The loud clanging of metal poles woke me rudely from my sleep. I opened my eyes suspiciously, accustomed as I am to disasters creeping up on me when I least expect them.
I lay for a few moments contemplating the sounds and what they could mean. Builders shouting, vans pulling up and driving away, heavy objects being flung around my front garden. This was definitely not something that would go away if I buried myself deeper in the duvet and tried to get back into my dream about ponies.
I struggled into my dressing gown and, with a due sense of exhaustion and dread, opened my front door. I was greeted by such an immediate and almost impenetrable wall of scaffolding that I could barely get out. Metal poles criss-crossed all over the place, the front of my house had entirely disappeared. Builders in blue boiler suits swarmed all over my garden.
It was like the scene in ET when the family realise that Nasa has attached entry tubes to their house so it can get the alien out without contaminating the atmosphere.
‘Excuse me!’ I shouted at one of the men in boiler suits. He barely looked up from hammering another pole in place.
‘Excuse me! Can you tell me what you are doing?’
‘Putting up scaffolding.’
‘Yes, I can see that. But why?’
‘For the solar panels.’
I admit, I have had a lot on lately, and I am sometimes absent-minded, even, dare I say, scatty, but I had no memory at all of having decided to put solar panels on my roof. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if I ever suffer a serious blow to the head the doctors in A&E trying to establish whether I am quite myself could do worse than ask me, ‘Would you like some solar panels on your roof?’ If I answer yes, they will know that my brain has been squished.
I would like to make clear at this point that I am not a climate-change denier. I concede that there is overwhelming evidence that we’re heating up like frogs in the middle of a pan of water coming to the boil. However, I tend to the view that we should all go quietly to sleep like the frogs and stop fussing.
The earth will sort itself out after we’re boiled so there really is no long-term imperative to worry. Something will come after us. The dinosaurs might make a comeback, which would be nice.
But eventually it turned out I hadn’t suffered a blow to the head and become an eco-warrior. They were putting the solar panels on my next-door neighbour’s roof, which made much more sense as he rides a bicycle and has a wife with a black people carrier with artificial daisies on the dashboard. (What is that about? Do they think they are mitigating the impact of their emissions by pretending that their 2-litre engine runs on flower power? ‘La la! Not listening, not listening! My car’s got pretty garlands on the dashboard!’)
Anyway, to erect these solar panels they had to cover my house in scaffolding, not theirs, which just goes to show how unselfish and concerned for their environment environmentally conscious people are.
‘Tell me this,’ I asked one of the builders as he threw building materials up my front path. ‘Did it ever at any point occur to you to knock on my door and ask if you could come on to my property? I’m just interested…’
He looked blank. ‘…It’s just that, you know, there was a time when people didn’t trample all over other people because they happened to be in the way of them getting something they wanted…’
He gave his colleague a glance that said, ‘We’ve got a right one here’. And he huffed a lot as he tried to work round me, until I started to feel as if I was in the way, trespassing on my own front path.
So I gave up and went back inside. Later, as I set off for work, I looked up to see my neighbour standing in his upstairs window watching his solar panels being heaved up on to the roof. We caught each other’s eye and he grinned as if to say, ‘Isn’t it exciting? Solar panels! I expect you’ll be wanting some next.’ I toyed with the idea of knocking on his door and telling him that I hoped his solar panels brought him as much electricity and smugness as the wind turbine on David Cameron’s roof had brought him. In other words, none and lots, respectively.
My only consolation was that it was raining heavily. ‘Not much sun, is there?’ I mouthed. But I don’t think he could work out what I said.
Melissa Kite is the deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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