I just can’t face one more argument with anyone, ever again

The cyclist was on the wrong side of the road coming towards me head-on.

It was a winding country lane with blind bends and as I came round one, there was the cyclist, pedalling furiously along the lane on his hard right hand side.

I slammed on my brakes, but instead of beeping my horn, I thought: ‘Let it go, I can’t be bothered. I just can’t face one more argument, ever again, with anyone.’

I never seem to get disputes one at a time. Troubles always come to me in multitudes. I fight at least two major battles on behalf of someone else or myself at any given time.

I’m currently getting all kinds of flak for defending a 64-year-old former bricklayer in his efforts to attend support group meetings in Surrey where some members seem to be saying they don’t want him because he has criminal convictions and they’re a better class of alcoholic.

And then there’s this stable yard row, where the landowner evicted us for refusing to let the children in the neighbouring house, which she also owns, have unsupervised access to our horses.

Like all Surrey disputes, the people involved are being thoroughly obnoxious. We cleared out of the yard this week and when all was empty and neat, the paddocks harrowed and the horses moved to a new field down the road, the landowner did not turn up for the handing over of the keys.

She rang two hours later hysterical about her bad day. You want to have the day we’re having, dear, I felt like saying. We’ve had to leave a stable yard with four horses because we won’t allow the neighbours’ children to trespass under the fence and get kicked and injured.

Instead of which we said it was no trouble at all, we had left the keys in the store room and we wished her well. The builder boyfriend, who took the call, thanked her politely for renting to us – even though she had completely breached our year and a half lease to turf us out after a few months and treat us abominably. We had worked for days to clear out all the temporary fencing we had installed because when we took the place on, her post and rail was smashed to bits, she promised to fix it or supply the wood for us to fix it and she never did.

Half an hour after he put the phone down, he got the first text message from her. She had arrived at the yard and was not happy. There was a piece of cord missing from a paddock fence where we had, at her suggestion, made a gap in it to allow the horses to graze off a corridor by the sand school to save her gardeners from strimming it.

The BB replied that if she wanted a ten-foot piece of cord she’d earlier asked to come out to be put back in, then he would do it first thing tomorrow.

The next text was unfathomable. She had given us back ‘our pallets’.

When we arrived at our new field the next day to check the horses, we found a heap of wooden pallets stacked up. They were the pallets that had been holding sections of the post and rail together when we took over the stable yard.

‘For goodness sake! I can’t take any more!’ I yelled at the builder b. ‘She’s going to have you working for her for free for months putting right all the broken fences that were broken when we moved in there!’

‘That’s not happening, don’t worry,’ said the BB, with the calm, stern look he gets when push is coming to shove.

He delivered all the pallets back and sent her an email warning her that if she dumped them again on the land we now rent we would report her for fly-tipping.

He then blocked her number, because even he doesn’t have the strength to argue any more. Meanwhile, I was dragging myself around like I had flu.

So I stopped the car and allowed this man in his fifties to steer his bike back on to the correct side of the road. And as he went past me he yelled something and made the cross cyclist pointy hand gesture, the one that tells you to ‘get over your side!’

I looked to the left of me at the tall, thick hedge I was almost touching, and I realised that he was suggesting that I drive my little Peugeot into the hedge and possibly straight through it into the field beyond, injuring myself if necessary, in order to facilitate him being on the wrong side of things.

And I feel like that’s a metaphor for what everyone has been doing.