The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife. Daisy Waugh

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       December 15th

      Half the builders I telephone don’t even bother to return my telephone calls. The rest make appointments, and then never turn up. Can’t quite work out what I’m doing wrong.

      Fin, needless to say, has had a little more success. Somebody in London gave him the name of an Irish woman called Megan, who apparently once did some work for one of the Rolling Stones and who consequently (he’d been warned) presented herself very much as a Builder to the Stars.

      He contacted her last Friday evening, and she hopped onto her broomstick there and then, arriving at our front door, hunchback and shoulders fully relaxed, dyed black hair perfectly coiffed and stout little body positively dripping in eighties-style jewellery, within an hour of his making the telephone call. How does he do it?

      Sadly, however, we had to reject her. Or maybe she sadly rejected us. It was pretty clear from the beginning that we were singing from different hymn sheets.

      ‘I can tell you’re a woman with discerning taste,’ she muttered to me, leaning her broomstick against the porch and shimmying into our untouched, half-lit, empty hallway. I felt quite aglow for a moment—until I looked up and down and around and about and realised she had absolutely nothing, at that early stage, upon which to base the observation.

      Anyway. She took the briefest of glances round our bomb-site of a house and then, suddenly, looked at her watch and announced she had to leave. She couldn’t possibly discuss budgets or plans with us, she said, until we had inspected the property she and ‘her boys’ were currently working on in a village about twenty miles away.

      We went to look at it the next morning. A Saturday. It was a house belonging to a couple of art dealers from Seattle, neither of whom was present. Nevertheless I think she was quite put out that we tipped up with the children. It’s possible she was quite put out that we tipped up at all.

      The tour, which was made unnecessarily stressful by her rampant irritation with our fairly well-behaved children, seemed to go on forever. Fin and I were forced to admire every tap, every door handle, every eco-friendly window fastener in the building. And it wasn’t easy. Somehow, and clearly at unimaginable expense, Megan and her team of boys had transformed what was once, presumably, a perfectly pretty village cottage into something that looked more like an industrial greenhouse.

      At some point (about an hour in) she was distracted from her boasting by an improperly fitted cupboard latch, and we managed to slip away. She found us a couple of minutes later—Fin, me and the children—sardine-packed into what was meant to be her pièce de résistance: an aluminium, bean-shaped lavatory capsule, cleverly suspended above what would one day be a dining room. We were giggling quite a lot, testing out the motion-sensitive toilet flush. Or the children were. Or, no. We all were, in fact.

      I think it dawned on Megan about then that we were completely out of our depth. The art dealers from Seattle were spending on a single, motion-sensitive lavatory pod about three times what we had to spend on our entire house.

      Nevertheless, at the end of the tour we hugged each other passionately. We reconfirmed our various e-mails and telephone numbers and swore we’d speak again before the weekend was out, just to confirm budgets and dates and so on. That was over a week ago now. Obviously we’ve made no attempt to contact each other since.

      And I never even asked her about Johnny Depp. As the West Country’s designated Builder to the Stars she ought to know if there’s any truth behind the rumours. I wish I could say I forgot to ask her, but the fact is she’s slightly scary, and I didn’t quite dare.

      The good news is I now have another builder up my sleeve. He’s called Darrell and he’s coming round this evening. I saw his card pinned up in the village Co-op (as opposed to the launderette, where clearly the calibre of cards isn’t up to scratch) and he sounds lovely. Quite sexy, actually. He says he’s built hundreds of kitchens before. Not only that, he’s available to start on ours immediately.