SaveNovember 8^th

A Scotsman, an Irishman and a Pole come onto a building site...From three directions they came, one in a car, one on foot and one in a van - to look, shake their heads, discuss, laugh. What is that joist holding up? Oh look, those bricks below the floor are post-war...they must have been shoring up the walls from below (not very well, if you ask me!). What happens if we...But could we...? This is going to cost you, says the Irishman, the structural engineer. We turn to look at the Pole, who grins. Make him give you the best options, he says, pointing at the Scotsman (the architect). I turn the proposed layout he has brought this way and that but the rooms as they will be are becoming unimaginable, and as they were, irrecoverable. This is what they look like now, one of them anyway.

10^th November

Site meeting with the builder and Sabrina Budalica, who has come to cast an architectural eye. She has looked sceptically at the plans the other architect drew up and instantly found flaws – along the lines of ‘what cowboy done this, then?’ She is absolutely right. ‘If you put the loo in the shower room where this guy suggests, your knees will hit the wall, and if….’ And so on. The builder says to me, ‘Go with your friend. Her ideas are better.’

Then he has another idea. ‘What if we move the partition between the two bedrooms and support the floor above with an RSJ going right the way across? Then it doesn’t matter where the partition is and you can increase the width of the shower room.’ (Am I getting too technical here?). We agree, although my friend has a cavil. It will be a very long RSJ. How will you get it into the room?

Builder laughs. We are Polish. His workers laugh too but immediately look pre-emptively tired.

Then we discuss how interesting it is that when whoever it was, post-war, who put in the low brick walls to shore up the floors they simply followed the undulating surface of the earth ground beneath. No one, when the house was originally built, or subsequently, had ever thought to make that surface level. So the supporting bricks went up and down; the joists resting on them followed, and the floors on those too. No wonder the floors slope, lower at each end than in the middle - side to side and front to back. Rather like the camber of a road, except in a road there is a purpose to it: for the rain to run off. Were they expecting it to rain in the house? Erm...
Anyway, we are now going to level off the floors. Doubtless the entire building will collapse.

November 5^th

I could see fireworks last night in one direction from the upstairs flat’s living room window, and in the other from the kitchen window at the back. Roofs were of course in the way but the fireworks, rather fine ones I must say, whistled and leapt and crackled above their tops from various neighbours’ gardens. I was impressed, and glad to watching from inside.

This morning, looking down into the garden from this first-floor height, I watched a pair of foxes, fully grown but still inclined to play. They pretended to fight fallen leaves (ah yes, still those leaves), and chased one another through the shrubs and flowers I have planted. Then one of them bounced to the back fence and with the exuberance of a small child seeing a newly-made bed as a direct challenge, lifted a corner of turf and tossed it to one side. Yippee! Something must be done.

I went online and looked up various relatively expensive fox-repelling gadgets including one you plunge into the ground (always supposing the ground will let you) with a sensor that upon detecting any movement in the garden directs a jet of water all over the source of the movement. The reviews gave many stars but not enough for the layout, and the faff. The gadget has to be permanently connected to a hose that has to be permanently turned on and the 9 volt battery doubtless has to be continually replaced. After all, if the gadget is doing its job it will be turning on and off half the night and early morning. There must be something simpler.

My local garden centre, a few minutes’ walk away, sells plastic mesh. I bought a square metre of it and a bag of metal garden staples about 6 inches long. Now the furthest corner of the not so newly-laid turf (yet still not rooted) is pegged down. How will the foxes view it? Have I thrown down a plastic-meshed gauntlet?

6 November

Three large men in an extremely large van showed up this morning with a huge cable of some sort on a turntable, a power jet and, although I didn't actually see it, a CCTV camera - all of it to investigate the drain that runs underground from the back of the building where my new flat is, to the front. Two of the men stayed in the van - to ward off traffic wardens, or because it was cold, I'm not sure.

The one who came in, Gary, was a tad alarmed that it was so hard to move around in the flat, and because the builders were not here today (every available Pole was helping unload a giant glass door trucked over from Poland for another job), the temporary downstairs entrance was screwed shut. This is a precaution I have seen this company use before, and it's a wise one because their tools are in the building - and tools are eminently stealable. So poor Gary had to haul everything up the stairs to main entrance and then down again where every step could have been his last.

I left him to it. After a while he rang the doorbell of the upstairs flat and announced that although one spur of the drains had been blocked (no longer is) the actual drain is in good nick. This is the first thing we have discovered so far that is. Next step: join the pipes coming down from all over the house to the drains below ground. Some of us lead such exciting lives.

7 November

Interesting things I found out today while the builders were (are) making a racket downstairs. 1. The drains people sent their report which shows that the waste pipes never were connected to the main drain that leads to the sewer. Hm. 2. I went down to the local Camden Archive in Holborn and learned that in 1957, when the responsible authority was the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, Gaisford Street was in a clutch of streets known as the Christ Church Estate. This was because Christ Church College Oxford owned the houses on the streets - since when I do not know. (I do know, though, that many Oxford Colleges made their money that way - do they still?)

