'I've got to go and meet someone at The Crown. Do you want to walk with me?'
On the way, he starts to explain. A group of them have been forming plans for well over a year, ever since they'd got wind of the possibility of the present shop shutting.
'It's all been a bit hush-hush. We haven't wanted to raise hopes. But news is leaking out now, and we're ready to go public. – Hi, how's it going? Yeah, see you tonight. – That's Chris Jury, by the way, who started it all. We're really lucky here in Blockley, the talent at our disposal. The committee includes a journalist, an accountant, a solicitor, a guy who's run a big business, and others. All with skills that they're giving to the project. I'm going to be managing it'
'Congratulations! That's all great news.'
'Yes. That's why I moved out of Murray's Cafe. The plan is to get the new place up and running by the spring.'
'Where's it going to be? In the same place as the shop now?'
'No, across the road in the Old Coach House. We've done all the research. We can get funding from a charity that's set up to encourage rural shops. They'll give us twenty grand, and lend us another twenty if we can raise twenty ourselves from local subscriptions.'
'Will you be able to do that?'
'I don't think it'll be a problem. You've seen how cross people are at losing the old shop. They don't want to go to the supermarket in Moreton every time they need a couple of rashers of bacon.' We've reached the door of The Crown. 'Oh, hi Pam. Yeah I won't be long. I'll be with you in a couple of minutes.' He draws me into the lobby.
'They seem to be getting more and more popular, village community shops,' I say. 'I saw an item on the local news the other night about one down in Oxfordshire. It was open for two or three hours a couple of days a week. They said it did wonders for the spirit in the village, with lots of people getting involved. They're usually staffed by volunteers, aren't they?'
'Right,' says Chris, 'what you're talking about is exactly and precisely,'… he's tapping my chest for emphasis… 'what we are not going to do in Blockley.'
'How so?'
'I've visited these places. Ethel with her wicker basket of home-made scones and watercolours of the parish church, set up in a garage, serving cups of coffee for one pound twenty that tastes of crap… crap…' He mouths the word with theatrical emphasis, glancing towards an elderly couple seated by the bar. 'And the village locals come and buy the stuff out of loyalty and listen to Ethel complain about volunteer fatigue. You can't run a business on guilt and duty. It won't last. It's like British Leyland telling us to "Buy British" when the cars were rubbish. And look where Leyland are now.'
'So what's the alternative?'
'Run it like a business. It's as simple as that. You employ the staff. You manage it professionally. – OK Alan, I'm on my way right now. – You aim to make a profit. It doesn't have to be a big profit. But to make this work, we've got to be quietly cut-throat. You need a Tesco mentality, but with all the local village friendliness.' As my mouth opens to form the next question, he adds, 'That, by the way, is going to mean a two and a half thousand pound coffee machine. Watch this space, Derek.' And he's gone.
It's stopped snowing and the road back to Mill Cottage has now got four flattened channels running its length along which cars are making nervous advances in both directions, but I choose the jester-friendly thick bits at the side. As I start my plod home, I'm on the verge of saying to myself that what Blockley's got, and what any village that wants to breathe life back into itself must have, is community spirit. But I don't say it, because whenever that word 'community' creeps into my brain, a spectre appears at my right shoulder. It's the spectre of Tony, an old university friend of mine. The merest sniff of the word 'community' prompts him to deliver a torrent of derision. Especially the phrase 'international community'. You notice, now I've mentioned it, how many times you hear it on the news.
'In what sense,' Tony will say, 'are South Korea, Italy and Canada a 'community'? They don't do anything together. Their interests are all so different and complex that there is absolutely nothing communal about them at all. It's just lazy journalism, and very misleading.' He's persuaded me over the years. Tony takes it a step further. He lives in North Carolina (where apparently they're just as sloppy in their language) and whenever he comes over to the UK, he always has a good chortle at the fact that we have a 'Secretary of State for Communities' in the Cabinet. 'It's the same nonsense,' he says. 'It just promotes the idea that thousands, maybe millions of people who've just got one thing in common – like their religion, say, or the fact that they live in Cornwall – somehow all have the same identical needs. It's dangerous baloney!' He's got a point, you can't deny it.
