Self control

I can tell you tonight that the mess in the living room is proceeding nicely.

It is not the sort of mess that comes from knocking the back of the house down yet. That mess comes later. At the moment it is the sort of mess that comes from having a house that is full of several fitted kitchens, none of which are fitted to anything, and all of which are piled up in the living room and conservatory.

We worked late last night, and hence were not properly awake when my brother rang this morning. He is not going to come and help us demolish and rebuild the back of the house this week, but might have a day or two to spare in a week or two.

We were not very disappointed by this because knocking your house down is not something that you want to rush into. You need to think about it carefully and decide which bits you are not going to need.

Not long after he phoned, Number One Son-In-Law rang. He was going to come and take out a fitted kitchen from the holiday village but is stuck on an oil rig and so he can’t.

We were inspired to suggest that we could extricate, and then look after their kitchen for a couple of weeks and perhaps when he came up to collect it he might help us knock the back of our house down, by way of exchange.

He agreed to this, at which point we realised that we might really be able to do it.

This is no small thing I can tell you. From being a vague daydream inspired by looking at pictures of other people’s houses-with-holes-in, it is suddenly a possible future.

This is a bit scary.

Once Mark had gone off to carry on taking kitchens out, my job of the day was to ring Building Control.

I have been putting this off.

I do not like talking to the council any more than I absolutely must. This is because of my long-standing and mutually mistrustful relationship with their taxi licensing inspectors, whose role in Windermere is to appear with a bang and a puff of green smoke whenever you are doing something that you should not.

In fact I rather like the incumbent licensing officers, who are broadly civilised and sensible to talk to. We have had some horrors in the past, but I have been a taxi driver for so long now that I have outlasted them all. In my very first interview for a taxi licence the then chap in charge asked me the sequence of traffic lights, and I was so blindly terrified by him that the only thing I could remember was that Tufty Says At The Kerb Halt.

He rolled his eyes and told me that I needed to brush up on my Highway Code, but he gave me a licence all the same.

I have tended to think of all council officials in the same way. They are to be avoided under every possible circumstance, and I did not want to ring Building Control, who are like taxi licensing officers for builders.

My brother, who knows about building things, said that somebody had got to ring Building Control before we knocked the house down. He explained that it did not have to be the council, if I really objected to the Civil Service, because there are some freelance Building Controllers who are self employed, and you can ring one of them.

I liked this idea much better.

People who do not work for the council are always much more enthusiastic than people who do.

People who work for themselves are the easiest sort to talk to. They are used to deciding for themselves whether they want to get up in the morning. I can trust people like that.

Today proved to be no exception.

I spoke to a very nice freelance building controller, who had decided to get up and earn himself a living.

I explained that we were contemplating making a hole in our house.

He said that he thought that would be all right. All we had to do was give him some money and then we could tell him what we were doing and get on with it, and he would tell us not to if he thought it was dangerous.

That seemed to me to be a splendid way of earning a living, I wish I had listened at school. Imagine making a couple of hundred quid just for telling people they could do things that they were going to do anyway.

He said that we would have to tell him that we were going to use beams that were not going to collapse under the weight of the house, which I thought would probably be a good idea, good job he thought of that one. Also he explained that there is a rule which says that we might have to put some more insulation in the loft so that the house would not get cold if the new doorway was draughty.

Sometimes the world is a difficult place to understand. If there is an icy wind howling in through a hole in your living room wall then it really does not matter how many quilts you have got nailed to the roof four floors above it. Your living room is going to be cold.

Absolutely, I said, cravenly. How brilliant of you to think of that.

He was a jolly nice chap, and did not give the impression of glowering and sucking his teeth the way everybody from the council does even if all you want to do is pay for your parking permit.

We have not given him any money yet, mostly because we have not got any, but if we are really going to do this then we had better start getting organised.

It might actually be going to happen.

Whilst I was faffing about at my desk talking to Independent Building Control an email arrived.

It was from Gordonstoun.

They had got some interesting news. They are going to open a brand new branch of Gordonstoun in China next year.

Mark fell about laughing when I told him. He said that it was probably an insurance Plan B in case Jeremy Corbyn gets in and makes all the schools close, because it will be easier to be a British public school in Communist China than in the UK.

I do not talk about politics in this diary, but I do not mind you knowing that secretly I am hoping very much that Jeremy Corbyn does not become Prime Minister and close all of the public schools. I do not want to have to send Oliver to Communist China to go to school, especially not if it is because they are more liberal there than we are here.

It is a long enough drive in the camper van as it is.