The case for Brexit, made by certain Englishmen

There are times when one can begin to understand why so many English people voted for Brexit.

We recently had some work done on our house. Recommendations from friends I always feel are stronger than just a star rating on some kind of internet site. So, with our friends encouraging us to use this particular contractor - let's call him Darren - we weren't too worried that he had absolutely zero references on the website that evaluates firms like his.

Our confidence was somewhat rattled, however, by the same friends phoning us again just days before the work was scheduled to start, saying, "for God's sake, don't use Darren: he's appalling".

Still, we'd already paid him a substantial deposit by then, and his behaviour had been charming. Perhaps with effort on our part we could accommodate him.

Ah, well. Had it only been that simple. We were soon to discover that the only way to accommodate Darren would have been to give him the whole house. And pay him to improve it.

He had a little team of building workers that had been with him for years. English to a man. We were struck by how hard and how well they worked. Until we saw them at a time when he wasn't around. When the cat was away, the mice, it seemed, had endless cigarettes to smoke or phone calls to make from their van outside. If they showed up at all.

Turning a house into a tip
But it isn't builders' work to turn it back, apparently

They also left a trail of dirt behind them which none of them ever bothered to clean. Dust sheets? Apparently never heard of them. Vacuum cleaning after they'd done? Not work for an upstanding builder. Taking off their muddy boots when they came indoors? There was no time for such niceties - after all, they had important cigarettes to smoke.

We decided to be polite but firm.

"You know Gary didn't show up till 10:30?" we might say.

"He tells me he was there at 8:00," Darren might reply, "And I've never known him lie to me."

Things would get broken and have to be replaced.

"It wasn't broken when I last looked at it," he would tell us.

"Well, it's broken now," we'd reply.

"OK, but who's to say it was one of my people who broke it?"

I suppose no one could say that with certainty. Only that no one else had been anywhere near the piece in question but his people had. But we were beginning to understand that pointing out inconvenient truths to Darren, however difficult they might be to deny, would only make the situation worse. And by "worse" I mean pretty seriously worse.

"Just stay there," he told me once, "and I'll be round shortly to sort this out with you, you effing unspeakable."

Only he didn't use the word "effing". Or "unspeakable".

Things reached a climax when he told us that he knew where our sons lived and they'd better keep looking over their shoulders too. Since our sons live in Madrid, that was quite a claim. It also suggested a grip on sanity worthy of a US President (and, yes, I do mean one particular US President).

Overall, however, most of his work was done well with only some blemishes or minor elements incomplete. In the end, for the sake of peace, we decided to call the job done and get the odd bits that needed finishing - or in some cases fixing - dealt with by someone else.

Who did we turn to? Three Poles, for different areas of work. And, you know, they were appalling: they turned up on time, they were quick and efficient, they did high-quality work, they were conscientious, they were honest in their charges, they covered everything around where they were working with dust covers and vacuum cleaned behind them. They never, never threatened us or our family with grievous bodily harm.

One of them was probably the most expensive workman we've ever used, in terms of hourly cost. But since he was also the quickest we've ever seen, the cost of using him was no greater than that of Darren's cigarette-smoking lads. And, boy, the work was immeasurably better.

Now, I know that English workers are by no means all like Darren's. There are conscientious and hard-working individuals among them. But I suspect most Brits reading the account above will find it rings familiar bells. There are far too many for whom those are the appropriate standards for work.

It's to understand why they might decide to vote for Brexit. I mean, those Poles we had clearing up Darren's work, can live and work freely in Britain under the EU rules. And set those shameful standards for work quality.

Who on Earth wants that kind of competition? Especially when, to put a stop to it, all we have to do is vote to leave the EU.

A case that must have seemed compelling, I'm sure, to builders sheltering in a van for their second early mid-morning cigarette break.

A little of what you like often comes at a price

A little of what you like does you good, they say. Sometimes, doing yourself a little good also seems to involve what you don’t like much.

Pilates is a case in point. Danielle has persuaded me to join her there twice now. Two weeks in a row. But it takes a while to get the hang of it. Take the scoring system. I mean, how do you know when you’ve won?

Well, I’ve discovered now and, let me tell you, it’s perverse. You win in Pilates when your muscles really ache. When it hurts, preferably intensely, you’re doing it well.

You read that right. It’s a sport where it’s supposed to hurt and you do it for pleasure. Talk about organised masochism. What’s more, the worse it hurts, the more good it’s doing you.

