2 November

Ahaha. Does anyone fancy an update? Three Poles worked like crazy today digging out the floor of the lower ground floor, which is now a pit of earth with the partition dividing the two rooms stripped to wooden staves with nothing in between. In time even this will go while we decide where the partition should ultimately be. Joists that supported nothing (because they were broken) lie askew, and to the side the wall that stands between the rooms and the corridor, also almost entirely unsupported, floats above what is left. The builder boss was standing on a corridor floorboard when it suddenly crunched under his (not inconsiderable) weight. Luckily he didn't have far to fall. He bent and picked up the miscreant board. It crumbled in his fingers, eaten to a friable wafer by woodworm. Side by side, its equally honeycombed compatriots lie waiting to crumble. Good thing we have decided to remove the lot.

Outside, the small front garden and the pavement beyond the low railings are covered by bags of rubble, boards, earth and general dug out rubbish. Then all of a sudden it has all gone, loaded in a few moments onto a truck that seemed only to pause to ingest the lot before grinding away. Behind it the three Poles have swept the garden clean and then, would you believe it, washed the pavement.

What will tomorrow unveil?

3 November

There's a lot of careful clock-watching going on. One of my next-door neighbours is a psychiatric nurse at St George's in Tooting. She's on nights at the moment, and in the way of night-shifts organised by the NHS these are unpredictable - guaranteed to damage the worker's health. So every evening Bartek (he of the damaged elbow now recovered) asks me whether they are allowed to work noisily next day, and every day I email young Clare to ask her when she will need to be sleeping. Inevitably her room is next to the bit the Poles are so energetically demolishing. Today they have license to make a racket (and they are) until 9 am. Then again after midday.

I can think of nothing worse than having to deal with deeply disturbed people all night after a day of no sleep. I did go to an audiologist to get a recommendation for the best possible ear plugs that one can sleep in, and bought them, but I cannot believe that any ear plugs keep out the sound of a kanga hammer on concrete.

As luck would have it she won't need to be sleeping tomorrow afternoon, but tomorrow afternoon  - it being Saturday - there will be no Poles anyway.

In the hour before silence was imposed to let a sleeping Clare lie the Poles did something to something downstairs that made the entire building shudder and possibly, in waves of sympathy, all the adjoining terraced houses from Kentish Town Road at the bottom to Bartholomew Road at the top. I have no idea what it was. Great clouds of dust seeped upwards in contravention of the laws of physics, at least as I understand them, and floated out into the borough. Then the noise stopped. Had they been felled by what they themselves had demolished? Had they knocked down more than they were supposed to and were cowering against the arrival of the boss who has his unforgiving moments? No idea. But after a while (it was sunny so I sat myself on the tiny roof terrace of the upstairs flat and kept trying to peer down) I saw them in their face masks, grey all over from the debris, hair clogged, traipsing in and out.

I had discovered, when I tried to go down and get in, that the place was un-enterable. And in case someone is about to say there is no such word, there is now. The inside of my usual front door had been covered in thick plastic sheeting fixed down to prevent the dust from going into the shared corridor outside that is going to have to be steam-cleaned come the day anyway. If the day comes. So up I went again. What was nagging me was not what was going on in my flat but the existential need to sweep leaves. They are fewer each day but the lawn rules say that the leaves must be removed and lawn rules can no more be brooked than can a Polish builder’s boss.

From the kitchen window I saw Bartek the deputy. I hammered on the window until he looked up and gestured that I needed to come down. By the time I had got there he had undone the plastic. But then…how to get out? There are no longer any floors – at all. Just joists spaced rather far apart and not in the best of health. The floor a storey down (beaten earth) looks far away. Is far away because it has been dug deeper than its original depth. There is nothing to hold onto. With Bartek muttering, Be careful, be careful through his face mask I edged across. Below me I sensed the flapping of multiple hands as the workers watched, fearful (or silently derisive) until I reached the door to the balcony. At least that is still in one piece. 

The leaves are swept.