Don’t even ask me how fast I had to go to get to the speed awareness course on time. The rush-hour dash was made even worse by the fact that the letter from ‘the UK’s leading provider of occupational road risk management, driver assessment and training for corporate organisations and speed awareness’ warned me that
Sanity is subjective. It depends very much on where you are. I know this because I spend half my time in south London and the other half in the country. Talking to strangers in the supermarket is fine in Surrey, for instance. In Waitrose, Cobham everyone talks to you. The check-out lady there told me
Stupidly, I left a pile of money on the fridge while I was in Italy and told the cleaner to come as usual. I thought it would be nice for her not to lose the business. But my cleaner is not some fly-by-night who takes money for nothing. My cleaner is serious about cleaning. She
Perhaps beginnings are meant to be disorientating sometimes. For many pages of Mohammed Hanif’s second novel I cannot get my bearings and start to worry that, far from finding my way into the dense narrative, I am becoming more and more lost. I fret about what the problem might be. Is it overwritten? The earthiness
Melissa Kite’s Real Life I’m prepared to do almost anything rather than apply to Lambeth Council for a bulk waste collection. Every human being has their limits of endurance, a line of suffering beyond which they begin to contemplate committing terrible atrocities themselves in order to make the pain stop. It’s just that most people
When the only man I’ve ever come close to marrying moved out after I broke off the engagement, he left me with his tropical fish. I begged him not to, but the separation arrangements included the absolute stipulation that I keep the fish tank. If I insisted on him taking the fish tank, he made
You know you’ve officially become a slob when you look down at a puppy chewing a pair of £350 Manolos and think, ‘Oh, thank heavens, she’s gone quiet.’ I started this spaniel-raising business with a million good intentions about being firm and using every difficult moment as an opportunity to teach and improve. ‘No, Cydney,
My local cab firm has gone global. Its drivers are now so fantastically cosmopolitan they no longer speak any English or know anything at all about Britain. The situation reached crisis point the other night. ‘Royal Opera House,’ I kept saying, very slowly. ‘Royal …Opera …House.’ ‘Roya’ Oppa How?’ said the minicab driver. ‘No. Listen.
The experts keep telling me I’ve got to put her to bed and leave her, but I can’t do it. I know I’m making a rod for my own back but when she starts crying in the night I get up and bring her into my bed. I try to sleep when she sleeps, but
‘What are you doing on Sunday evening?’ asked my friend Colin. ‘The usual,’ I said. ‘Feed the horses, drive back into town, have a bath, make cheese on toast, go to bed.’ I’m all about the glamour. ‘Well, come over for dinner. It’s just a few friends hanging out. I’m cooking chilli.’ My friend is
What an aptly named place Hook junction is. My mind wandered for only a few seconds but that was enough to land me in peril. I was driving down the A3 and as the road narrowed from three lanes to two I failed to slow quickly enough. At the precise moment the road goes from
I always suspected that I liked bread a bit too much, but ensconced inside a gated villa with only the finest, gluten-free food in the fridge and the dangerous nature of my dependency is writ large. ‘This is how teenage looters must feel about Nike,’ I ponder, as I imagine all kinds of scenarios in
Looking for ways to de-stress and cure my eczema has become my new obsession. It is very, very stressful. It often involves hurtling to the corner shop to buy chocolate. I was doing this the other day when I happened upon a little spa next to the Spar. It was called the TenSixTwo treatment rooms.
When the steroids stop All good things come to an end. I had to stop taking the steroids sooner or later or I would start to look like one of those sprinters of indeterminate gender. It was fun while it lasted, and came in really handy when my friend fixed me up on a dinner
I’m sick of being scared by scientific studies Tall women are more likely to get cancer. As research findings go, this has to be among the most randomly vindictive scientific conclusions ever to spill out of a university research department into a screaming newspaper headline, and lord knows there have been a few. Women who
‘I need to ask you something,’ said Steve the sandwich man, looking me up and down suggestively as he buttered my baguette. ‘I need to ask you something,’ said Steve the sandwich man, looking me up and down suggestively as he buttered my baguette. I like Steve. I call at his sandwich hut just off
Within three clicks of using my new laptop I am apoplectic with frustration. Why does technology always get more complicated, not less? When is someone going to make a computer that is easier to use than the last one, not more difficult? And, above all, when will my new laptop stop talking to me? It
Melissa Kite’s Real life After three hours waiting, I am taken into a cubicle to be told by Nurse Ratched that there is nothing she can do. ‘Dermatology is not an emergency,’ she says sadistically, as I sit scratching myself into small pieces in front of her. ‘If I cut my hands off to stop
One day in the early Nineties, a trainee recruitment consultant looked down at their carpet and thought, ‘I wonder what’s under there.’ And so began a mania for exposed floorboards that has had the British professional aspirant class in a vice grip ever since. My twenty-something upstairs neighbours are currently in this grip. Nothing will
Midway through my pruning session I realise I am cutting the wisteria up into really neat pieces. I mean, seriously neat. Each branch is carefully chopped into three and then placed in a garden waste bag. I do the same with the ceanothus until I have filled both my regulation green bags. Then I stand