To take another example, there’s heading off on holiday. Leaving grey wet England for somewhere that ought to be warmer and brighter. Without appointments and deadlines. In pursuit of pure relaxation. But that comes at a price: the stress of making sure that everything that needs doing is done before one puts the out-of-office message up and shuts down the laptop. A painful rush. It means that once you finally get to go on holiday, you really need one.

The worst of it was that there weren’t only work tasks to complete before departure. I had a responsible domestic job too: putting a new clasp for a padlock on the gate to the garden. This was principally needed because of Toffee. She mostly behaves quite well but provoked, say by the passage of a cat, she could be tempted to rush straight through an open gate and into the road, whether a car was bearing down on her or not.

Toffee (on the right) with her friend Luci
The picture of innocence. Until she gets into trouble (again)

It was brought home to me just how carefully she needs protecting when I was on a walk with her in one of our local parks the other day. She slipped through the railings around the lake, because she’s still small enough. When I saw what she’d done, I called her over, thinking that she’d go back out by the way she’d got in, and come around to me. After all, between her and me was a tongue of lake water, with a drop of a metre or more down to it. 

She surely wouldn’t come straight towards me, ignoring the deep drop into a drop of deep water? I had barely time to think the thought and notice that she was looking straight at me and ignoring the hazard in front of her, before she came trotting in my direction, all innocent obedience, and went straight off the edge and, with a plop, into the freezing water.

Fortunately, Luton Council in its wisdom and kindness had set a steel ladder in the wall on my side of the water. I was over the fence in a second and down the bottom of the ladder calling to her as she swam round and round, looking far from comfortable with her impromptu dip. She was a little confused, swimming towards me and then away – well, who can blame her? She’d just tried coming to my call and look where that had got her – but eventually she came close enough for me to grab her collar and pull her out and on to dry land.

A wet cold poodle on cold dry land.

With a dog like that, who wouldn’t be afraid to leave her with a garden – accessible through her dog flap – not properly sealed from the road?

The clasp had to go up. But that involved doing things with screws and screwdrivers. On a wooden gate full of knots. This is not a skill in which I particularly shine. I had trouble getting more than half the screws more than half the way in.

Even with a power drill, the screwdriver bits just spun on the screw heads, driving them in not one jot. Since the failure of this exercise couldn’t possibly be attributed to the workman, I had to blame the tools. Naturally. So I ordered a new set of screw bits for the drill.

Just wonderful. They arrived the following day. And by that afternoon the clasp had been mounted, thus proving that I had no trouble getting the job done once the proper tools had arrived.

Having the right tools is crucial for a good job
Though having an actual building worker around's even better

Coincidentally, a building worker was in the house that morning, finishing off the last job outstanding on the work we started in the autumn (what a relief: finally done). It’s true that he happened to have his own power drill and screwdriver bits. It’s equally true that he has some skill with driving screws into ancient wood made hard by its knots. But that’s not the point: the job needed doing and by the afternoon it had been done.

Surely that was the extent of my responsibility, wasn’t it?

I now feel I can dedicate myself to holiday mood, with a clear conscience.

A sprinkling of comfort. In case of fire

We’re not quite home and dry with work on our home.

It turns out that to be home and dry we need to install a means to make part of our home thoroughly wet. Contrary to the oft-repeated views of our contractor, building regulations require us to have more sophisticated precautions in place against the risk of fire. That means installing sprinklers in our sitting room and dining room. 

Sitting room and dining room are really one large room – well, large by our standards – which is the problem: the alternatively would be to split them once more into two rooms with a wall in between, at the same time walling off the staircase which is currently open-plan. That’s how things once were, no doubt, but we’d regret going back to that layout. So it has to be sprinklers.

Open Plan. We like it. But the price is sprinklers

They also want us to put in a first-floor window through which we might be able to escape to the street ahead of any flames.

Well, there are now neat round holes with protruding hoses in the ceilings of both the sitting room and dining room. For some reason, the sprinkler people had to send a couple of young lads round to do that work a week or two ago, but a second team has to come out to finish the job. That isn’t now due to happen for another two and a half weeks. We shall have holes in the ceilings nearly till Christmas now. So it will truly be a holy season. A holy holiday, indeed. 

