Real life | 27 June 2019

Remainers don’t like borders, I get that. But I had always assumed this was a preference confined to geopolitics. I had assumed that when these people got home they barricaded themselves in their houses and let no one over the threshold they didn’t completely trust like the rest of us.

But perhaps they are not such hypocrites after all. For as the builder boyfriend found out when he was on a job the other day, it seems the eccentric dislike of borders permeates some people’s everyday lives.

‘Please leave the gap in the fence,’ was the instruction given to him by a well-to-do Londoner who had secured his services to put a new fence in her garden.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. I’ve got one more panel to put in.’

‘No, no, you mustn’t put the last panel in because Angelo and Leilani like to go through into next door’s garden and play on the tree swing.’

The builder b’s amusement can only be imagined, but he is tactful when dealing with clients. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘but is it not the case that the neighbour whose children they have been playing with is moving out at the end of the month as the house has been sold?’

‘Ye’es,’ said the lady, opening a kitchen cupboard and showing him a selection of around 25 different herbal teas from which he was to make his choice. ‘Do you have any instant coffee?’ he asked, and she looked blank: ‘Instant?’ ‘You know, freeze-dried, in a jar?’ Whereupon she had to go out to the shop to buy this strange item beloved by Brexit-voting oiks and the conversation resumed when she returned.

‘So,’ he said, ‘with your nice neighbour — and what a nice chap he is, by the way, I was talking to him over the fence — with him leaving and the house being sold, I’m just confused as to whether you would want the gap left in because, well, the new people could be anybody.