Melissa Kite | The Spectator columnists & writers

With only five to ten more years to work out how to log in to my pension plan I need to get a move on. The Fidelity website is so impenetrable to someone like me that, aged 50, I fear I will have run out of time to get access to ‘planviewer’ by the time I am 65, never mind 55. They write to me all the time, asking me to verify this or that by scanning a QR code and entering a reference, along with my National Insurance number, but it never works. ‘Sorry, we are unable to find your details in our system. Please make sure you have entered all of your information correctly. If the problem persists, please call us on…’ Persists? It never stops. It’s been defeating me for years. When I email to tell them I can’t log in they send back an email which is encrypted so I have to log in to see their answer about why I can’t log in.

Our village bonfire night has taken a sinister turn

The children walked with flaming torches ahead of the float bearing the bonfire queen which was headed for the towering monstrosity of pallets and tree branches on the village green. The builder boyfriend and I stood at the front of the crowds lining the road as the procession came through in the darkness and it struck me, as it always does, how disturbing bonfire night really is, especially when it’s done with this much enthusiasm and attention to detail. A tractor was pulling a livestock trailer upon which were sitting on chairs two figures wearing fancy dress, adorned in heavy make-up, looking like nothing so much as the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter, and all to the tune of a marching band. As the procession came through, men shaking buckets shouted boisterously at us to donate money because all of this had to be paid for.

My battle with British Gas

By the time I got through to someone at British Gas to complain about them holding £491 of my money in credit, they were holding £924. This was made up of £858 of my own money plus £66 from the government support scheme, the first instalment of which had just hit my account. So there it was, nearly a thousand pounds sitting there, doing nothing, and the builder boyfriend and I were agonising over whether we could afford to go to West Byfleet for a kebab. British Gas had emailed me to inform me that it was giving me this £66 a month. And I had emailed back to complain bitterly about it. I just thought it was a cheek that they were giving me charity while holding my money in credit, having overestimated my usage ahead of winter and the excruciating price rises, so I’m paying £368 a month.

Wanted: a trap for a happy mouse

‘Excuse me, I’m looking for something to catch a mouse that won’t cause it any distress,’ said the young chap who had walked into the hardware cabin at the farm shop with his girlfriend. The pair of them had briefly perused the shelves where the well assorted pest control items were neatly stacked and, not seeing what it was they were looking for, they had approached the counter where the owner and I were having a chat. We were setting the world to rights, as usual, as he put through a bottle of floor cleaner for me, and we had come to the conclusion we always do, which was that we wanted to get away from it, whatever it was. But even if we knew what it was, where should we go to get away from it? Right on cue, the voice of today spoke to clarify at least half of this conundrum.

Me and the builder boyfriend are going to go without hot water

‘I’d like my money back please’ was what I was waiting to tell British Gas, if they ever stopped the deafening rock music of their recorded hold message to answer the phone. My account was £490 in credit, like it was a savings account. Only it wasn’t a savings account for me, and now energy prices are going up beyond all reason, I’m not going to be so relaxed about these matters. I want my 500 quid back. They have been over-estimating my usage for too long, despite me diligently giving them my meter readings. The £2,500 cap announced by the Prime Minister doesn’t mean a damn for me, because it turns out it only applies to those whose usage would never come anywhere near that amount anyway. If you use more, you pay more.

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.

The ugly side of AA

A lot has been going wrong lately in the support group I’ve been attending for more than 20 years. I wasn’t going to write about it, of course. But then a fellow member stuck her iPhone in my face at a meeting and filmed me. So rather than sitting here waiting for the footage to turn up on the internet, I thought I’d explain. I’ve been objecting to the banning of a long-time member who has helped a lot of other members over the years, but he’s chatted up too many women and now the safeguarding procedures of this strange new era have kicked in and the younger female members, in particular, have flexed their muscles and decided to throw him out. I am one of the older generation members who have stuck up for this 64-year-old man, who is of an age and social class that have left him completely bewildered as to why he cannot flirt with women without being accused of harassment.

The death of customer service

The ladies in the bank now wear badges telling you to Be Kind and not do anything that might upset them in any way. Be Kind is in big capital letters on this badge and beneath is a lot of small print explaining the well-known global problem of upset bank employees, which has reached such proportions that extreme measures are having to be taken to tackle customers from whom kindness does not flow in generous enough proportions as to prevent upset being incurred by agents of the high street banks in the course of them courageously risking all in order to speak to the likes of you and me about our banking issues. But I couldn’t quite read the small print, for the same reason I was asking this lady to heroically put herself in jeopardy to order me a new debit card with no thought of the danger to herself.

