BUILDERS (2)

I'm sorry if I keep on returning to this notion, but I regularly start to convince myself that this particular blog is doomed. Never more so than in recent times when it's just become increasingly difficult to get much in the way of "keyboard time" as the chaos of everyday life swirled around me.

Some days I just wonder whether I'm going to get any chance at all to it myself down and do anything more than splurge out a few thoughtless words, and on some mornings I wonder whether I'll even manage to to that.

Then there's the tricky little matter of having so much thinking going on inside my head that, perhaps with an irony that has yet to hit me, I can't think of anything to actually write about.

At least, nothing that I would imagine would have been of any actual interest to anybody else...

Take, for example, the other day.

I idly decided that, given the amount of "add-ons" that had accumulated with the building work that was being done on the rickety hovel that we refer to as "Blogfordshire Towers" it might be worth just asking what the current running total might actually be, before I committed us to yet another additional bit of work that had revealed itself to be, if not exactly imminently necessary, then certainly on the agenda.

The answer kind of floored me, and, having texted the beloved with the dreadful news, ranted to various people about it and (because this is the nature of modern life) Tweeted about it afterwards:

Today it turns out that I forgot the "Grand Designs" first rule of building budgeting: Assume everything will double, and then add the VAT.

I then found out that there had been some kind of misunderstanding which meant that the eight or nine hours of bowel-cramping anxiety and running around wondering what we were going to do without any savings left, and where the hell I was going to find the extra cash to pay for the work that was still in progress, that I had put myself through had all been pointless and that things were still pretty much in the ball-park of our initial expectations.

Which only goes to show that, when someone uses a phrase like "about twelve" it's probably wise to make sure that you're both talking about the same thing, and to know which units they are working in.