I have worked from home for a number of years, and one of the wonderful things about it is that one becomes plugged into the little routines and rhythms of assorted public service personnel (bin-men, post-people, local Jehovah’s witnesses), and the people and animals that live in the area. For example, the post-people all (separately) congratulated me on my wedding to Giant Bear as they delivered wedding presents in the run-up to the day(s). Similarly, I have learned not to mind that our local hedgehog, who has entered into the spirit of my ‘I’ll leave snails out for you if you eat them all’ game with great good humour and appetite, also feels the need to leave black, stringy poo on the lawn as a token of his esteem1.
As for our neighbours, for most of my time in Bristol I had an uneasy relationship with the West Highland terrier across the road. He belonged to an elderly lady, and seemed to have two purposes in life: to bark at the postman (and bite him if at all possible); and to sit in the window of the spare bedroom and stare at me while I worked. I was also treated once or twice a week to the sight of an enormous dog-fox sauntering through the garden and, more often than not, doing an enormous poo in the vegetable garden to show how comfortable he was. He was so comfortable, in fact, that I myself (pegging out washing, say) was no obstacle to his commute through the garden; he simply glanced at me and went about his business2. Here in sunny Bridgwater, I can’t help but notice that the people across the back (i.e. their garden sort of backs onto our garden) have recently replaced their entire garden wall. This impacted my sitting-outside-in-the-sun time in a fairly serious way, as follows:
July 8th. Based on what I can hear from my sunny spot, the builder being employed by our neighbour has a job description that consists of the following items. One, he is required to play Radio One at full blast all day, regardless of whether he is actually doing anything3. Two, when taking his (enormous, endless, gaping) breaks, he is required to discuss his personal life at the top of his voice on his mobile with anyone who will listen. Bonus points will be awarded for using the terrifying phrase ‘Mate, I was so wasted! I thought I was going to pass out before she woke up’.
July 12th. Not only do I have to endure Radio 1 turned up to eleven all day and his shouty telephone conversations (‘Mate! I was so wasted! I had NO IDEA where all that paint came from!’), but now he’s decided to sing along, including to songs he doesn’t know4. He doesn’t switch the radio off when he takes breaks (even when our neighbour can see him. I spotted her today watching him through the window with her arms folded, while he combed his hair, talked to his friends and had a thorough scratch. She wasn’t happy).
July 13th. Blessed, quiet, builder-less Sunday! He didn’t seem to do much beyond eating a colossal sandwich and taking his top off half a dozen times yesterday, so I’m going to quote Flanders and Swann with impunity: ‘On Saturday and Sunday / They do no work at all.’
July 14th. So far this morning, the bricks remained shrouded in quiet mist. He clearly hasn’t finished, but maybe (since it’s a weekday) he won’t be starting until, say, 2pm?
July 16th. It’s 8.30pm on a quiet summer evening. SHCLONK. SHCLONK. SHCLONK. The builder has just started up his cement mixer. I draw four conclusions from this. One, he’s not a builder. No builder works at 8.30pm on a Wednesday. Therefore, two, he must actually be the owner of the house and the lady that glares at him when he downs tools is his partner. Furthermore, three, she probably hates him almost as much as I do. Finally, four, it’s just as well I didn’t ring the doorbell to complain about the noise and ask if she was aware of just how little work he was doing.5
1 I tolerate this on the basis that the poo poses no threat to my plants.
2 I can only conclude that there is something about the way I choose and arrange plants that says ‘feel free to crap here, local carnivores!’
3 The man’s work-rate was quite astonishingly low. There was one afternoon when I was proofreading a paper with the window open (despite the noise, it was too hot to work with it closed) and he did literally no work at all. He read the Daily Express from cover to cover; he arranged his sacks of sand into a nice neat line; he sang along to a considerable number of terrible songs. He experimented with different ways he could attach his T-shirt to his person other than actually wearing it. He drank two entire thermos flasks of tea (it was far too hot for tea. Maybe it was Pimms). He did not, at any point, add any bricks to the wall, make any concrete, measure, check or reinforce anything. The most active thing he did all day, in fact, was to ring his friend and bellow, ‘mate! I’m KNACKERED! Yeah, been working on that wall all day! Yeah, I did have a good night. Mate! I was so wasted! I nearly swallowed that umbrella!’ I assume he is referring to one of those teeny-weeny papery umbrellas that decorate the poorer class of cocktails, but really, who knows. It may be a golf umbrella that he took a shine to in the middle of the night, and which (through the coquettish angle at which it placed itself in relation to, say, a picnic bench) indicated to him that attempting to remove it from its base and make it part of his person would be a diverting way to spend twenty minutes. I’m imagining him bloated and cross-looking, jaw bones ominously wobbly, much as a boa constrictor looks mid-marmot. His witless friends might even have stood around him in a rough circle chanting ‘Chug! Chug! Chug!’, checking their watches to see if it was time for him to take his shirt off yet and pouring Morrison’s Basics cider over each other.
4 He even attempted the perilous cliff-face that is ‘Ain’t Nobody’ by Chaka Khan. It wasn’t a success.
5 At the time of writing, it is early September and the wall remains unfinished, activity having ceased several weeks ago. The wall is also, disturbingly, two different heights, in that the end nearest the house has a row of little terracotta hats on it, indicating what the finished wall should look like and how tall it should be; the end furthest from the house is significantly higher and has no hats. There is also no space for a gate (I’m pretty sure there used to be a gate). I can’t decide whether it is more likely that he realised one day that it was two feet higher at one end than the other and/or that he had run out of terracotta hats and, overburdened by the evidence of his own incompetence, simply gave up; or that his disgusted partner has thrown both him and his indecently loud radio out, preferring to live in asymmetric quiet.
