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
Once upon a time, it was perfectly possible to ask British Telecom to do something in return for money. You would ring an 0800 number and someone in India would politely accept the premise that if you paid them, say, £70, they would send an engineer to your home to carry out repairs. This used
The Indian bellboy was sweetness and courtesy itself as he took my bags and escorted me to my room. But even he, with his impeccable manners, could not disguise his horror at my appearance. The word dishevelled doesn’t do it justice. My hair was standing on end, my clothes were rumpled, my eyes were red
‘Dealing with a bruised soul’ is how I read the headline on the front of Horse Scene magazine. When I looked closer, the actual headline was ‘Dealing with a bruised sole’. But sometimes you see what you feel. I turned to the article anyway, because I do, in fact, have a horse with a bruised
The man at the next table looked down at my fidgeting spaniel and shook his head. ‘Not trained,’ he said. How rude. There I was, having a quiet drink with my friend at the local pub, when the man at the next table decided to give me some unsolicited advice about how to control my
As well as buying vinyl records, I have begun collecting three-dimensional books constructed of paper that you hold in your hands and operate manually by turning their pages over. I buy them from bookshops. There are a few of these emporiums scattered across the country. My favourite one is called My Back Pages in Balham,
Are you stressed? Do you worry that your stress levels are not normal? Do you fret that your reactions to everyday situations are an indicator of your total inability to cope with modern existence? Then why not take my handy personal stress self-assessment test? It’s easy, fun and at the end there will be an
One of my favourite things to do is to visit the field where Tara, my bad-tempered chestnut hunter is retired because there, I know, I will find like-minded company. We are two obstreperous mares together. Never happy to concede defeat on the smallest of issues where a long, arduous battle might get us absolutely nowhere,
‘We hate Tottenham!’ If they had shouted it once they had shouted it 100 times. I wasn’t sure why, as we were watching Chelsea v. Basel. But I knew enough about a girl’s place at a football match not to turn to my male companion and ask what would no doubt turn out to be
Sometimes, the answer only becomes clear when you stop trying to work it out, and give in to the incongruity of things. I was buying some shopping at Sainsbury’s in Balham. I picked a check-out where the conveyor belt was empty and the cashier looked as if she was waiting for the next customer. But
Such a tiny creature would not be any trouble, I decided. And so I got the idea, at the beginning of the winter, that it might be all right to leave a mouse in my garden shed. It was such a cute mouse with the twitchiest whiskers. It had burrowed into a sack of Chudleys
If Joni Mitchell were writing her song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ today, about the ruination of the natural world by the march of modernity, the lyrics might run something like this: ‘They paved paradise, put up a cycling route.’ Not content with demanding cycling lanes through our towns and cities, the cycling lobby — by which
Having diagnosed myself with diabetes, I demanded the doctor run a full set of blood tests. Just to confirm what I already knew, you understand. I was weak, dizzy, my vision was blurred, I felt devastatingly tired, could barely get out of bed, and only then to stuff myself frenziedly with chocolate and biscuits. The
As if by magic, a long-lost cousin will every so often appear. They come from the sticks and ask if they can stay in my south London flat. I always say yes, on the basis that I was once taken in by kind people who took pity on a fugitive from Midlands farming country. Jim
Eighteen months into my car injury battle with The Slobs, I slump over my kitchen table and throw my head into my hands. Through bitter tears, I email the ‘customer experience’ people at Aviva the following cri de coeur: ‘Right, that’s it. It’s official. I can’t take any more. I can no longer fight this
Sadly, I was being over-optimistic when I declared that if all went well with the builder boyfriend I would never need Stefano the Albanian again. It turns out that I never stopped needing Stefano. I needed him while I was dating the builder, because builders never do any building work in their own lives —