Real life | 6 December 2012

The renovations were too much for me. I had to get the builder boyfriend back. But before you call me weak, manipulating, cheap, pathetic, or (if you’re into American self-help books) co-dependent, just hear me out. I defy anyone to go through what I went through with a consignment of ill-fitting MDF and not make a panic-stricken phone call to an ex-boyfriend who happens to be a building contractor.

And it’s not as if I rekindled the relationship entirely in order to get my house halfway back to habitable. I missed him. I missed his funny south London builder ways. I missed his deafeningly loud laugh, his tousled, blond,  dust-filled hair, his weather-beaten face and soulful blue eyes. I missed the way he wears T-shirts when it’s minus four.

I even missed his argumentative black cab driver-style rants over dinner about how the country is going to the dogs: ‘Here’s me working like a mug on a freezing roof all day when you can sign on the dole and get everything for free and a car thrown in. It’s no good. Britain’s finished.’ And so on and so forth.

I don’t know if this means I love him, but I think it probably means something. It definitely meant that when I came home one day to find a catastrophic error with the fitted wardrobes in the master bedroom and could take no more of this renovating business as a single woman, the ex-builder boyfriend was my first port of call.

‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll sort it,’ he said when I explained that the Albanians had built an elaborate four-door cupboard right up to the window frame leaving no room to hang curtains, and were refusing to dismantle it. Even when I cried they refused.