Lying in bed one night as the rain pounded down, I became aware of a yellow patch forming on the bedroom ceiling. It took shape as I lay there watching it, and before long it had spread into a glorious stigmata of impending ruin.
This would happen. Because it’s not as though for the first year of living in this house I was living with a boyfriend who was a builder, whose original specialist trade was roofing. I must have imagined that.
I did of course ask the builder boyfriend to get up and check the roof but with his usual reverse logic he insisted on starting work in the basement which was, it could be argued, his area of least expertise.
To cut a long, sad story short, for some of you may be sick of hearing it, he was still down there digging a very long time later and indeed he ended up ripping the house to pieces from the ground up.
While some might be weeping as they write that, I choose to think that this was the best way to do it, because so much damp was coming from the cellar — it wasn’t damp, let’s face it, it was water — that groundworks were the only way to convert what was essentially a houseboat into a house.
A year later, and much water under the bridge, the house was still in pieces. The builder boyfriend staged a gargantuan flounce and I called in Stefano and the Albanians. Out went the BB and his team of cheerful cockney geezers shouting obscenities at each other while Queen’s Greatest Hits blared out of a ghetto blaster. In came tanned, swarthy fellows shouting something or other in Albanian while playing Balkan techno-funk on their iPhones.
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