I brush the snow off my backside for a third time, calling out, 'No, I'm fine, I'm fine, honestly,' in the direction of an old lady at the wheel of a passing Morris Minor, and recall that I recently read that the world of sociology is coming round to Tony's view. Apparently one eminent member of the British Society of Sociologists has concluded that the word 'community' has ninety-four different definitions. Now, some of you may have suspected that I occasionally do exaggeration for comic effect. But not this time. Ninety four definitions! The result, apparently, is that the word 'community' is regarded as useless for any kind of explanation of what's going on, for instance, in villages. So sociologists now resort to the word 'conviviality.' They don't mean 'conviviality' in the sense of Kev putting his arm round his mate in the pub and slurring, 'I love you, Jake, you're my best friend.' They use it to mean what-these-people-have-in-common-is-that-they-live-in-the-same-place-and-don't-necessarily-have-anything-else-in-common. I don't think somehow it's going to catch on. The Blockley Conviviality Shop and Cafe. Well maybe. I'll try it out on Chris.
However, the good thing about all this, on a freezing November morning in Blockley, is that the spectre of Tony makes me abandon my sloppy thinking and work out exactly what it is that Blockley's got going for it. And it's pretty obvious when you look at it like that. Blockley's got a couple of handfuls of people, Chris being one of them, who've got energy and talent and time, all of which they enjoy devoting to a project that'll make a lot of their neighbours happy. Blockley's lucky. Hogsthorpe didn't seem to have anybody like that, which was one of its many problems. Sociologists apparently have stuck a label on these get-up-and-goers as well. They call them 'fiery spirits'. Quite nice really. So long as they don't start to talk about a 'conviviality of fiery spirits.'
Mill Cottage hoves into view. There's a lot to tell Maggie. Especially about that coffee machine of Chris's.
CHAPTER 25
A HELPING HAND
FROM A FAIRY
As the snow in Blockley shrinks, I sit for hours shifting numbers around on my spreadsheet. There's one thing about being a worrier. You're prepared to go to mind-torturing lengths of worry today on the off chance it'll avoid an even worse worry tomorrow. The alternative would be not to fret today because the catastrophe's unlikely to happen tomorrow. I can't do that.
As far as I can make out, what's happening is the costs of building are outstripping our budget, but not in obvious ways. It's subtle. For instance, what we saved not having to underpin the walls got gobbled up by the oak. That was fine. But then, the odd bag of nails here, an incidental sack of cement there are up on forecast. Multiplied approximately ten thousand times.
My fussiness in getting the computer to total all the sums and organise the items in neat little categories, if not rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, is akin to polishing a bucket that's got a hole in the bottom. The fact is – and as I sit watching the melt-water drip ever faster from the roof of Mill Cottage, I start to see it is a fact that has to be faced – we got a lot less from the sale of Maggie's old house than we'd budgeted. There's no point being a star juggler of the expenses, if the lion-tamer behind you has left the cage door open. And it's certainly a waste of time devising multiple elaborate metaphors instead of sorting out the finances.
Half a dozen
letters plop onto the mat. Hiding beneath the Reader's Digest prize for Mill Cottage, South Street, and the cruise brochure for Mill Cottage, North Street is a letter stamped the 'Hang-Em-Hi Scaffold Co. Ltd' addressed to me. It's a bill for eight and a half thousand pounds. So, once again I prepare to nestle into the comfortable task of ticking off cost against budget on my spreadsheet.
I enter 'scaffold' into the FIND box and click OK.
Nothing.
So I try respectively 'Hang-Em-Hi', 'Hang-Em', 'Hang' and in desperation 'Hi'. All I get are those annoying little stickers that say, 'The search item was not found.'
I can't believe this. I've forgotten completely to put anything into the budget for all those steel poles and clamps that I've managed to bang my head against almost every day for the past four weeks.
What was I thinking?
That it was a little gift from the fairies?!
Well, that settles it. Maggie and I convene a summit in the kitchen.
'So how much do you forecast we're going to be overspent by the end of the project?' she asks, kicking off the debate.
'Hard to say exactly,' I mumble.
'Well, how much are we overspent right now?'
'Hard to say, really.'
She frowns.
I decide to resort to smoke and mirrors. 'Hold on,' I say, and leap over to the printer. After five minutes of keyboard poking and paper loading, the machine chugs out eighteen Excel landscape sheets, which I spread out on the table.
'So?' asks Maggie. And I launch into a line-by-line account of quarter-inch elbow drains and twenty kilo bags of sand brackets.
She listens for about twelve minutes, then jumping into the gap left by the eighth sheet fluttering onto the floor, asks, 'So do you reckon an extra fifty thousand would cover it?'
'Should do. With a bit to spare,' I call up from under the table. And that's decided. We'll take out a mortgage. And we agree the monthly interest won't be too bad. We'll soon pay it off. I've just done a deal to do a bit of part-time work as a consultant for the South Bank Centre in London, though I seem to be forgetting I hardly have time to do that as well as fret about The Old Stables conversion.
