Today I am skulking in the office whilst the men take down the conservatory.  They have come from the other side of the country (although not quite far enough to explain why neither of them can speak English) at the behest of the person that bought it from us at a bargain price providing they had it dismantled.  They arrived in a van that shows all signs of having survived a holocaust by the skin of its teeth, but they are quiet, polite and getting on with the job.  I am hiding away at my wife’s insistence because she knows from bitter experience that I will otherwise find myself labouring for the two much younger, more able workers.  People do not impose on me, nor do I go out looking to get drawn in, it just somehow happens and my wife would rather it didn’t.

As a matter of fact, it is currently quite claustrophobic in here.  Much of the furniture from the conservatory is stacked up around me along with boxes that have been removed from elsewhere to accommodate ex-orangery gew-gaws.  The old glasshouse is now a roofless, unglazed skeleton, like a long-forgotten beached whale.  The men are picking over its bones with a startling variety of electric tools as, piece by piece, it is reduced to a carefully labelled Lego kit.

We have three weeks looking out at its sad remains before the builders arrive to tidy it up and build something new and shiny in its place.  In the meantime, with the the tiled floor and stud-walls remaining in place, we have the problem of keeping the adjoining bungalow dry.  It has not rained for weeks, but today the rain is biblical and the ‘unsettled outlook’ is likely to persist for weeks.  We have enough sandbags to create a beach and sufficient tarpaulin to cover a football pitch, nevertheless we both know that over the next 21 days much of what should remain outside will almost certainly find its way inside and the builder – whose delay has caused this sorry state of affairs – will look at the walls when he finally arrives, suck his teeth and say, ‘that plaster will have to come off.’

We have used him before and he was brilliant.  He has promised my wife it will all be ‘pretty as a picture’ when he’s finished, so he’ll just get on with it and we will, once again, be forced to skulk away in my office whilst the building proceeds, because it is relatively dry, has electricity and (unlike the bungalow) all four walls.  We have an air-fryer, a microwave, a kettle and sufficient body-fat to last several weeks, so we should be ok.  The dishwasher sprung a monumental leak some weeks ago but, as the kitchen was close to being gutted, was not repaired or replaced, so the issue of washing the pots in a plastic bowl will not be anything new to us.

When we bought our very first house, forty five years ago, we spent every available hour doing it up, prior to moving in.  My wife painted whilst I wallpapered, wired and plumbed (the depths mainly).  There were no Youtube instructional videos back then (actually, no internet) so it was all done on a very much suck it and see basis: if it didn’t fall down, flood the kitchen or catapult me across the room when I turned it on, all was well.  We had just a kettle to keep us going, so we drank a lot of tea and ate a lot of Pot Noodles.  That time may well come again.  I would love to say that I will embrace it, but I am really not so sure.  Pot Noodles were really quite exotic way back then, in the days when the crispy noodles atop a Vesta Chow Mien were as close to haute cuisine as we could possibly imagine.  Microwave ‘ready meals’ were not really a thing, but they are now, so we face the dilemma: something that looks and tastes like the bottom of a hamster’s cage with sauce, or over-salted veggie lasagne in a portion size that would almost satisfy an anorexic woodlouse… providing it had already eaten the Pot Noodle.

We’ll see.  The kitchen situation will arise in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I have other things to occupy me.  Time has passed since I started to write and the conservatory currently lays in pieces all around the garden while the men try to work out how to fit some of the five metre sections into a three metre van.  It will, they assure me, be gone by tomorrow.  We have some time before fridge/freezer/oven/hob/washing machine/dishwasher are laid to rest.  Replacements will arrive at the end of an extended period of knocking down and building up, after which, I imagine, my Pot Noodle days may well be locked away forever.  The chances of me living long enough to ever do this again are, thankfully, very slim…