My mare has had a ‘misalliance’ with a pint-sized stallion

My favourite vet came to see Darcy and immediately put his finger on the problem. Dusk was falling when he climbed out of his battered 4x4 in khaki shorts and crumpled T-shirt, sun-burned, muddy and sweaty from the day’s call-outs. He is a victim of his own brilliance, and the decades of experience that have made him invaluable. Everyone asks for him, and he tries to get to his favourite clients even though he ought to be retired. It was 7.45 p.m. and after me he was heading for a traveller site in Croydon. He does not discriminate. He’s my kind of hero. We had Darcy standing ready by the gate and immediately he dismissed the graze on her knee which was the only reason for the lameness I could find. He ran his hand down her back leg from one end to the other as I held her and the builder boyfriend watched.

I can trace all our problems back to Frankie Dettori

‘If you think about it, Frankie Dettori is to blame,’ said the builder boyfriend, because when things are really bad he deploys satire. One thing leads to another with horses, the joke goes, so we may as well trace our problems back as follows. If Dettori had not ridden a horse called Marienbard to victory in the 2002 Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe by bringing something magical out of a horse as slow as an elephant so that the Godolphin bay suddenly, like something out of a movie, exploded from the absolute back of the field to come from nowhere, overtaking horse after horse after horse in the final seconds of the race, flying over the finishing line so improbably that even the commentators were caught off guard and the first time they mentioned the horse as a contender was when they were announcing he had won… if Dettori had not managed to do that then Marienbard would not have been standing at stud.

My farmhouse nightmare

From the veranda of a small Irish farmhouse, I looked out over the sun-drenched West Cork peninsula. All I could hear was the clank of the boat yard below. ‘How much is the booking deposit on this one?’ After two days of viewing farms, I was tired of asking this question. Conveyancing is different in Ireland. As soon as you say you want to buy somewhere you have to transfer money to the estate agent to become ‘sale agreed’, and it’s often as much as 5 per cent. I had found plenty of tantalising period farmhouses with 20, 30 or even 50 acres, but I couldn’t get too excited that they were ‘only’ £500,000, because that meant I had to come up with £25,000 to get under offer. ‘The booking deposit is fully refundable,’ the agents kept saying.

There is nothing speedy about speedy boarding

When my black passport arrived in the post, I decided to take a trip. I’m not a good flier, so the absence of foreign travel for three years had to be making my fear of flying potentially insurmountable. A one and a half hour flight to Cork felt manageable. The builder boyfriend had already been over to have a look at this farm we’ve had our eye on. Incidentally, I know this passport is meant to be dark blue, but it’s not, it’s black. And to make it more alarming, the picture of me inside it is bright orange. I had slapped cheap make-up on my face and was wearing an orange T-shirt when I went to a booth by the checkout at Sainsbury’s which turned out to have a Day-Glo orange seat. Consequently, I look like an Oompa Loompa.

Everything’s burned to a crisp – and the horses are suffering

Everything is well and truly burned to a crisp, and we are piling through hundreds of pounds of hay a week. When the sun shines relentlessly and it never rains, keeping horses gets awfully expensive. The poor gee-gees themselves are bored stiff. We heave mountains of hay into the fields but they miss the ability to mooch about foraging and munching the greenery. There is no greenery. Everything is brown and white. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing the fields white before. When the grass first burned off, the paddocks went a taupe colour. But after weeks and weeks of relentless sun and no more than the odd spot of rain, the ground became quite bleached. The builder boyfriend’s cobs loaf about or snooze under trees.

The Lycra louts are back

‘That will be £7.50 please,’ said the girl in the bakery to the cyclist in black Lycra after he put a sandwich and a drink on the counter. By way of reply, he slapped down a fiver. He still had his aerodynamic hat on, and the straps and flaps on his booty feet. Click clack. Click clack. He moved with a waddle, like they do when they’re in their special outfit. They look like aliens to me in their pointy hats and clacky shoes and their behaviour is as alien as anything I have ever come across. He pulled this £5 note out of a little pouch in his pants and slapped it down on the counter. I imagined it was still warm, and smelt of Lynx, for my mind is overactive. And he said to this sweet young girl: ‘Well, I’ve only got five pounds, so you’ll have to have that.

