Friends have announced that they are having builders in. One beseeches them to change their minds, but in vain. Kevin Myers writes.
For wisdom cannot be retained, only forgotten. Each morning Plato would ask the young Aristotle: "What was I going on about yesterday?" And the young A would reply: "Dunno boss, haven't a clue." This is the human condition, which explains the continued existence of builders.
Nobody who has had builders in would ever freely allow the experience to recur. I recollect friends in Belfast whose builders arrived in October, demolished the entire rear wall of the house, erected a large plastic sheet, and then left, saying they'd be back next day. They actually returned in April. In the intervening months, the house came to resemble Stalingrad, but without the charity one associates with that little affair.
My friends spent the long winter wrapped in old newspapers and gnawing on the bones of migrating moose they had trapped in the Alaska of their kitchen.
Experience of builders should prevent anyone from ever putting on another wing, installing double glazing, or erecting a conservatory. The recollections of builders' veterans usually cause them to lie palely awake through the night, gazing at the ceiling with tormented halibut-eyes until just before dawn, when sleep finally arrives. At which point, the god of builders arrives and cascades his evil honeydew upon his victim: a tincture of optimism there, a small dose of stupidity there, and the stardust of amnesia everywhere. Dracula wasn't a vampire, but a builder's deity.
So dawn, and the exhausted homeowners wake, now bewitched by the notion of calling in the builders, again. Appointments are made for contractors to come and give an estimate for some wholly unnecessary job, and on the appointed day, the homeowners wait. And wait. And wait. Thus their apprenticeship into how their relationship with builders will henceforth be.
Now, it's not widely known that there is a corner of the Toyota assembly line which is reserved solely for making pick-up trucks for Irish builders, all with identical specifications. Even new, they must be decrepit, with a single wobbly wheel and a half-flat tyre, giving them the directional stability of a one-legged duck on ice. Such trucks must be white and have no windscreen-wipers, indicators or brakes. The driver is standard issue too: lop-sided spectacles, mouth agape, and an ancient tweed cap, which he scratches in perpetual bemusement.
Our builders' driver sets off in his brand new battered old truck, managing a rather hesitant speed of 40kph as he slowly wonders if he should turn left, or right, or do a u-turn, or, I don't know, maybe just stop. So he does a little bit of everything. In the back of his truck, he has an uncovered heap of gravel and sand, several of his former clients' buckets and spades, and on top a long, unflagged ladder protruding several feet front and rear. If he comes to a Garda road-block, he is certain to be waved right through, scattering sand and gravel as he goes, possibly with a kicking cyclist or two impaled on his ladder.
Do these trucks have particular destinations? Or do they just stop whenever they see a building site and offer whatever it is they have in the back? And does the builder just take what is on offer regardless of whether or not his client has asked for it, or whether it even fits? Probably. Because builders' clients - now possessing the individual willpower of the living dead - will usually take anything that the builder installs; moreover, anything can be made to fit with a hammer, if only the once.
You can always spot the clients. They look like Silesian refugees in 1945, dressed in rags, with bits of cloth wrapped around their frostbitten hands. They're usually huddled before their tent in the front garden, beside the rubble where the prize-winning roses used to be, making tea for the builders on a Primus stove. They originally only wanted a small kitchen fan installed, but one thing led to another, as it does once you allow builders over your threshold, and now the house is being moved six inches backwards, for no reason that anyone can now remember.
"Oh look," says the foreman cheerfully. "The roof's on fire. Well, that's that. No point in calling the fire brigade. We'll just have to put on a new roof. Never mind. It'll only add twenty thousand to the bill. Ah well. Time to be off. See you tomorrow."
"See you tomorrow": the builders' equivalent of airport security announcing that you are going to be given a thorough cavity search - "for your own good." It is no more for your own good than you will see them tomorrow. You'll be lucky to see them again this year. Now bend over.
With the builders gone, our famished, wizened little Silesians wander forlornly around their former home. Their Victorian mahogany chairs made splendid firewood for the lads working indoors, and the matching table proved to be a steady platform for the ceiling-plasterer in his hobnailed boots. There are hundreds of teabags everywhere and scores of ancient milk cartons churning out streptomycin from their multicoloured contents.
The precious Persian carpet is now cushioning a load of bricks, and - look! - the lucky homeowners can see the stars from the basement, which wasn't always the case.
Will they learn from this? Well, in about five years' time, Dracula will kiss them one dawn, and they'll wake up with the brilliant notion of installing a new shower unit. They're doomed. Silesia, 1945, beckons yet again.