Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

Fantastic to hear that you and C met up and quaffed. I'm of course, jealous and not a little miffed as I was planning to spring him on you as a surprise at the nuptials. No matter, we shall drink like depraved beats (I meant 'beasts' but that Freudian keystroke gives me ideas. Let's drink jug wine, eat Benzedrine inhalers and howl shite poetry until we collapse).

All in all it's been a pretty invigorating month here. I have been interviewing builders.

You are imagining, I expect, a scene from 'The Draughtsmans's Contract'. I stand on a low hillock in my commodious estate, with a scroll in one hand and a brass telescope in the other, discussing the placement of haha and grotto with a chap called something like 'Capability'. How wrong you are.

Let me describe for you, a day 'on site'. This will enable me to limn for your betterment, sketches of the principal types of London builder.

11.38 am

Barry was a type now rarely seen in the Metropolis as they have all taken the proceeds of generations of low-grade extortion and invested in mighty time-share empires on the Costa Brava. Usually a 'Loverble Cockerney' or 'Agreeable Oirishman', these men share a genetic disability when it comes to answering a mobile phone.

If I'm charitable, I might posit that their giant spatulate fingers can't operate the answer button. If I'm truthful, it's because they don't want clients to be able to reach them. Clients would either complain, or ask them to do something, both of which can fatally interrupt the real business of the day which seems to be reading the Sun, leering at women, consuming fats and tea and avoiding work. I had undertaken a Byzantine trail of message-leaving to persuade Barry to grace me with an audience and he was naturally two hours and thirty-eight minutes late.

A diminutive Essex crook with the congenital low cunning of a shithouse rat, Barry walked around the house, sucking his teeth and randomly ejaculating titanic sums. It was like viewing the place with a touretting merchant banker. At the end of his tour of doom, he did a brief calculation on the back of a traditional fag packet, offered to halve it for cash and disappeared from my life forever. This may well be a blessing.

1.00 pm

At ten minutes to one, Chris phoned from his car to explain that he was going to be between three and five minutes late. When he arrived, it was apparent that he was not old enough to have facial hair, which, in hindsight, was excellent news as he lacked any form of chin with which to support it. Imagine a man with a small, fashionable goatee hovering a couple of centimeters in front of a chin shaped void - incredibly disturbing. Chris was one of the new breed of client friendly 'Chelsea' builders.

Bristling with mobile phones, laptops and expensive lasermeasuring-devices, he created a massively comprehensive spreadsheet and talked about a percentage management fee for 'making our problems go away' and 'finishing on time and on budget'.

For two days we felt like we'd died and gone to middle-class North London heaven. Then, just before the quote was due, we received a sheepish phonecall asking if 'a couple of my chaps could take a look around the place'. The 'chaps' turned out to be a Cockerny and an Oirishman who after three minutes of tooth sucking, did a calculation on the back of a fag packet and offered to do the job minus the 20% management fee and 17.5% off for cash.

3.00pm

Two enormous men in leather coats squeezed sideways through the front door. By now I was expecting candidates to lack something but these fellows had both chins and operational dialing fingers. What they were missing, though, was hair and necks. One spoke a little English, the other, clearly in charge, grunted occasionally or issued orders down a mobile phone.

They examined the place with a strange cold detachment, as if calculating entry points and the best place to lob a concussion grenade. I mentioned the importance of securing the site to avoid the problem of squatters.

"Squatters not a problem", rumbled the linguist. "The carpenters are Spetnaz".

Finally, after a short calculation on the back of a packet of western cigarettes, he growled,

"Five thousand per room, four thousand for cash, three if the guys can crash here".

He could have said...

"... and two thousand per month for the rest of your life or they find you floating face-down in the Thames".

...at least I could have budgeted for that.

Hobson's Choice, is, I believe, an appropriate term.

Tune in in a fortnight when I shall reveal to which set of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing set of incompetent extortionists I shall be giving our money.

.
Yours in Christ

T

PS. We finally exchanged contracts and completed on the place on Friday. I picked up the keys and spent a delirious hour crowbarring off the big security boards they'd screwed over every window.
It's gorgeous.

Light flooding in through the dust for the first time in decades - it looks like a recently squatted Chartres Cathedral.

I'm strapping on my mighty toolbelt and may be gone for some time.

