As Stefano the builder positioned his drill, I sat watching him serenely. In a few minutes my home improvements would be complete. One last storage unit would be fixed to the kitchen wall, thus bringing to conclusion three weeks of painting, plastering, carpeting and shelving. It has been an exciting time. Stefano and I are now joined at the hip. We had gone to Ikea to buy the shelving unit together in his battered Skoda estate, which lurched its way eccentrically around the South Circular because Stefano only uses fourth gear, including when trying to pull away from traffic lights.
As the car wrenched and choked, I kept encouraging him to try first or second. But he was too distracted. He was talking about corruption in Albania. ‘You know they charge extra to get passport quickly? If you don’t put cash inside your application they don’t give you passport for months.’ And he made a money sign with his fingers. I didn’t like to, but I had to inform him that a similar system operated here. With a heavy heart, I told him that one could only get a passport in Britain quickly if one paid the authorities well over £100. He gasped. ‘No way!’
When we got to Croydon Ikea he became even more disillusioned. ‘Why can’t we park closer to the store?’ he said, as we were herded to a spot about a mile from the entrance. Inside, he insisted on inspecting a room set aside for quiet contemplation. ‘But why would they have that here?’ I told him it was best not to question such things. In the showroom, he was bewildered by the arrows forcing us to walk one way in a snail-shaped circle. ‘Why can’t we cut through?’ he said, darting towards a forbidden corridor. I told him it was wise to do as you were told.
When we got the shelving unit home, Stefano made a brave attempt to put it together but of course half the fixings were missing. He proclaimed this an outrage and said we must return to get my money back. I explained that this happened all the time and that we must try to make the best of it. After much cursing, he managed to build the unit, then he poised his drill over the requisite spot and began to bore into the wall. The next second we were covered in water. A high-pressure jet was shooting across the kitchen.
Stefano screamed. I shouted at him to plug the hole with his finger. Whilst spitting water out of his mouth between sentences he argued that he could not possibly have hit a pipe because he was drilling halfway up the wall.
I explained that in England they put the pipes all over the place. This he declared barbaric. I told him he may well be right, but our first task — before complaining to the UN — was to find the stop-tap in the street. He asked why I didn’t have one in the house, as surely the regulations must stipulate. ‘No one has ever been able to find it,’ I said. He looked as if he were about to call the police.
As I always do in these situations, I ran into the street and up and down it shouting ‘where the hell is it?’ before going to fetch Tony.
At £300 an hour, Tony the plumber is not someone whose door you knock on lightly but needs must. By the time he had made his way very slowly across the street and shut off the mains tap, we could hear Stefano wailing lamely inside the house. We found him holding a bucket to the wall, trying to catch the water. He was in a state of shock, repeating the word ‘how?’ endlessly. Tony calmed him down and explained the vagaries of turn-of-the-century London plumbing.
Then he ordered him to knock a huge chunk out of my wall so he could solder the pipe. At this point, I had to be taken to another location. When the surgery was complete, I was allowed back in. My kitchen, which ten minutes before required only a finishing touch, now featured a gaping three-foot chasm in the brickwork.
Tony was informing Stefano that he should not even think of drilling another hole to install the shelf. Even if he missed the line of pipe we could now see, he could well hit another section of it as it curved around another way. At this point Stefano got really angry. He seized his drill. Tony urged him to think again. But Stefano was not going to be beaten by rogue plumbing. ‘Stand back,’ he said, as he raised his drill to the wall. ‘I’m going to finish this…’
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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