Sprinkler hose in place. Wholly in tune with the holiday spirit

Still, you can imagine, I’m sure, that I now sleep a great deal better at night. I am no longer consumed by terrible dreams of being burned to a frazzle by a horrific blaze. We just have to hang on a little time longer and fine systems will be in place to protect us from so vile a fate.

I thought at first that if the terrible circumstances arose, I’d make for the new window and a break for freedom. Not that I understand why. It seems a little silly to go up to the first floor only to jump from the window, when I could just open the front door and leave the house on the same level as the street. But, hey, I didn’t make up fire precaution regulations and I suppose the people who did are far more qualified than I am to reach intelligent decisions on these matters.

In any case, I’m much more attracted by the idea of the sprinklers. I think my view is that if it comes to it, what I’d far rather do would be to make for the sitting room in the event of fire. Then I could sit in my favourite spot, the couch, and be sprinkled with water from the ceiling.

There I could enjoy the delights of a cold shower while I watch the flames moving inexorably closer. In all the comfort my couch affords.

I concede that there are downsides to that prospect. But you must admit it’s pretty dramatic. And all thanks to the considerate design of building regulations.

Fire? Bring it on, I say. We’re ready.

Or, at least, we shall be in a few weeks.

Transient's diary: end of the epic

Transience, as the word itself implies, comes to an end. Ours has. We’re back home, and a home transformed, if not quite as completely transformed as was planned, but more of that later.

Like all good operations – and I’m thinking of D-day, for instance, as an example of comparable scale – the enterprise got under way the day before the main action. With my impeccable sense of priorities, I wanted to make sure that the house was reconnected with phone, WiFi and, above all, a service to run both our TVs. Because we now have two TVs, but more of that later too.

So I was in the house the day before making sure that the engineer knew what to do. For instance, when I told him we wanted a TV connection in our new bedroom, on the new top floor, he did that teeth-sucking thing so many technicians like.

“Ooh, I don’t think I can do that,” he assured me with obvious satisfaction, “the only way I could get a cable in would be by drilling a hole through the window frame. It can’t come through the wall, you know, it’s covered in tiles and if I tried to drill, they'd shatter.”

“What about using that cable, then?” I asked pointing to the cable end sticking out just where we wanted the TV.

“Oh, I don’t know what that’s for. Is it for a satellite?”

“No. It’s the connection the electrician put in for us.”

“Oh! You mean got it put in special, like?” 

The tone was "why didn't you tell me before? Perhaps before getting my hopes up that I'd get away quickly?"

I showed him the other end of the cable, he tested both ends, and lo and behold, it worked. So we have the second TV.

What was good is that I also came round to feed Misty, the cat, for the last time of his cruel separation from us. I was delighted to see that he was already inside the house. He’d been outside before. So he’s mastered the new pet flap! A great relief.

I have to call it pet flap, by the way, because the girls, Luci and Toffee, think it’s a small dog flap and Misty thinks it’s a cat flap, and it doesn’t pay to put any of them out.

They were with me, by the way, the girls. Misty was delighted to see them, so the reunion went swimmingly, as they all gathered on the patio, inspecting the pet flap and each other.

A household reunited

The move itself happened the following day. Danielle realised that this was the fifth time in just seven years we’d used the same Polish removals company, such has been our sad nomadic existence since we reached Luton. This will have been the last, partly because we don’t want to keep bobbing about like that, but partly also because our Poles – the hardest-working, most skilled removals men we’ve ever worked with – have decided to go home. Ah, Brexit, Brexit: the gift that never stops costing.

The manager of the removals team agreed to put up our new bed for us (new bedroom, new bed). But then he decided that he had to go to another job. I suspect that he took a look at the flat pack kit and realised how long it was going to take. 

I didn’t.

IKEA stuff’s not that hard. It’s a bit like the model aircraft kits I used to build as a child: you take it a step at a time and follow the instructions. It’s just that with a bed it takes a tad longer.

Bed-building under way.
Why the carpet? See below

Use a carpet or it will end in tears
Who am I to query Swedish wisdom?

I bet it would have taken our Pole less time than it took me, but that still would have been a few hours. In my able hands it was a five-hour job and left me exhausted. Still, it was eventually done, meaning that we could spend our first night back in the new room, right up at the top, and wake up to a view of a clear blue sky over the tops of the houses behind us.

Satisfaction
No picture of the bed collapsed, because it hasn't. Yet.

