luckily, the girlfriends I ride with enjoy galloping too. As we are all safely in the bracket known as ‘middle aged’ this scandalises the world but we don’t
Animals have a terrific sense of humour. Mine have just co-ordinated a mass outbreak of malingering. Every single last one of them has gone down with a complicated illness or injury. It all started a few weeks ago when Tara the chestnut mare ripped her lower eyelid open. The vet who came to stitch it
At last. I’ve waited a long time for this moment. I’ve been through years of torture at the hands of excitable twenty-somethings, experimental thirty-somethings and Booker-prize-winning forty-somethings. I’ve had nothing but adventurous, liberal-minded, free-spirited sorts living in the flat upstairs. But I don’t want happy, joyful and free people living near me. I don’t want
If you are bullied at school, you see, you never stop feeling bullied, no matter how old you are. It is absurd that I am 41 years of age and a group of women can still reduce me to tears. To be fair to the bullies, I was an awkward, argumentative, pedantic nerd of a
My spaniel has been pronounced ‘too thin’ by a lady who rescues dogs from Greece. I had stopped to chat with her in the park, as I often do, because I like the lady who rescues dogs from Greece. I’m not one of those people who say, ‘Well, how disgraceful. Fancy spending all that money
‘Benvenuti alla Small Cluster Band!’ And about time, too. We had been sitting in the Castello in Castellabate for half an hour watching an empty stage, while members of La Small Cluster Band stood around eating slices of pizza from takeaway boxes. ‘They’re on Italian time,’ I told my mother, as she sat in her
Imagine: it’s Sunday morning, and the warden of a medieval village church arrives to get the place ready for communion only to find the altar covered in bat droppings. As he gets scrubbing, he reflects on how he rang the officials at Natural England to request help getting rid of these bats — ‘Perhaps they
‘Piccolo problemo.’ Luigi, the hotel manager, delivered the fateful news as he served me my first lemon soda of the holiday on his sun-drenched terrace. Francesco, an old flame, had discovered that my mother and I were booked in at the hotel this week and had rung to inquire about the date of our arrival.
You know you’re in bad shape when you need to make a list before you go to the GP. Admittedly, the list was on a Post-it note but it was in alphabetical order. Coincidentally, it also worked its way from the top of me, starting with my mouth Abscess, through the Eczema on my hands
This is the story of the amazing, disappearing car warranty. It is a cautionary tale that all second-hand car buyers should heed. And it goes like this. The amazing, disappearing car warranty began life as an apparently normal car warranty issued to a Volvo XC90 I bought for a very reasonable price after the builder
The sometime builder boyfriend spotted the Volvo on his way to a roofing job in Dorking. He rang me greatly excited. It had a few bumps and scratches but the pertinent facts were these: one owner. Never towed. A bike rack on the back. Haribo wrappers all over the seats. Oh, and the mark from
