Toodle-oo

At 8 this morning this was the view out of my front window: for the first time in a year my small front 'garden' doesn't contain a portaloo. The builders now use the inside loo and the portaloo people have been promising to collect theirs for three weeks but each time they've come something has gone wrong - they've sent only one person and he has a bad back, there's a car in the way, they couldn't grab hold of it...

You'll see from the extra that I celebrated all the new-found space by remaking my 'temporary' bike shed so I could bring my bike in from the pavement. Also that the windowsill was made today after a lot of harrumphing from the joiner because the angles weren't equal. I reminded him that that was why the window had to be replaced and why everything is three months' delayed. The wood left on the windowsill is to fit above the window on Monday.

Re yesterday, it looks like I'm going to have to put up with the lights in the wrong places because the cables have now been cut. The site manager was almost as annoyed as I was that the electrician didn't consult me and was having a very bad day so I sat him down at the little bit of kitchen table that isn't two feet high with things waiting for homes, made him a mug of strong coffee and fed him mature cheddar (he's the one who doesn't eat carbohydrates or sugar). We talked about the evils of capitalism (we agreed), bread and circuses (we agreed), his belief that governments around the world deliberately over-reacted to covid in order to control us and the vaccination was destructive (we disagreed), where AI is taking us (no conclusions), microwaves (how did that topic get in there?), the mining of precious metals in poor countries for rich people's benefit (we agreed) electric cars (we agreed, to my surprise), LTNs (we disagreed).

I'm so impressed that he's doing all this in his second language. I couldn't do it in mine. The perspectives of our different life histories shone through: his growing up in Soviet Poland and mine as a privileged West European leftie.