ROOF OFF

There is something decidedly alarming about having the roof taken off your house, even if it is supposed to be for the long term benefit of improving its general condition and making it a better, less moist, place to live. But it’s especially alarming to be having it done during the depths of winter when the frost or the rainstorms or a howling gale could come at any moment.

Rather naturally, because it’s me, the rainstorms, frosts and howling gales waited until exactly the moment when the slates were nicely stacked up in piles at the front of the house, and therefore no longer capable of keeping the raindrops from falling on my head whilst I was still indoors, before arriving en masse, and then refusing to let up ever since.

Hoorah!

This then leads to all sorts of worries and stresses which you never really expected. You find yourself staring at the sky from time to time and wondering quite what the weather’s going to bring, you start to ponder about which of your precious paper based collections and documents are filed away under the most vulnerable parts of the house, and, perhaps most weirdly of all, you find yourself listening out for strange and unusual noises which might imply a leak or a loosening or a thief in the night flitting away with those carefully numbered and catalogued slates which make up the jigsaw puzzle of your home’s weatherproof lid.

Since the thing has been stripped down to whatever those Victorian builders considered to be the basic structure of roofwork, I’ve not actually seen the place in daylight either, so all I can do is arrive home and wave a torch in the general direction of where my roof was in the vague hope that instead of wooden laths or shiny polythene I will merely see the comforting light absorbing matt blackness of a roof restored.

Other things that start the worry wheel spinning in the wee small hours, of which I have seen many during the time the work’s been continuing (I am, after all, a perennial worry-wort…), is the money running out before they get to the stage of actually putting the roof back on.

You know the sort of thing… “I’m sorry, Mr H, but we’ve come across another little problem that you really ought to consider dealing with…”

Keep writing the cheques and, above all, keep on smiling…

However, it’s not only that which is keeping me awake at all hours, but every noise, every scratch, or scrape or (God help us) drip, even if it’s only coming from the tap downstairs in the kitchen, tends to leave you believing that there are massive holes up there where the water’s pouring through and that the whole lot’s going to come in at any moment. Every time it starts to rain and the water drops lash against the windows, or the polythene where the tiles used to be, is another booming reminder of just how vulnerable everything indoors actually could be and that you might be leaping into action to spend half the night rearranging precious valuables and empty buckets and basins just to catch whatever rainwater you can, or mopping furiously and sobbing quietly to yourself after a long session of rediscovering ways of swearing and ranting which you thought you’d long forgotten or perhaps didn’t know that you ever even knew.

The birds don’t help. At least, I think it’s the birds… Scraping and scratching and looking for bugs and grubs and poking their beaks through the plastic before flying off with the spoils to make nests with it.

But then, well, the birds don’t tend to fly at night, do they? So… What the hell was it exactly which was walking across my roof at four-thirty in the morning, scratching their way around and rolling pebbles off the apex and into the gutters…?

I lay awake for hours listening to all sorts of things moving about up there, and the occasional rolling of a pebble, or footstep, or squeaking of a wheelbarrow can turn into all sorts of criminal activity or unfolding disasters in my mind, because I simply do not like feeling so vulnerable, or being dependant upon the whims of others, in order for the cocoon that makes up my little world to feel safe, secure and snug again.

Of course it was probably just the edges of the sheets of polythene flapping about…

That’s what I convinced myself that it was by the arrival of last weekend…

But then the gales came, and the rainstorms, and there were still no slates on my roof and it all started to get just a little bit scary…

By that stage I was barely sleeping at all. Those dripping taps from the kitchen which I’ve consistently failed to address would continue conjure up desperate images of the ceiling pouring in water all over my precious collections of old magazines and I spent each subsequent night hopping in and out of bed like a yoyo whenever I thought I heard anything, or else lying there listening or thinking about every possible “worst case scenario” under the sun.

When I finally gave up and got up to face the pitch darkness of another morning, all bleary-eyed and yawning, my spirits were not high, and it was still raining, and there were still no slates on my roof, and I had to head off to work and spend the entire day wondering about what water-damaged disasters might possibly await me by the time I got home.

And people ask me why I procrastinate about “getting things done…”