218: ladders, scamps, scallywags and imaginary onions

Stupid scaffolding has been up on the house for only a couple of days and already a gang of scally-wags has been clambering all over the house.  What I want to know is why the builders have left their ladder up as an invite to tosspots, tied it at the top so I can’t take it down, and ripped up the front gate just to make access even easier.  It’s like an invitation to aggressive and naughty little idiots.  “We’re not fucking robbing you, what’s the fucking problem.”  To keep quoting from their stupid defence I’ll have to remove all the rest of the “fucking fucks” or it’ll look like I’m cheating on the word count.  “Get back in your house or I’ll smash you.”  “Which is your window?”  “Go on then, ring the police.”  Etcetera, etc, &c... 

They were, of course, all talk and no trousers (tracky bottoms tucked into socks), scampered off, and almost immediately began climbing all over the next group of semis down the street.  I came back out to try and take down the ladder; they saw me and shouted “it’s him again” and when I came back out a few minutes later to get the bus, they were nowhere to be seen.  Now all I have to worry about is midnight reprisals.  Our bedroom window is at comfortable kicking height, and the scaffold is loaded with heavy metal clamps and fasteners to lob crashing and unwanted into our lives and laps.

For obvious reasons I don’t want them up there; invasion of privacy, they might hurt themselves, they might snap our telephone wire or aerial or the neighbours satellite dish, they’re in my garden on my house, aggressive and ignorant, little Viz Rat Boys.  Anyway I don’t want to look out of the window and see teenagers tumbling past at terminal velocity, with only the newly laid tarmac to break their fall.  That would be terrible (terribly inconvenient... am I being unfair?  Probably, but...).  Only another six weeks to go, and then the house will look marginally different from the outside, woo hoo. 

Looking up from my desk during the week and seeing the feet of builders walking passed the window at ceiling height creates the perspective of living in a basement flat.  I can produce a comfortable delusion for myself by imagining it’s not a basement, it’s a garden flat or lower ground floor.  There, it’s not a building site after all; it’s a garden flat, full of strawberry plants and fresh herb bushes, yummy!  Home grown potatoes and carrots for tea roasted with home reared lamb; perfect.  I’m hungry.  See you later.