Wish me luck. T

Posted by T at 10:21 PM | Permalink

My Dear Old Top,

My it's been a long fortnight and no mistake. Some might wonder whether you and I have wandered forever into the white light, the one you pray for when you've had seven or eight over the odds and Samson is pulling down the walls of his temple inside your dome. Small wonder though when one half of our union is upping sticks and decamping while t'other is spending a disproportionate amount of time being ministered to by highly skilled LBFMs, thence finding himself in yet farther corners of foreign fields and cet.

So what's been afoot of note in this corner of the E? I'll tell you shall I. Well for starters I've been once more in that place where they didn't do the square thing during the last Little Unpleasantness and are still not fessing up. Anxious as I am to correct this my mission this time was too instil a modicum of correct behaviour when dealing with yours truly and his like. I'll not say t'were easy but I think I started to chip away at their natural reluctance to play off a straight bat. Much more to be done but as with any other area of world affairs one has to work at these things. (Sorry to use that four letter expletive, I think it's the jet lag).

Funny thing happened while I was putting it up 'em tough and it is to this that I shall address myself for the length of my emission. For a bit of R and R I popped out to survey the mercery and what'd I see but the gurning mug of one of our old muckers from the home town by the sea. You know the one, used to wield the shears at that decayed but elegant clothing shop, then joined us in the Seat to pursue his muse as an artist. He now makes his weekly stipend playing gramophone records in footie stadiums or something. Anyway standing as I was in this mercer's estab. my eye was caught by an array of visiting cards that touted various types of evening entertainment, one of which was our Old Mucker doing a mobile disco or something. Charging mine hosts with the task of sleuthing him down I returned to matters of great import till the phone goes and your friend and mine announces that after an absence of more than nine years he and I are mere yards from each other's locales and would be lifting refreshers together within minutes.

Sing out choirs of heavenly angels. There is nought so delightful as a few hours in the company of a fellow traveller from one's err... Well. One's shall we say livelier days. The jockey of disks and I laughed like well-turned-out drains and bandied names like there was no such thing as preux-anything (noms de guerre bien sur). Our revelry took us across that blighted metrop (the place where the ground shakes every now and then and things get in a bit of a pickle) till we fetched up in a bar crammed to the gills with ahem, City Wankers, and their cohorts.

Now it's a funny thing but I'd been warned about this place before and having vaguely intended to avoid it found myself there only by the purest of accidents. Honestly. All right, well even if the accident wasn't that pure my intentions could only ever have been of an anthropological nature. And studies of an anthrop. nature abounded I can tell you. We all know that City Ws are aspiring-horsey wide boys with ill-fitting over-priced suits, fat bellies, acne, and cockney hair cuts. Loathsome and odious to a man-jack of 'em. These were no exception and one might easily have picked up a tip or two about what the current wave of sty dwellers is wearing. One might have, had not frippets of an unprecedentedly pulchritudinous nature not been draped around a large part of the assembled wankage.

What happens, I'm told, is that these bloated City Ws have a hankering for a bit-of-the-other and make a bee line for this particular estab. where examples of this bit-of-the-other are known to congregate for the purposes of entangling themselves with fat-cat City Ws. No great surprise there, sort of thing that happens all over the place. Hmm, true enough. But where this differs is in the behaviour of the BOTOs. They have, you see, pretty firm agendas, along with their pretty, firm, other things.

The crux of it is that these BOTOs will literally do whatever the CW wants. They will agree, acquiesce, enthusiastically go along with, and generally conform to whatever the CW can dream up, with the proviso that shopping with the CW's credit is part of the deal. And by shopping I mean private viewings at Harrods so the porters don't get caught in the crowds as they march out with the boxes. They do not spend lightly these ladies.

Now the uncharitable might look at these dalliances as some kind of transaction, rather than a genuine union of souls.

They might.

And they'd be bloody right too. These femmes commerciales know the price of their favours and they know where to go to net the kind of fat fool who'll pay it. No it isn't the oldest profession, no more than getting your leg over after a full night's wining and dining anyway. But it's not exactly a coming together that your auntie might want to advertise in the local Echo either.

Still all concerned looked like they were getting what they wanted, and who is anyone else to judge 'em for that?

My Old Mucker and I stared openly at these naked transactions and they lent more weight than ever to our gilded views of life in simpler times when a passing few words in their native tongue would get you pretty close to their, well, native tongue (sorry).

As you can see I need to take some strong waters and to this I must immediately attend. I shall endeavour to purify my mind in advance of our next back and forth which I shall ejaculate within a British Fortnight.

I am and shall remain,

Your Old Pal,

S

Posted by T at 10:19 PM | Permalink