Real life | 29 June 2017

Since moving to my dream home in the country a month ago, I’ve only had to fight a parking dispute, a right of way dispute, a council tax dispute and a dispute over my neighbour’s loft room being several feet inside my house.

‘It’s going well, isn’t it?’ I said to the builder boyfriend, as we sat slumped on the dusty sofas in our front room overlooking the idyllic village green at the end of another hard day’s country living.

‘What is that lump sticking out of the plaster up there?’ he said, looking beyond me to the right-hand corner of the ceiling.

‘I don’t want to know,’ I said. ‘All things considered, if it’s not a part of their house coming into our house, or an improvised explosive device planted there by militant villagers in protest at the space our car is taking up outside our house, I’m going to ignore it.’

‘Hang on a minute, that’s not right,’ he said, clambering up on to a table to reach the ceiling. And, as he always does when in doubt, he grabbed the wallpaper and ripped it off, then started bashing the plaster out with his bare fist.

‘There’s something in this wall, some kind of steel that’s been plastered over. But there can’t be a steel resting on this wall. It’s a single skin between us and next door.’

‘Single skin? Is the wall made of body parts?’ Nothing would surprise me.

‘Single skin means the wall is only one brick thick. You can’t just put a steel in it. If they removed a supporting wall from their house they should have put a padstone in the basement and…’ Blah-de-blah-de-blah. All I can hear is white noise when he starts talking like this.