Real life | 16 May 2019

‘When you are in a hole stop digging. Have you never heard that?’ I asked the builder boyfriend, as he slammed his spade into a pile of earth.

I came home to find him in the cellar finishing some unfinished business. The last time we gave it a go — by which I mean gave ‘us’ a go — he set about renovating the house from the bottom up, attempting to remove all the loose earth in the basement. He filled sack after sack, hauling it out in camel tubs, until I was begging him to please do anything else. In the end, I kicked up such a hullabaloo that he was forced to fit me a bathroom.

But he remained somewhat obsessed with the lower-ground-floor level and every time he thought I wasn’t looking he would sneak back down there and start burrowing his way through the earth again, like a demented mole.