What we weren’t able to do, through lateness and tiredness, was make use of the new TV (I told you I’d come back to it). The idea is to be able to watch TV from in bed. That means that when we’re put to sleep by some contemporary fairy tale or another – perhaps something based on the premise that, against all experience, all it takes to be a successful US president is honesty and decency, we wouldn’t have to wake up again to brush our teeth and make our way to the bedroom.

Ingenious, right? Well, we shall test it tonight.

And what about the completeness of the transformation? Well, there are a few minor bits and pieces still to deal with. Like the installation of a fire sprinkler system. The building contractor was adamant we didn’t need one. The building inspector says otherwise. So walls on which the paint has barely dried will have to be channelled out again, for electric power and water. But this time we’re not moving out.

Anyway, when was a building job ever completed without the odd hiccough and setback? Never, you tell me, and I agree. And, after all, I know that soon this too will end.

Transient's diary, weeks 11 and 12

So close and yet so far…

The house is nearly ready. The new bedroom has painted walls as well as a floor and a view.

Blue walls, wooden floors, and a view:
our bedroom just needs a bed

The new bathroom upstairs has bathroom fittings.

New bathroom looking good
If they can replace the leaky toilet
and turn the water back on

Fresh paint is on the walls of the new staircase.

Great pale green staircase
Just needs a carpet

What more could we ask for?

Well, I suppose water in the upstairs bathroom would be good. In the new shower room downstairs, too, come to that. But, hey, we’re nearly there. The stair carpet’s ordered. The new carpet for the living room has already been delivered. And the kitchen was finally finished this morning.

We’re sticking with the removal van’s arrival on Saturday, and that’s that.

Anyway, a rite of passage has occurred. For the first time since we moved out in August, the whole household gathered in the old place, indoors, in daylight, this Sunday. Ever since he’s been on his own in the place, our cat Misty has been most chary about coming indoors: it was a mess and often full of strangers, and few people are stranger than builders. He preferred to keep out of the way, hanging out, we suspect, in a neighbour’s house and only appearing at night, in the garden, when we came to feed him.

But on Sunday, the toy poodles Luci and Toffee were able to get together with him, share the joy of reunion, and start exploring the place.

Gathering of the clans.
Note the new pet flap in the background, being examined

The joy didn’t last too long for Misty. He quickly remembered why he’d always found Toffee an annoyance: she followed him everywhere, pushing him around when she could to try to get him to play with her, or smelling him in inappropriate places. Eventually he retreated behind a ladder and had to defensive action with a paw to keep her away.

Misty chastises Toffee
“Great to see you, but clear off now you irritating little tyke”

Still, at least that too is part of normal life, now close to being re-established. Indeed, it was because of normal life that we were there at all on Sunday: a house must be cleaned and when it has had builders in it for twelve weeks, it needs cleaning on a massive scale.

We were there for ten hours on Sunday (though I would slope off from time to time to walk the dogs). But for Danielle that took her total to 32 hours in three days (the first two of which, sadly, I had to be away on business. In Sicily). And we’ve had two wonderful Polish women put ten hours each. But the pace still isn’t clean.

Ah well. I’m looking forward to moving back in. But I suspect there’ll be a fair dose of purgatory mixed in with the pleasure, at least initially.

Transient's diary, weeks 9 and 10

It may be time to start counting differently. To think “day -12” rather than “week 10”. Our transience is really feeling transient now. Why, we’ve gone so far as to book a removals lorry to get us back, for a week next Friday. We were promised completion by last Friday, but OK, we never really expected that target to be hit. In the end, we’ll be moving back a couple of weeks late. 

What’s more, the project’s a few thousand over budget, but hey, we got a lot more done than we were planning.

Like new floors everywhere. That wasn’t in the original plan, which was a mistake. A design flaw, you might say, not to design for replacing the floor. Now that’s done. The guys even fixed the squeaky floorboard by the door, which turned out to be a squeaky floor joist, which turned out to need one of them to climb down into a gap where he could barely breathe and do whatever you have to do when you replace a squeaky joist by one that doesn’t squeak any more.

Before you become casually judgemental about my utter inability to explain any of the things that they were doing, let me just point out that I’ve made quite a lot of progress in the course of this whole business. If nothing else, I now have some idea what the difference between a joist and a beam is, even if I still don’t know how to fix one. Either one.

