WATER BORED (1)

So there we were, having the bathroom converted, when a van rolls up unannounced from the utilities company and starts digging a ruddy great hole outside the kitchen window...

The stop tap outside which services the entire row of houses needs replacing, it seems. It's a scheduled job, they say, and I ought to have known that they were coming because of the blue "X" which has been painted upon the metal access cover by a person or persons unknown at some point during the last whenever.

There's a secret code, it would appear... A blue cross means that someone will be turning up without warning and digging a hole fairly soon, it seems.

I was more than a little miffed, to be honest, not least because they shattered the paving stone, went away leaving a ruddy great hole and a load of debris, and also left me full of the sort of irritation of knowing that if I had known they were coming, I might never have scheduled my own building work to coincide with such an intrusive, invasive and irritating event.

However, I also immediately started to have one of those terribly British worries - that all of my neighbours would be massively inconvenienced by this and would then put two and two together and make twelve,  assuming, quite erroneously, that this development must have something to do with the various builders and tradesmen who have been traipsing in and out of my own back door this past couple of weeks.

Worse still, I had to go out for part of the evening and had visions of many of them coming home from their various working days and tutting sternly at this unexpected and unexplained excavation, and being put back at the very top of the social pariahs list without having any opportunity to defend myself.

When I did eventually get home myself, I was, at least, able to knock at next door's door and explain that I had no knowledge of what it was all about, using as my excuse to call round, the old ploy of wondering whether they'd had a notification letter which I had somehow failed to receive.

Happily, having just arrived home herself, my neighbour hadn't even noticed the hole as yet, so I was able to demonstrate its awful presence with a less than impressive "voila" in the manner of a less than impressive prestidigitator...

Still, at least I got the chance to explain the situation and weedle out a half-hearted "It's not my fault..." before the debate got really started.

In the morning I overheard one end of  the conversation as she rang the number written upon the big yellow portable fence, and she seemed far less happy with them about it, and being fobbed off with the old "Data Protection Issues" mantra when she tried to find out more.

Our own enquiries gleaned little more. They've replaced a stop tap in the "communal area" at the back of the house because "somebody" had reported a fault. It will, they say, be completed within 5 working days and the area will be made good so they should put everything back as they found it, slab repair included.

Later on that same morning, a second crew arrived to shift the rubble left by the first crew, stack the yellow fence parts, and managed to go away again without a word and leaving a partially filled-in ruddy great hole (with no slab on it) for (presumably) some third crew to come along and fill in.

Weirdly, I think that the rubble they cleared away might have included the original Victorian paving slab pieces which will be a bugger to match and which they might very well have known were there if they'd been part of the original excavation crew, but I suppose that's not for me to say...