My revealing phone call from Ben Wallace

My phone buzzed and rang while I was doing the horses until I thought, fine, I’ll call the Defence Secretary back. I sat down on a picnic chair by the muck heap and dialled. He was extremely courteous. He just wanted to point out that he really didn’t want to be Prime Minister. The profile I had written of him was very good, he said, but the one thing he wanted to put me straight on was, well, the whole premise of the article. He didn’t want the top job, no matter what I had heard. I told him my sources were impeccable. He didn’t need to be so modest. But he insisted people had got him wrong. He really, really didn’t want it. He’s a nice chap, Ben Wallace. I could tell as much from talking to him. He said he had my number because we had spoken before.

The builder and I are done with Surrey

As he grouted the last tile, five years after the bathroom was finished, I knew the game was up. ‘I guess this is it,’ I said, as the builder boyfriend used a filler gun to bring about closure. This single ungrouted tile where the bath meets the wall has been something of a symbolic fight between the two of us. It baffled and infuriated me until I simply gave up wondering and made my peace with it. I plastered it with Hippo tape, thinking that would shame him, but it didn’t. Why he stopped short of an otherwise perfect job two seconds short of completion, he never did explain. I came to various conclusions about the psychology of the ungrouted tile. I decided that whatever it meant, it went to the heart of our relationship.

A boiler service, spaghetti western-style

The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came down the track. If this boiler service had a theme tune it would be Ennio Morricone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. The engineers parked up and got out of their vans in a cloud of dust. One was tall and lean, a good enough ringer for Clint Eastwood, given the circumstances, while the other was short and stout, making an ideal supporting character. They strode towards my house grim-faced and I opened the door. ‘Gosh, you’ve come mob-handed,’ I said, and Clint nodded. The little fella looked scared. ‘You know where the boiler is, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I assume that’s why they’ve sent two of you?’ Clint looked deadpan, giving nothing away.

How I got one over on the chat bot

‘Your service contract has been completed,’ said someone or something from British Gas, in the chat box on its website. I had been watching the squiggly lines of the icon telling me a person or a bot was typing. When it finally spat that out as the reason I could not book an annual boiler service, I was baffled. Completed? Did they mean deleted? I had to do battle with the chat box because there was no way of booking my annual service by logging in under my username and password. Everything I pressed directed me back to a home screen asking me to take out a contract. But I was sure I already had one, which I took out last winter. I would have taken it out when the boiler was installed five years ago but British Gas told me they didn’t want to insure my new Worcester Bosch.

Rewilding will kill Waitrose

‘Do you care about the woodland? Do you care about the wildlife?’ shouted the bearded Woodland Trust volunteer from his table of tree-hugging paraphernalia set up outside Waitrose. He had pitched his camp – a trestle table covered in leaflets and bedecked with pictures of foxes and badgers – so close to the supermarket entrance on Cobham High Street that it was impossible for customers to get through the doors without running the gauntlet of his leaflets. No doubt these leaflets explained that the Woodland Trust is the largest woodland conservation charity in the United Kingdom and is concerned with the creation, protection and restoration of our native woodland heritage. It has planted 55 million trees since 1972.

I demand my right to night

The LED streetlamp outside my house was fitted with a ‘compromise’ shield acceptable to a vegan that looked as if it had been made on Blue Peter using sticky-back plastic, and that was bad enough. But a few weeks later, we were sitting in our living room and the light from this streetlamp seemed almost back to full strength, despite the makeshift strip of black gaffer tape. We had been forced to accept this most rubbish of solutions – which wasn’t a solution at all really, and which I’m sure totally breached our human rights if I wanted to be that sort of whinger – because our neighbour, the vegan, had the proper shield removed. She claims she likes the LED bulb at full blast, although how can she? I will say, in her defence, vegans do love harsh light bulbs, especially in the countryside.

Why I don’t do WhatsApp

If I could ban one question ever being asked of me again it would be: ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ I don’t know how many times I’ve answered this in the negative, 57,983 times at least, but the question just never stops being asked. Nobody wants to use even a fraction of a penny of the almost limitless text and call capacity in their perfectly affordable phone packages to send a text any more. What they want is totally free, completely limitless blathering capacity. Consequently, everything has a WhatsApp group attached to it. Every activity I take part in, every hobby, every social group I belong to, now comes with its own WhatsApp group. The effect of this is that the hobby or social gathering never ends. The idea is you go to the yoga lesson, or to the stables to ride your horse, and afterwards it just doesn’t stop.