Love the green. Shame a lot of the dark shade will be covered by our couch
Sorry – Luci and Toffee the dogs' couch. And the cat Misty's

As well as floors, we now have newly-painted walls. In tasteful colours, too: none of your “white with a touch of primrose” or “white with a touch of sea spray” or what have you. These are proper colours. It means that when people come and stay with us, we’ll be able to say “shall we put them in the brown room or the claret room?” like the gentry of yesteryear. It’ll still be the front room or the back room, but it sounds so much better, doesn’t it?

One of the nice things about the claret room, incidentally, is that it’s the room where we keep our wine – so it’ll contain claret as well as being painted claret (note to self: go out and buy some more claret). That might make it not the best room for our more bibulous friends; or perhaps, on the contrary, absolutely the best.

The other good thing about the colours is the clever strategy we adopted for choosing them. Danielle picks them. She asks me whether I like them. I tell her “yes”, and we’re all happy.

The kitchen’s nearly done now. We actually have water there, and with proper pressure. It was worth having the road coned off again and again for two or three weeks while the water company made up its mind to come and do the work. Well worth it, I say, though I’m not sure the neighbours agree.

Units, sink, stove, tiles, a door - even a cat flap (small-dog flap)
See it down there to the left of the door?

As well as water, we have a stove and an oven and tiles and units and a door to the garden and – I can just picture the delight of the animals – a small dog/large cat flap too. Everything’s really coming together.

That includes our new bedroom. Blue paint on the walls. A lovely view from the wide window, with no scaffolding to block it (did I mention the scaffolding had gone?) and delicate led lights in the ceiling. Which are on all the time, as it happens, since the switch, although firmly installed, doesn’t actually have any effect on the lights. But, you know, an electrician must be allowed the occasional mistake, and he’s superbly qualified to fix it.

The bedroom's starting to look like one. With a view on more than scaffolding
And notice the led lights - permanently on for the moment

We’re looking forward to getting there. In less than a fortnight. My only regret is that the flat we’re renting has one of those pay-as-you-go metres for gas. I put a lot too much money on it. It’s all very well keeping the heating on as much of the time as possible but this is turning out to be a mild autumn, and there’s only so much sweltering we can stand.

Oh well, I suppose leaving rather more gas credit to our successors than I planned, is a price worth paying for getting back home as soon as possible.

I’m looking forward to it. Impatiently.

Transient's diary, weeks 6 and 7

At last, it’s really happening. Things are on the up. There’s beginning to be a glimmer of a hint of a chance of a hope of a prospect of our moving back into our house before long.

The new kitchen has tiles on the floor. It has some kitchen units in place. Why, it even has a new boiler. No water to the boiler (or taps or anything else). No electricity to light the boiler. No gas to light, indeed. But, hey, that can all come in time.

A kitchen taking shape
Note the boiler. Not that it’s working yet or anything

And it’s not just in the kitchen that we have tiles. There are even tiles on the walls of the shower room, and very fine they look too. Of course, no water, electricity or, indeed, water heated by the boiler that’s not yet working either but, again, hey, we shouldn’t ask for too much too soon.

Besides, there’s no shower head.

The shower room has great tiles
Though no shower yet...

xThere’s been even more progress upstairs. The loft no longer looks like a loft at all. It’s beginning to look like a bedroom. As well as the window with its great view (well, OK, mostly of scaffolding for the moment but one can picture the view beyond it), we now have plastered walls and a proper floor.

New room emerging with a fine view of scaffolding
But – en suite doesn’t really mean a bath in a bedroom, does it?

There’s a bath too. I like to think it’s not in the right place – I don’t think ‘en suite’ means actually in the bedroom. Some time they’ll no doubt move it into the little kind of cubile they’ve fashioned next to bedroom – yes, it’s going to be more en-cubicle than en suite, but there’s no room for a real suite under our roof.

It’s all happening, though, isn’t it? The end of the vagrancy beckons. To be capped by a place I’m keener and keener to get back to…

The end is in sight.

The transients' diary: week 3

Every day, I assure myself that the destruction has gone as far as it needs in our house, and now the process of construction can go steadily forward with no more backtracking or regression.

Then I find that something else has gone down. Or been torn up. Or ripped off.

What? What? Where's my roof? Or even my floor?

That’s not to say that there’s been no progress. There has. Things have been built in amongst the continuing demolition. It’s just that the demolition still, for the moment, seems to be outpacing the building.

