The building next door is having a face-lift. They started putting up and bolting in the scaffolding just before the Christmas break and they only stopped on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. The drilling and scraping starts at eight am sharp and goes on all day long. It’s particularly tiresome as the vibrations from all the activity cause loud reverberations throughout our building and particularly in our flat as it shares a common load-baring wall with the neighbours. A bit of a nightmare when you are stuck in a flat for over a fortnight with two toddlers who need periodic naps.

Between our two buildings is a light well that our kitchen and bedroom windows give onto. The blank, six storey cliff of a wall that faces us has been deemed to be a structural part of the building next door and so is being tackled by a few workers in harnesses and climbing gear who rappel down in the morning for work and then presumably winch themselves up in the evening. These guys no doubt are climbers who have found payed employment doing what they like best – swinging in high places – and they seem to have lost nothing of their free spirit DNA by joining civvy street. In fact in this case I’m certain they know they are on to a cushy deal as they are away from the rest of the crew and, more particularly, out of sight of the foreman. They spend their days half way up the wall dangling from a rope, telling rude jokes and smoking copious amounts of pot… something that I find hilarious and has taken the edge off things a bit.