Never turn your back on builders. I only nipped out to walk the dog. I was barely gone half an hour. When I left I had one good room. The spare room. The only nice room in the house. I really love the only nice room in the house. I love the jasmine white walls,
When you start renovating your home, it is like pulling the loose thread of an old jumper. Everything unravels. I only tried to fit a dimmer switch, and now my entire flat has come apart. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I was having Stefano the Albanian builder fit wardrobes in the spare room. It was
Ikea is a totalitarian state. When you drive under the overhanging barrier preventing reasonably sized vans from gaining access to its car park you are entering sovereign territory. Should you get stranded in Ikea for any number of reasons, the best way out is to call the British consulate. Alternatively, you might try the Ecuadorian
In sympathy with New Yorkers, albeit inadvertently, I have had virtually no power for weeks. Worse, I have been warned that my lights are on an ancient system of fabric wiring which could burst into flames at any moment. I have been trying to fix things, but have come up against a vicious circle of
Stefano the Albanian was delighted to hear from me. He was really cross when I got myself a builder boyfriend, which he regarded as a terrible sort of betrayal. He knew something was up when I rang to cancel the spare room renovations. The builder boyfriend had promised to do it for free. On no
Any half decent guide to the countryside should include the following tip: if you find an owl by the side of the road, don’t pick it up. I was riding along the lane on the skewbald pony when I suddenly realised there were two huge eyes staring up at me. It was a beautiful brown
The roads seem to be rigged to detect particularly low grade offences nowadays. And when you’ve done nothing wrong at all, the police seem to get ferociously cross. I was once read the riot act by a bearded cop on a motorbike who banged on my window as I sat in gridlock on the Albert
The spaniel was given specific instructions. ‘This is your big moment, Cydney. In fact, this is our big moment. Do not embarrass us.’ We were driving up the long track to the elegant estate where the annual shoot barbecue, marking the opening of the season, is held. It is a huge deal to be invited,
A girlfriend who was about to get married was telling me about her wedding plans recently when she said, almost as an aside: ‘Oh, and I’ve converted to Islam.’ Her fiancé was a Muslim but she thought it no more than a minor detail — like ordering the corsages, or finalising the table plan —
Success. Finally, I have made someone in a call centre do what I want, when I want and how I want it. I stumbled on the secret formula for getting jobsworths to co-operate quite by accident. It was an ordinary day. I was sitting in my kitchen waiting for British Gas to arrive to change
Some years ago, I had a boyfriend who left himself logged into his Facebook account on my computer. When I sat down at my desk after he had gone to work I was confronted with the screen he had left behind which contained a long list of messages. ‘Oo, goody,’ I thought, ‘suddenly I seem
Friends with children all seem to agree that there is a general rule on numbers: if you’ve got one child, you may as well have two. But you must never, ever be tempted to think that if you’ve got two children you may as well have three. Apparently, the apophthegm breaks down at that point.
Being blonde and female, I should have known better than to take my Fiat to a main dealer to get it serviced. It’s not that I’m stupid, per se. It’s just that main dealers have an invisible automatic scanning system so that, when a blonde woman walks through the door, an alarm goes off inside
‘So, you’re a supporter of Julian Assange, then?’ said my friend the radio presenter as we were live on air. Oh, dear. This was going nowhere good. It was far too early in the morning for me to get myself into an un-PC fix. My friend the radio presenter has me on his breakfast show
Being the girlfriend of the world’s most devastatingly handsome gay celebrity nutritionist has its disadvantages. I know, how could that statement possibly be true? What could be more divine for a girl than lounging by a Spanish poolside with an eye-wateringly handsome, gallant, kind, generous, caring, courteous, accomplished, witty and charming forty-something gay man and
On a visit to my old school not long ago, I found myself confronted by my former PE teacher, now the deputy head. She fixed me with an icy glare. ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I’ve forgotten my note.’ The icy glare froze completely so I explained: ‘You remember? I’m the one who came to every
Horses are dreadful hypochondriacs. They also hate work. We may kid ourselves that horses enjoy being ridden. But horses, if truth be told, just want to be left alone to eat. They are willing to do almost anything to achieve this end. Tara, the chestnut mare, has over the years tried every ruse. She once
The phantom car accident injury claim is progressing. Aviva has just rung me with big news. About time. It is now eight months since I sparked the insurance claim from hell by pranging into the back of the car in front whilst in a traffic queue moving at 3mph. Despite the fact that neither car
One second the spaniel was sitting in the window seat, looking out of the third-floor attic window at the dogs playing in the garden below. The next second she was gone. Time slows down when things like this happen. I remember looking and her being there, and I remember looking back and wondering where she
On your marks…get set…bah humbug! They can keep their Olympic traffic lanes and their Olympic copyright laws preventing me from cooking five fried eggs and placing them in an interlinking pattern on my breakfast plate — although I just did, so there. I also arranged the apples into Olympic ring formation in the fruit bowl, now