Ah well, that’ll change. I know that can’t be wrong. 

Can it?

Three weeks gone now. It can’t be more than five to go – as we’ve said before, these projects complete to schedule. 

Don’t they?

In making progress, it’s curious how simple some decisions, how complex others. Not, generally, the way you might expect them to be. I’m reminded of one of the more colourful characters in Shaw’s play, You Never Can Tell, the barrister Bohun:

”… there will be no difficulty about the important questions,” he assures the other characters. “There never is. It is the trifles that will wreck you at the harbour mouth.”

So it proved this very day. A decision about putting in a new water main, ripping up more of the floor to do it? No problem. Investing more money in making sure the water gets to the different places we need it, at sufficient pressure? A few minutes discussion led to a decision to go ahead. Changing our intentions over accessories and units to make the most of that water? Easy.

No, what took the time – an hour and a half of it – was selecting a new cat flap to go in the kitchen. I pick my words with care because he gets terribly upset at any hint that he might be a little larger than he should be, so let me just say that no one would suspect him of anorexia ever. At one point, he managed to rip a cat flap right out of a door.

Well, that door’s going in the new arrangements. So, we need a new cat flap – actually, a small dog flap, as Luci and Toffee have to use it too. This one will not be in a door at all (why cut a hole in a brand new, double-glazed door?) but in the wall next to the far better door with which we’re replacing the old one. Though the construction work is going to increase the room available to us in the house a bit, space will still be at a premium. It isn’t easy to pick a cat flap that will take up a sufficiently small proportion of the wall space we can play with, but still be – again I pick my words judiciously – large enough to accommodate a cat of respectable girth.

It took me an hour and a half to solve that conundrum. To be honest, I’m still not sure the solution will work. We won’t know until the new cat flap turns up and the contractor can compare it with the space available.

As for Misty himself, he seems to be doing reasonably well. We still pop round to see him at least once a day. He’s always pleased to see us, trotting over to be stroked and mewing in loud appreciation as we go over to his shed with a packet of food to refill his bowl.

What most pleased me, though, was to find him inside the house the other day, among the building workers. We thought he was keeping well away from these strangers. But one of them explained to me that he’s taken to stroking Misty when he shows up and making sure he has access to his dry food.

So Misty has a friend and the purgatory that the project implies may have been lightened a little for him.

Good for Misty. I’m looking forward to moving back in and seeing him settle once more into his home. And, of course, use his new cat flap, making all my effort and heart ache entirely worthwhile – as I’m sure he will.

Won’t he?

The transients' diary: week 2

The scaffolding’s up around our house!

Scaffolding up. Execution next

It was a joy to behold. The contractor had to give up on the firm he chose first, the one whose lorry proved unserviceable, and even on the firm he talked to next. But then the third firm he tried came through and they did the job. Just within his timetable for doing it: he’d assured us it had to be this week.

So he’s got no excuse for not hitting his schedule, right? He said the scaffolding had to go up this week. It is up this week.

On the other hand, once they dug up the old bathroom floor, they found all sorts of ghastly stuff underneath. Rotten, it seems. Unstable. All over the place. Happens so often, though, doesn’t it? You start to fix something and you find more things to fix.

Naturally, that rather kills things as far as sticking to budget’s concerned. I just hope we can still meet the timetable...

There’s no doubt in my mind that the success so far has all been down to the encouragement Danielle provides the contractor. It’s wonderful that our temporary accommodation is only ten minutes’ walk from the house. That means she can keep popping in and checking on progress. It must be wonderful for the contractor to know that she’s doing that, and he can count on his client’s constant vigilance.

He must be so pleased.

The other reason we go round at least once a day is to see Misty, our cat. We didn’t want to bring him here, where there’s no cat flap. He’s always enjoyed being able to go in or out at his pleasure.

Catch a mouse outside? He can have a pleasant and invigorating snack.

Fail to catch a mouse outside? He can pop back in through the flap and tank up on dry food instead.

We didn’t feel we could deprive him of that so we left him at home. But it must be a bit of a dismal experience being alone so much of the time. So we go and see him, and also make sure he’s got all the food he needs.

He’s a proud and independent creature. But you can see it’s hurting him to be left alone for so long. And he's living in the shed, with his food bowls in there. Which he must feel is a bit of an indignity.