It seems that various individuals who were the college's tenants were actually subletting as rogue landlords...in today's way of putting things. There was overcrowding and much insanitary living. The Council at the time (according to the minutes of meetings I read) decided this would not do and applied to make compulsory purchases of individual properties which were not well-maintained because ultimately the council would anyway find itself responsible for the people who had to be moved out, for reasons see above. Applications were made to the Exchequer for funds to repair and convert the houses into flats. Mine was one of the first.

I also learned that in 1883 a wood engraver by the name of Robert Brooke Utting lived at my address, when it was a house. Did he own it or just lodge there? Or squat? No idea. And here's something that really took my attention. About half way down the road, opposite the Lion and Unicorn pub, is a larger, double-fronted building called Northumberland House, now all council flats. But in 1910 it was a 500-seat cinema and variety show venue, originally called the Kentish Town cinema, and later the Gaisford. It stayed a cinema until 1960, when it had been part of the Odeon chain. And also, up and down the street there used to be a number of schools for young ladies.

If this building had been in good nick when I bought the flat I would never have found all this out. Silver lining, anyone?

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.

The mess under the floors of my flat is actually rather funny. Never mind that four storeys of wall are supported by a few thin and bending floorboards with no joists beneath them. Where there are some joists they haven't been screwed in place or buttressed or even nailed. So you can toe them from place to place. And cut very shallowly into the tops is a tangle of old gas and water pipes. Any builder thinking to nail on floorboards above would either flood the place or set it on fire. The various extremely young and polite Poles who are dismantling all this cannot believe what they are seeing. But something is the matter with them. I have yet to hear one of them say, 'kurwa.' I think it must be shock.

30 October

There’s been a good package on the radio this morning from the Polish town of Lodz, all about why young Poles are returning from the UK where they have working very hard and in droves (and multiple professions) for some years. Why? I discuss all this with my builders’ boss. ‘s according to the programme, I tell him, it’s because the Polis economy is on the up – a great beneficiary of EU membership (mm, he says); because the Brexit vote has made them feel unwelcome and uneasy (mm, he says); because after that vote the pound has weakened so what you earn in the UK no longer gives you as much at home with which ultimately to build your new house (and who is better skilled at doing that than many of you are?). Mm he says, and then shakes his head. ‘This is not the reason.’ ‘It isn’t?’ ‘No. They are leaving because they hate the British weather.’ Come again? Poles hate British weather? But Poland is cold and murky and dark and…’No no no. In Poland winter is winter and summer is summer. But here, nothing is anything.’ He has a point. After all, Poland has climate. We don’t. We have weather, which is (partly) why we talk about it or at least use it as a conversation opener. Who’d bother doing that if the weather was for the most part doing day by day what it was meant to do?

31 October

Conversation with Polish builders, prompted by the extraordinary tangle of pipework under the floors. I likened this to Cat's Cradle. Do you have the same game in Poland, I asked. The boss remembered playing it at school but not what it's called. The younger ones, Rafal, Bartek, and the two Karols looked bemused. Of course, scoffed the boss. They just played computer games. They agreed that was true although one of them had a vague memory of other people playing the game. But as to its name?....

1 November

We knew that the lower ground floor of my flat was damp, especially at the back. There can be many reasons for this but we have just discovered a big one. At the back was a lot of decking, which has just been removed. Underneath is the drain where rain water would go. The pipe that runs down from the roof for the rain water, and into which the kitchen of the flat upstairs is also plumbed (sink, dishwasher and washing machine) doesn't connect with any drain. It simply pours out all over the ground outside the back of my flat with nowhere to go except into the walls of the bedroom and my little study. I said it was funny, didn't I?

The turf-layers were most precise. The turf must be kept watered (it began raining more or less the moment the half Pole had fixed the mains supply to an outside tap), and leaf free. But no feet must touch the grass because imprints will be left as if in wet concrete (really?). What do do?

In my shed I have a number of boards that once were bookshelving. If I lay one on the grass, taking care to keep all my weight only on it, all will be well. I can balance and crouch and bend and lift whichever offending fallen leaf is within reach. I then need to sling another board to a different place and leap between them to gather the next lot of leaves. It seems unbelievably silly and is a lot of fun. Next year, when de-leafing to this pernickety degree presumably won't be necessary, it can be a good grandson game. How many leaves can they pick up without their feet touching the grass? If it weren't for the dangers of having to traverse the building site that is my flat to get to the garden, it could keep them busy all this half-term. Pity.

And before anyone asks, I pre-emptively stored the bookshelf boards out of the shed and under the garden table because the shed is, of course, the further side of the new lawn. 

I now understand the reason for sweeping the endlessly falling leaves from my grass. Its mindless repetitiveness is a form of meditation, made indispensable by what is being revealed indoors. Inadequate floor joists, mould, heating pipes propped on random bits of timber, walls wedged up with chunks of plywood. All of it, I am guessing, the excellent standard of building work produced by the contractors the council once employed. More leaves tomorrow. That is a certainty.