There's Always Work to Be Done

Wherever you look, artisans are doing things to our properties. In London, we need to get the flat into a condition whereby tenants are less likely to ring on a Saturday night because they’ve seen a moth, or the lights flickered, or they’ve staggered drunkenly against the wooden roof terrace fence, smashed through it and fallen five storeys to their - stop, stop, I get enough exercise thinking about that in the middle of the night, we need not speak of it now. Suffice to say it’s all distressed purchase stuff - anti pigeon spikes on the ledges, an RCD board for the main electrical circuit, and so on.

Out West, the horny-handed sons of toil are massing for Home Improvement purposes. The Dirty Dentists laid cream carpets in every room, and any wall that stopped moving for long enough was painted magnolia. Not the kind of thing you can criticise them for, these being nice neutral colours, but after a few weeks of having them permanently imprinted on your retina, the effect is similar to being dressed in a boiler suit, blindfolded and forced to listen to white noise on headphones. So decorators were top of our list. Of course, we don’t actually know any decorators in Somerset, so we did it the traditional country way. We established that the estate agent’s husband was a tiler and got him to recommend a decorator.

Adam, the recommendee, arrived in a vintage Land Rover Defender. This elevated him in my eyes, especially when he moaned about how uncomfortable and leaky it is; for all middle class Londoners harbour a secret urge to drive an uncomfortable, leaky, twenty year old Defender. It’s the rural equivalent of adopting a faux working class accent at school. Anyway, when our daughter Sophie gave me a focused reality check about how much it might actually get used (and how we'd be unlikely to persuade my cohabiting mother to be ferried around in it), I saw sense and switched to the other middle class Londoner vehicle strategy, a luxury SUV.

You hardly ever see an SUV outside of London. I’ve seen a few ageing Range Rovers, and possibly one BMW X3, and that’s it. But stand outside Sloane Square tube station and about 50 Chelsea tractors a minute will crawl past you, ready for unexpected mountains or fields of mud just off the King’s Road. Round here, though, everyone seems to drive ten year-old Vauxhall Corsas.

I mean, you would, wouldn't you?

Sorry, I’ve gone a bit off the point. We have decorators; we also have electricians - small issue of our lighting circuit not being earthed (“Oh, that won’t be a problem, as long as you never have a metal light fitting” was his highly effective sales pitch). It’s given me an anthropological opportunity to compare the two species. For example, decorators, especially when working in pairs, tend to banter and sing while they work; while electricians work silently, slowly feeding cables into holes, occasionally asking each other in hushed tones whether a 76B or 584S fitting would be most suitable. Mind you, I suppose if there was a risk that sticking your screwdriver into a set of wires might fuse you to the national grid, you probably wouldn’t feel like singing either.

At some point in all of this, Darren the tiler will arrive (“He likes to talk” his decorator friend warned me. What about, I wondered? “See this tile? Look, it’s just like this one. I’ve put four of them on now. Next I’m going to do another one... You alright, mate? You look a bit spaced out.”). And after him, Justin Bathroom (my phone’s address book is full of medieval style surnames: Alan Wallpaper, Wayne Guttering, Suzanne Neighbour). After dealing with the dirty dentists’ kitchen management (8 days’ cleaning and we’re still not sure what colour the worktops are) Helen is too frightened to go into the bathroom at the end of the landing (note to prospective house guests: that’s your one) so it seems easier to get a specialist firm to obliterate it and put in an industrial strength walk in shower (note to prospective house guests: no, you can’t have a bath, but you’re only here one night).

Product of the wife's fevered imagination

So here I am looking after things in midweek while Helen saves the world in her day job back in London. I’m like a character in a Joseph Conrad novel, in an isolated existence trying to manage the natives, then lying in bed at night hearing the jungle creep ever closer. 

Oh, and for those who were rooting for my gardening progress, something I planted is actually growing. Raspberry canes which came in “bare root” format and which I dug little holes for are now sprouting bunches of leaves. None of my seeds have come up, though. Still, there’s always next year. We shall live on raspberries in the meantime. And life will be glorious.