I don’t know what your problem was, but I was 
happy in the house. Look where I'm living now

The moment we show up he comes trotting over, mewing the whole time – very vocal, he’s become – and rubs himself up against us. Why, he even rubs himself up against the dogs, if we bring them around: in the good old days when we were all under one roof, he’d often get fed up with Toffee and Luci, but these days he’s pitifully happy to see them again.

All very sad.

Hang on in there, Misty! We’re working on it. Why do you think we keep the contractor under pressure? It’s only so we can get back as soon as possible, with our couch, so that all five of us can crowd onto it together to watch some gripping TV series or other.

That’s what transience is all about. Getting it over fast. Returning to normal.

“So why the heck did you move out in the first place?” I can practically hear him saying. Bitterly.

The transients' diary: week 1

It all started when we decided that it would be fun to add some space to our little house, and make it slightly less little. Convert the loft, say, so that we could have three bedrooms – and, hey, luxury, two bathrooms. And how about a bigger kitchen that led straight to the garden? That could be a lot more comfortable.

It would be inconvenient, of course. There’d be noise and dust and the place would be barely inhabitable, but that seemed a price worth paying.

“Barely inhabitable?” said the contractor with what could only be described as a guffaw. “You want to stay here while we’re working? You’re kidding, right?”

“Not a good idea, you think?”

“Listen, pal.” He may not actually have said that – we are the clients, after all, and he wouldn’t be offensive – but the sneer was there by implication. “Barely inhabitable doesn’t cover the half of it. Completely uninhabitable’s a bit closer the mark. We’re going to cut off the gas and the electricity. The water too. And we’ll be working in both bedrooms. No, no, you can forget it. Out you go, I’m afraid. For two months, till we finish.”

Homeless! We’d made ourselves homeless! In pursuit of a more comfortable home.

Oh, life abounds with amusing ironies.

Barely inhabitable

Fortunately, we had friends with a flat to let. So we moved there.

So we’re in a time of transience. Which struck me as worth documenting. If only because it’s slightly different, and therefore potentially more interesting, than mere banal normality.

Oh, wow, that’s so much easier to write than to do…

It’s surprising how much less difference there is than you might imagine, between a small temporary move, and a full-scale permanent one. That’s principally because anything we weren’t taking with us had to be boxed up, or at least covered with dust sheets, if we wanted any hope of still being able to use it when we got back. As for the things we were taking, well that was just like a normal move. We used the same great Polish company we’d already used twice before since we moved to Luton (yep: we’re one just one step away from nomadic living). We prepared and boxed everything for them to take, made sure they had everything with them, and unpacked it all at the other end.

Just as big a job after a five-minute move as after a five-hour one.

The worst bit was getting the sofa up the stairs and into the living room. Both ends had to come off. And then be put back on again. But, hey, it had to be done: it’s where the dogs like to lie during the day, and they need to feel at home in the new environment. 

Don’t they?

The next day the builders moved in. And, as usual, the first step in making the place more attractive was to make it profoundly unappealing. To turn it into a disaster area, in fact.

However, and I have to admit this a perpetual source of amazement to me, within the maelstrom of destruction something constructive began to appear. Within days, a new set of steps appeared. We don’t have our new top floor yet – for the moment, we still have a loft – but we have steps up to it.

They may not go anywhere but, hey, they’re stairs

That’s progress, isn’t it?

Naturally, progress has to pause from time to time. What project doesn’t, after all? Today I learned that the scaffolders’ lorry had failed its emission tests and needed a new engine. That won’t be fitted until Tuesday, so the scaffolding won’t arrive until later next week, instead of last week as planned. But, never fear, the contractor assures me, as long as it does come by then, work can still complete within the two-month schedule.

“The timetable stays the same, does it?” I asked him.

“Oh yes, no problem,” he said, with that nonchalant tone people always adopt when they’re trying to hide the doubts that assail them.

There might be another small problem. The daughter of one of the building workers has been having seizures – “well, she has them all the time, but you know, this time she’s in hospital” – which means her Dad has had to have time off. But the contractor’s still nonchalant about things.

Worryingly nonchalant.

Meanwhile, we’re having trouble adapting to our temporary life. As she was driving us back from badminton today, I had to remind Danielle that she needed to turn left to the flat, and not go straight on to the now uninhabitable house.

“Old habits,” she said as she wrenched the wheel around to enter the side street, “they’re difficult to break.”