The house names of Surrey tell a sad story

If you want to understand Surrey, look at the house names. Keepers’ Copse, Meadow View, Weavers, Highfields… What do all these names have in common? They describe something rural that used to be there before it was destroyed to make way for the house named after it. Surrey is where London will one day join Guildford and Woking, making the outer banlieues of our capital city very nice indeed, but obviously destroying the countryside that makes Surrey nice in the process. So not all that nice, in fact. For now, it amuses me to drive along the lanes of chintzy villages in prime commuter belt, grimacing at the names of the houses. It is as if the ghost of rural south-east England is laughing from the slate plaques of small mansions, over-extended bungalows and mock Georgian flats, with their over-manicured gardens and grass verges mowed flat.

The village parking wars have taken an ugly turn

The dynamics of the village can only be understood with reference to what’s happening to the parking. Unless you study the parking, you have no way of understanding the village. Not really. You may think you understand it, but you are just scratching the surface of the alliances and enmities that make the village go around. For example, we recently lost the residents’ parking sign relating to the dozen spaces down the unmade track that leads to my house which had been used by those of us stuck down this track through no fault of our own, other than we had a rush of blood to the head and decided it would be nice to live on a village green. My lawyer friend at the time I bought my house warned me not to, but I wouldn’t have it.

Spectator Out Loud

Katy Balls, James Heale and Melissa Kite

16 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Katy Balls, James Heale and Melissa Kite

16 min listen

On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Katy Balls on Boris Johnson’s plans to divide and conquer (0.33).After that, James Heale on the broadcast battle obsessing British media (6.20).And to finish, Melissa Kite on the politics of horse muck (11.16).Produced by Natasha FerozeEntries for this year's Innovator Awards, sponsored by Investec, are now open. To apply, go to: www.spectator.co.uk/innovator

The politics of horse muck

‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message. The builder boyfriend and I were lying in the garden having a well-earned sunbathe on Sunday, his only day off. Meanwhile, as we full well knew, the builder b’s fellow livery customers were hard at work shovelling horse muck out of the fields at the country estate where he has been grazing his two cobs until we can move them to be with my two horses at the new stable yard we have just taken a lease on. This mania for ‘poo picking’ is all very well if you are talking about paddock maintenance. I’m out there with a shovel every day in the small private paddocks where we now keep my thoroughbred and pony. But when your horses are turned away in a herd with a dozen others in the vast parkland of an English country house it is a different system.

Are iPhones sending women gaga?

The girl wound down her window, stuck her mobile phone out into midair, and started to take pictures of the sun. I was behind her Mini on the southbound slip road off the A3 to the Cobham roundabout. On the left was the backed-up turn for Hersham down the Seven Hills Road which is always busy in the morning. I was queueing in the less busy right hand lane to go around the roundabout to Cobham to do the horses. It should not have taken me long, even at 8 a.m. But the woman in the cream Mini in front of me was busy with her phone pointed up into the sky at a sun so blazing it was impossible to look anywhere near it. What she captured I have no idea. It’s hard to think of anything more pointless than trying to photograph a blinding heat haze.

Spectator Out Loud

Melissa Kite, Mary Wakefield and James Heale

24 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Melissa Kite, Mary Wakefield and James Heale

24 min listen

On this week's episode, we’ll hear from Melissa Kite on the ambitions of Ben Wallace. (00:48) After, Mary Wakefield on our misplaced faith in forensics. (09:35) And, to finish, and James Heale on Eton’s great ‘awokening’. (16:33)Produced and Presented by Sam HolmesEntries for this year's Innovator Awards, sponsored by Investec, are now open. To apply, go to: www.spectator.co.uk/innovator

Chump or champ? Why Ben Wallace could be the next PM

During the Afghanistan crisis last summer, Ben Wallace decided that he had what it took to be prime minister. He had suspected it before then, according to friends, but during the evacuation of Kabul the Defence Secretary came to a definitive conclusion. His prediction that the Taliban would take Kabul had been proved correct, when other senior ministers involved had failed to see it coming. And as the desperate situation played out following the US withdrawal, he hit his stride. His row with the then foreign secretary Dominic Raab over the fall of Kabul was a turning point for the way he saw himself, insiders say. Raab was caught off guard, on holiday. Wallace was on top of his brief, cancelling a weekend away, deploying British troops to the airport as the Taliban advanced, declaring that he had known ‘the game was up’ months ago.