Okay, this is going to be dead racist – but, fortunately, I have no idea which race I’m maligning, which should be enough to protect me from being prosecuted for hate crimes.
People in a nearby house are currently having their garden restyled, which should have taken two weeks, but has taken five and a half so far, with no end in sight. When the workmen first turned up, we breathed a sigh of relief, because (a) they weren’t from Glasgow or Liverpool, and (b) they appeared to be Polish. Consequently, we expected the usual civilised display of speed, efficiency and courtesy.
But, from the start, these chaps behaved more like Brits: every time you look out the window, they’re either bellowing into their mobile phones (7.35 in the morning is a popular time for this activity), or sitting down chatting, smoking and staring at pictures of scantily-clad lovelies from Essex. Whenever their employer isn’t at home, a transistor radio blares out crass Euro-pop. Apart from the fact that they haven’t knocked at our door asking to use the karsi or demanding mugs of tea with seventeen sugars, it’s all very nostalgia-inducing – it’s as if the street has time-warped back to 1975, probably the high-water mark for useless builders (and car-workers and miners and railwaymen and local council workers - an oxymoron, surely? - and… well, you name it).
So, have the Poles turned into traditional British Proles already? You normally expect the next generation to be born with the debilitating virus, but this lot seem to have caught it already.
It was all a bit of a puzzle, until earlier in the week, when I exited the house to see a white van pulling up nearby. A neat-looking young chap got out, studied an address on a piece of paper, then fired off a question in Polish at the Sun-reader relaxing in our neighbour’s garden. “Sorry,” he replied in heavily-accented English, raising his voice to counter the boom-bang-a-bang bollocks emanating from his own radio, “I am not Polish”.
The conversation continued in English.
So there, as Barry Norman used to say, you have it. If they spend an inordinate amount of time skiving, read the Sun, play loud music, and the job they’ve been hired to do takes three or four times as long as it was meant to, you’re either in an episode of Life on Mars – or they’re not Polish.
Mystery solved!
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