Real life | 14 September 2017

Stefano and his boys got to work with gusto and within a few days the upstairs of my house started looking like the upstairs of a house.

‘I’ve got walls!’ I exclaimed, after one day. The next day: ‘I’ve got doors!’

The day after that I had a wardrobe. ‘Oh, you are wonderful!’ I told Stefano, and he looked at me with his usual expression, a bemused grin. ‘Getting… there…’ he said, in between the screeching of his boys putting electric saws through sheets of plasterboard.

‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘What are these?’ A bag of pink doorknobs lay on a table.

‘You don’t like?’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t be my first choice,’ I said. So he made me promise to go to B&Q to buy knobs.

‘Yes, yes, I will,’ I said. ‘Just as soon as I get back from picking up this lorry.’ ‘Lorry?’ he said, frowning deeply to signify that he was moving from bemusement to bafflement.

While the Albanian boys have been making me a house, I have been buying a horse lorry. Just a little one, to transport the thoroughbred to somewhere not run by the Liberal Democrats, where I am allowed to ride her.

Realistically, the No Horse-Riding signs in this village are not coming down while the Libs are in charge, and they will be until at least next year, when the borough elections are held, and possibly for ever if enough Tory voters go on buying into the idea that voting Lib Dem locally is a harmless and rather fun hobby, a dalliance or flirtation with the gauche or risqué, rather like a trip to a fetish club or a weekend’s bog snorkelling.

So I am going to need horse transport.