Strained relationship

There was, the architect said, no hope of getting planning permission for an extension. So I had the ingenious idea of solving our bedroom shortage by building what amounts to an annexe on the ‘footprint’ of the dilapidated potting shed on the other side of the orchard. The plans which we submitted to the Peak Park Authority were headed ‘guest accommodation’ — an anodyne description which I barely noticed. The same could not be said of my neighbours. As soon as the bright-yellow statutory notice was nailed to a door in our garden wall, half the village assumed that we were proposing to go into the bed-and-breakfast business. Anxious not to be knocked up late at night by improvident holidaymakers looking for somewhere to lay their weary heads, we determined to think of another name. In a moment of creative genius, I decided that the new building should be called ‘The Fairies’, because it is at the bottom of our garden.