Spring is sprung. Around these parts that’s a signal for armies of builders and decorators to descend on neighbouring houses, crank up their transistor radios – along with every piece of noise-making machinery they possess - and get stuck in. LOUDLY.
After all, it’s warmish, which means that those of us who don’t tinker obsessively with our homes at every opportunity will be able to hear every sound these Stakhanovites produce. With pellucid clarity. This will go on until the end of October, only pausing, one suspects, when we go on holiday (“Thank God!” I imagine the team leaders exhaling. “I thought they’d never leave! Okay, lads, off you go – see you in a couple of weeks.”)
I realize that, as I work mainly from home, I’m probably more prone to irritation at this racket than office workers, who escape the worst of it. In the old days, I’d see the scaffolding going up and shrug unconcernedly as I skipped off to the Tube, knowing that they’d all be down the pub by the time I got home.
But now I get it both barrels, full on, in yer face, all the time. Seven months a years, apart from a week here and there when the West London House Improvements Collective Scheduler cocks it up, and there’s nobody to disturb the peace. I imagine them phoning round hysterically trying to find someone –anyone – to do some pointless but distractingly noisy work. After all, it only takes one lone man with a hammer to destroy everyone’s concentration for several hundred yards in any direction.
And if they really can’t find anyone, then your neighbours will fill the abhorred auditory vacuum with barking dogs, or screaming kids, or throw their windows open and give us a blast of dance music, or decide to practice on their trumpet, or choose to conduct acrimonious mobile phone calls in their garden – “Look, I made it perfectly clear… Well, that’s not good enough!” – or lease their house young Australian party animals (the worst – the very worst!), or call in someone to tidy up the garden with a leaf-blower (the devil’s preferred instrument of torture, I’m convinced - which bright spark decided they were legal?).
We’ve lived here a long time and we’ve experienced a plethora of kitchen and attic extensions (I’m sitting in one), bathroom refurbishments, window shutter installations, garden remodellings, floor polishings, fence replacements and exterior paint jobs. All a form of audio terrorism, in that you never know when or where they’re going to strike next: but you know an attack is imminent.
A few years ago, I made the mistake of remarking to my family that, surely, people would soon run out of things to do their houses – unless they actually started rolling back the improvements they’d already completed: shrink the kitchen back to its original size, get rid of that stupid attic extension – never wanted it, anyway - and get rid of all the bamboo and birch trees and decking from their low-maintenance gardens.
But the same thing evidently occurred to others at the same time. Knowing that householders were becoming terrified at the prospect of going cold turkey, builders had to find some other way of ensuring that no one would ever again be able to sit in their garden on a sunny day, reading the paper, smelling the flowers and enjoying the gentle hum of bees and the chirping of birds.
And so someone dreamt up the basement extension.
This really has everything: huge amounts of noise and dust, and skips full of subterranean crud, and the work takes forever. And a day. And the potential for hold-ups and complications and legal issues are endless.
Sorted!
Of course, the government deserves a lot of credit for this endless, enervating disruption, this state of permanent revolution. Stamp duty has made moving home cripplingly expensive, they’ve welcomed in a city’s worth of Polish builders (and we’d better use them while we still have them), and they’ve made buying a house a truly dicey prospect by trashing the economy. No wonder people are tempted to sit tight and turn their current home into the one they’d like to move into.
But, when this economic mess has been put right by some future right-wing government, and all the basements have been extended (and they’ve rebuilt the neighbouring houses that have collapsed as a result), maybe, just maybe, potential house-purchasers might be tempted to buy houses they actually likejust as they are.
Then people like me could stop dreaming about escaping to the country and get back to enjoying the city we occupy.
Just a thought.
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