How not to talk to builders

It’s week eight of the installation of a cheap Ikea kitchen in my flat, and an Albanian builder is slumped in an armchair in my sitting room. He’s shielding his face with his hand, Princess Diana-style, to hide the fact that he’s weeping.

My kitchen sink drama began when I rang a firm of local builders and they sent round a chap called Dave with a twinkle in his eye and a plan to rip off his employers. ‘Here’s what you do,’ he said. ‘Hire me for a day, tell the boss you’ve changed your mind and sack me. Then I’ll come round after work, charge you half the original quote and we’re all laughing.’ I did sack him – but after five weeks, not one day, and there were no merry chuckles when I screamed down the phone that I wanted him out of my life, for ever.

At first I thought I’d struck gold. You always do. Dave was in his mid-sixties with tight grey curls and an eye for the ladies. He’d been through four divorces and was back with ex-wife number one, whom he’d married in 1977. (‘Always fancied her, still do.’) He sounded like Bob Hoskins and, like Bob in those old BT ads, he thought it was good to talk. Especially when I was paying.

He’d explain, in meticulous detail, how he was going to shave off some formica to make room for the washing machine. Then he’d disappear into the kitchen for 20 minutes and I’d wait for an anguished cry of ‘Farck!’ before he broke the news that ‘they delivered the wrong one’. It seemed rude to point out that he’d ordered the wrong one. Several wrong ones, in fact, because every time he borrowed my laptop to visit the Ikea website he complained that he’d lost ‘me gogs’ – the reading glasses that enabled him to distinguish between 50cm and 80cm.

Still, at least he kept me in shape. ‘Could you run down to the cashpoint? I need some materials.’ Fair enough, but I soon realised I was also buying him new tools. I learned to translate Dave-speak. ‘I’ll be with you first thing in the morning’ meant ‘I’ll swing by when I’ve left the pub the night after next’. Invariably he’d forgotten some vital implement, so I had to make do with an anecdote from his days in the merchant navy. He was a natural raconteur, as relaxed as Kenneth Williams on Parky’s sofa. A natural builder? Not so much. The units were assembled at curious angles, more Kandinsky than Ikea.

When it comes to shop assistants I can be appallingly rude, but I’m a certified coward with builders. Finally I hinted that five weeks was a bit longer than the promised four days. ‘One long weekend and I’ll sort it all out,’ he said.

I decided to leave him undisturbed by checking in to an Airbnb flat for five nights. It was a rat-hole with screeching purple wallpaper. One of us had to go. And it was me, after just three hours and £400 down the drain. But not to worry, because my flat was empty. Dave was taking one of his impromptu sabbaticals. He switched off his phone for nearly a week. When he finally rang, suggesting that another trip to the cashpoint might speed things up, I offered him some Logan Roy-style advice. And that was that.

Panicking, I poked my head into a nearby building site and pleaded for someone to fix my kitchen. That was how I found Alex the gloomy Albanian, who examined Dave’s handiwork in horror. ‘Man, you had the king of the cowboys,’ he sighed. All builders say that, but he was right. The drawers didn’t fit because Dave had installed the unit upside-down. He’d tossed away Ikea’s fiddly – but crucial – adjustable legs.

Alex was the opposite of Dave in most respects. He worked as silently as possible. He accepted payment grudgingly, as if he felt he had to earn back my lost faith in builders.

But he had one thing in common with his predecessor. After work, he liked to talk. ‘I spend all day with morons who whistle at girls’ butts,’ he said. ‘I’m into politics, history, the things you know about.’ He found a clip of me on American television sneering at liberals and told me I was a genius. When I said I’d abandoned a book about charisma, he ordered me to resurrect it. So I did, and I texted him what I’d written. ‘It’s great, but you haven’t mentioned Donald Trump,’ he replied.

The floodgates of unsolicited advice opened. Drink more water. Change the theme music to your podcast. I said I was feeling fragile and morbid. Alex said that was all the more reason to write ‘one last book before you die’. And then I fled, not to some Airbnb hellhole but on to the street, trudging up and down, waiting for the tell-tale sign of the kitchen light going out. Of course Alex saw me. The next day he told me how wretched he felt.

To cut a long story short, we established some professional boundaries. These, I promptly ignored, because I also like to talk and I wanted Alex to hear my new vinyl pressing of Solti’s Beethoven Ninth. My turn, he said, and he played me an Albanian folk song about a broken love affair. That’s when he hid his face and cried.

The kitchen looks great. I sit there for hours every evening, thinking about growing old and the loneliness that makes builders and their customers overshare. Is it worse than it used to be? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure one of those drawers is still wonky.