Every year I forget how noisy this season is. Great industrial, howling lawnmowers a persistent screech of busyness. The strimmer and the hedge trimmer manned by men with noise cancelling headphones, oblivious to anything around them including children and small dogs. The communal areas, the church gardens, the cemetery and the park surrounding me need looking after but in the loudest of ways. Machinery is a constant backdrop to a beautiful Summer day. I long for zen and quiet.
Sunday wasn’t a quiet day. It started with the blowing up of a bouncy castle in the church gardens next door. My heart sank. The last one started about 1pm and went on until gone 8pm. This was not going to be a good day. Mine and June next door’s water had reduced to a trickle by Saturday afternoon so come Sunday, as I already have Yorkshire Water on speed Dial I gave them a call.
‘Are you on the same water supply?’ . How the fuck do I know is this something we were taught in school that I missed out on when skiving off? ‘You will get a call back within the hour’.
When she calls back it’s, ‘so our technician can come out to you on the 18th of July’. She must surely have seen it coming. Seriously? That’s three weeks! It’s going to be 80 degrees tomorrow and you’re going to leave us with a trickle of water. We can’t even have a shower. Well I tell you what then I’m telling you now we have no water. I lied when I said we had a trickle we have NO WATER at all so get it sorted!!
Meanwhile some twat has brought recorders to the party next door. Remember those plastic flute things of excruciating noise pain and endurance? My dogs love this along with the screams that seem to be the noise of choice when on a bouncy castle. Let’s bark a lot they think in unison.
By this time the prozac has stopped working and my head goes. Until last year we had bushes and brambles in front of the wall separating us from the church grounds but next door’s daughter in a fit of gardening frenzy cut them all down. Amazingly they haven’t grown back yet even though the rest of the garden is only lacking a bicycle wheel and an old mattress to show if off at it’s finest. Basically this means kids at parties and ‘kids’ late at night come over the wall after they’ve picked up their drugs over at The Roebuck carpark. Anyway I digress. Hello, I shouted a couple of times. Hello I screamed about three times more until over the wall a woman heard me. Will this be going on much longer? Ten minutes. Thank fuck for that.
And so within the hour my mate has turned up. The young guy that came so many times before around Christmas trying to find my outdoor stoptap so they could check the pressure. What an absolute legend of a young man. Anyway he found our leak with his listening stick and refused offers of tea and beer and ice lollies.
‘I’ve put it down as a two dayer, meaning today is day one so if there is no sign of them by late tomorrow afternoon call them up and play hell’.
He knew, I knew and my neighbour knew I would have to do this so at 4pm I got on YW speed dial again. They arrived a bit later and bless them dug a big hole and fucked about until about 10pm Monday night. I’m not saying they were slacking. I felt for them. Sorting out one shitty job after another. Digging holes and messing in mud. The guys that came last winter stood up to their waists in the hole they dug and then laid out on the cold muddy ground while they messed with pipes and water pressure. I have to give the digging guys absolute credit.
Anyway they left a big hole that had four of those plasticky red danger fency things around it and a bit of a sign warning people not to fall in in case they didn’t understand what the four plastic fence bits around a big hole meant.
I think it was yesterday they came with a big noisy digger thing and filled the hole. Then they put the fence things back even though the hole was filled and there was nothing to fall down. This morning the fence dismantling men came. They moved all four fence bits and the sign and propped them up against each other in a little tidy pile. At lunchtime as I was washing up I watched the take the fence bits away man come. They were near the bottom of the steps but no he parked up and took one piece at a time and threw them over the wall into the back of his pickup. Hugely noisy and unnecessary.
If it had been Sunday I would have pointed my rifle at him and said ‘now you place those fences down quietly boy’.