Life at home sweet uncompleted home

IF YOU’RE looking for rubble, you’ve come to the right place (apologies to Elvis). If you would allow me for a moment to speak on behalf of our race, we Jews don’t like chaos or mess. We already did our time in the desert, enduring inhospitable conditions. So when it comes to housing, we like it luxurious and modern, two qualities your average tent in the wilderness lacks.

As Jackie Mason is always reminding us, not for us tools or toil. We recoil from the pleasures of “the project” — finding a wreck and doing it up over a period of months or years. No, we would rather just take the keys from the estate agent and move into somewhere that, from day one, requires as much improving as a five-star hotel. Which is ironic because for the past year-and-a-half I have been living with my new wife and not so new children on a build- ing site.

When we purchased the property, we were told it would be finished in 18 months to two years. Guess what? Here we are 18 months to two years later and not only is it not completed — the developers and their team of hired drones appear not to have touched a single brick in the vast expanse that is effectively our front garden.

Put it this way. It would take a Jew 40 days and 40 nights to cross, that’s how big it is. Occasionally we see someone in protective headgear use a bulldozer to shift a small pile of dried mud a few feet, or a couple of Men In Charge (we can tell they’re Men In Charge because they wear ties under their yellow vests) exchanging hot air. But that’s about it. For a workaholic like me, it’s galling to see so little labour.

The completion date was not the only piece of fiction deployed at the point of purchase. We were also informed that, on our development, my children— then 13, 11 and eight — would have a park to play in and there would be a café, even a crèche. There is no sign of any of these. OK, we’re not desperate for a crèche — but maybe watch this space — and coffee I can just about sort myself. But we could have done with an expanse of grass for the kids and the dog. I say kids. Ben is now 15 and needs a park about as urgently as a Jew needs a hammer. Ethan, 13, will go on a roundabout but will look askance at a slide, while Talia has two years, I’d estimate, before she makes the transition from swings to boys.

Now I’m no mathematician — and I’m certainly no builder — but given that it took over a year to construct the first two block of flats (and that it would take about 12 edifices of a simi-

When all is done and dusted — and there’s a lot of dust — it will look nice

lar size to fill the remaining area), well, we’re talking 2020 before it’s all done. By which time Ben will have left home, Ethan will be at university and Talia will still be slumped in the lounge watching back-to-back episodes of The Simpsons. And she won’t be needing a playground, unless it includes a flatscreen TV.

The developers had the effrontery to emblazon the phrase “boulevards and piazzas” on hoardings outside the development. Maybe the meanings of “boulevard” and “piazza” have changed to signify “giant mounds of earth surrounded by gravel and human-high weeds”. But I think not.

Still, there are those two blocks of flats to alleviate the ugliness of it all. One is actually quite posh while the other is “affordable housing”, code for “beware the well-oiled yobs shouting at each other from balcony to balcony [and their boyfriends]”. Equally pleasant are the weir and canal, which suggest that, when it’s all done and dusted — and there’s a lot of dust — we will live in a nicelooking place.

In the meantime, it’s like Nagasaki without the radiation. Call me an old fusspot, but I don’t want the view from Ben’s room to be of a crane and acres of rubble. He can have that when he moves into his first bedsit in Dalston. I don’t want Ethan and Talia’s memories of their childhood to be of a post-apocalyptic bleakscape. Nor do I want the first thing the kids hear each morning to be foul language from irate workmen. Foul language from irate parents, they’ll have to live with.

What worries me is, if I had to sell my house in an emergency, it would probably be worth a fraction of what we paid for it. Unless there’s someone out there who dreams of living in a facsimile of 1980s Beirut. Not that there’s any fighting or shooting going on, although, again, watch this space.