That’s certainly true. Later, I took the dogs for a long walk, and didn’t wake up to what I was doing on the drive back until I found myself pulling up in front of our house instead of the flat. I, of course, don’t acknowledge my faults as readily as Danielle does, so I just pretended (to the dogs and to myself, because there was nowhere else present) that I was there deliberately, preferring to park near our house rather than in any old anonymous side street near where we’re staying – though not living.

We’re now at day 6 of our temporary exile. That means there are only 56 more days to go. The plan is to be back in our place by 15 October.

I have confidence in that date. Because the contractor has told me he’ll meet it, so what grounds have I for doubt? Contractors are people for whom it is a point of pride to perform or die, to bring a project in to budget and to schedule against any odds that society or nature throws against them.

Aren’t they?

A poorly educated population: the disadvantages are obvious, but the advantages may be more telling...

It was interesting to hear a senior executive from a building firm telling the BBC that there were 200,000 applications being processed right now for new houses around Britain. As he pointed out, that meant that for the first time since the cry was raised, the country could be poised to build the 200,000 new homes required each year to meet housing needs.

Except that there’s a problem. 

There aren’t enough skilled building workers. So even if every single application were authorised, the houses wouldn’t be built. People will go homeless because we simply don’t have the training structures, the apprenticeships, in place to make the builders available to provide them with homes.

Whatever other problems there may be,
one difficulty in housing is:
a lack of well-trained building workers

Meanwhile, last year the NHS recruited 3000 doctors from abroad. And over 6200 nurses, against nearly 4400 who left this country: the net gain was just 1800. 

Why are we recruiting so many foreign nurses and doctors? Because we simply don’t train enough of our own. In nursing at least, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t: nursing courses are massively over-subscribed and the present government has reduced the available places. The result has been a shortfall of 8000 nurses from within the country.

This leads to all sorts of glorious consequences. Because we don’t train enough of our own people to fill the jobs that need to be done, we have high unemployment and a dependence on benefits that the very government that created it loves to decry. The Conservatives suggest that people can be driven off benefits and into work by cutting benefit levels, as though somehow that would turn the untrained and unskilled into the qualified workforce industry needs.

Meanwhile the inflow of skilled workers from other countries that goes some way to staunch our worst needs has led to a huge rise in xenophobia. The battle cry of the anti-immigrant movement is that many British citizens are unemployed because foreigners have taken their jobs, even though in reality a depressing proportion of the unemployed couldn’t take the jobs in the first place, because they don’t have the training for them.

So we have the spectacle of UKIP, the cheerleader for this kind of xenophobia, denouncing immigration while at the same time looking for the kind of reduction in government which would make it still more difficult to train our people, to their advantage by providing them with a living, and to ours, by filling the posts that need an educated workforce.

Even more shameful, or perhaps shameless, are the politicians on the right of the Conservative Party, supporters of the government that has done so much to deepen the crisis, joining in with the same kind of denunciation of the immigrants who didn’t cause it, but are in fact are mitigating its effects by coming here and doing work that badly needs tackling.

Which brings me to today.

David Cameron, Conservative Prime Minister, announced his plans for education if he is re-elected (or I should say, “elected”: though he emerged as leader of the biggest single party at the last election, he didn’t win a majority). He intends, he told us to great fanfares of publicity, to protect education spending at today’s levels. Sadly, that’s “protection” of much the same kind that the men in fedoras and long overcoats with bulging pockets offer: holding spending at today’s levels means a real cut year after year, in schools that are already struggling to make ends meet.

We saw the same trick in healthcare. Budgets have been “ring fenced”. Hospitals are receiving more than they did when the present government came to power. But that ignores the constant increase in treatment costs and in demand for healthcare. The NHS may have more money than it did, but far too little to make good the extra pressure on its resources.

That’s what will happen to education too if the Tories are returned. Budgets protected in nominal terms, falling increasingly behind in real terms. And a deepening crisis in the mismatch between the available homegrown skill base, the needs of citizens for work, and the needs of us all to see that work done.

What amazes me is that a great many people suffering from the effects of the crisis still seem intent on voting Tory, or even UKIP.

Perhaps that only reflects the problem we have in teaching some of our citizens to understand just how the world really works. So the government that creates the knowledge gap benefits from it in votes. If the Conservatives had ever shown themselves skilful enough to contemplate it, that would leave me wondering whether there wasn’t some method in this apparent madness.