The next morning, when I arrive on-site, I make a point of glaring at the scaffolding. It had first gone up to carry the carpenters a month ago when they fitted the roof beams, felting and slats. And it's been loitering there ever since, like a hoody in a shopping mall. It should have been hounded out, or hugged off, to productive employment elsewhere ages ago. It's the problem of the roof tiles that's delayed things.
Maggie and I had found some Spanish slate that gets an aged look with the weather. It's indistinguishable from the Welsh stuff, and costs only a third of the price. What's more, Queen Bee, Empress of Planning said, 'We approve.' But Nik has been informed by the building control department that the pitch of our roof is only eighteen degrees, whereas the building regs state that our slates need at least twenty-two point five degrees.
We are, it seems, to be battered by bureaucracy worthy of the Indian Civil Service.
'No,' says Nik. 'You'll be battered by the wind. It can get under the tiles with such a low-pitched roof.'
'So you're telling me,' I say, 'that the wind can distinguish between twenty-two point five degrees and twenty-three degrees?'
'No, I'm just telling you what the regulations are. I didn't make them. But at the end of the day, they're there for your benefit. I don't think Maggie and you are going to want to be sitting watching the telly one night, when the wind starts to rip your roof off because you've got the wrong tiles on.'
Fair enough, and I apologise to him for getting shirty.
Nik takes no offence, and he's already sniffed out an answer. He pulls from his pocket a sample of some artificial tiling with concealed drainage channels which will reroute any rain that gets blown under. The tile is shiny though, and Maggie and I don't like it. But we guess we're stuck. We need Queen Bella's approval, so we crave an audience. She's away on holiday and they're short-staffed.
So we wait. For a week and a half. During which time the work rate slows. There's a bit of desultory pointing of the back wall. But not much else. The roof's got to be made waterproof before we can get on with any of the more delicate jobs inside. Finally, rested from her hols, Queen Bee chucks Nik's tile back at us marked 'Rejected'. There shall be no artificial roofing in a conservation area.
'This is typical,' says Nik. 'Planning and Building Control both have to say "Yes", but they don't talk to each other, so you have to bounce back and forward between them till Bingo, the bell rings.'
He has a go at beating the system. The building control officer regularly drops by the site, and Nik knows him from a hundred past jobs. So on one such visit, Nik asks the guy which tiles we are permitted to use, so that we can then take that list to the Queen of Planning in order to find out which ones amuse or irritate her. But the BCO says, 'Oh no, I'm not here to act as your unpaid adviser.'
'But, come on Charlie,' says Nik, 'you must know the answer.'
'Yes, but I'm not allowed to say.'
Charlie then looks over each shoulder and slips Nik a shifty sheet of paper with a nine-digit code on it. Nik recognises it as a Birmingham phone number. I decide to accept the risk that the line's been tapped by the Roofing Regs Police, and tap out the digits on my mobile. An incomprehensible name answers. So, without knowing why I'm speaking to this person, I spill the story of our woes.
'Ah,' the voice replies, 'You'll be needing our double-'ook roof fixers. It's the nails Building Control don't like. The water goes through the 'oles.' And he finishes on a note of triumph, 'With our 'ooks, you don't need 'oles!'
The man has reliable intelligence, because both departments, BC and QB stamp our documentation 'Passed', and the Spanish tile solution, as originally favoured, is implemented with the hook modification.
A week later, I clamber up the scaffolding which Tinkerbelle had so thoughtfully provided, and Len, chief roofer shows me. The hooks clinch under the leading edge of each tile. Neither wind not water will shift it.
'Looks good, Len,' I say.
'Yeah, thanks,' he replies. Then putting down, or rather balancing his hammer on the equivalent of a rooftop knife edge, adds, 'By the way, some old bloke came by this morning and got really poncey with us.'
'What do you mean?'
'He said he was going to report us to Planning in Cirencester. Something about the roof height.'
Gawd, I think to myself, sounds like the Grise.
'Anyway, I told him to eff off, and got on with it.'
'You did what!'
'Just kidding. He said you'd know who he was.'
Pausing only to check my heart rate, I beetle off post-haste to the Grise emporium.
He's in his den as usual, stroking his chin. He doesn't respond to my cheery greeting.
'My roofing lads were just telling me you'd been round to have a quick shufti at the old work in progress.' My attempt to sound matey and matter-of-fact cuts no ice.
He erupts. 'It's an absolute disgrace! I don't know how you've got the gall to stand there and face me!'
I give a little laugh. I don't know what else to do.
He's wagging his finger now. 'You told me you would not be raising the height of the roof. But you have!'
'That's ridiculous,' I butt in. 'Of course I haven't.'
'You have broken your word to me, and I suspect broken the terms of your planning consent!'
'Em, you're mistaken. That's simply not correct.'
'Hah!' he says.
I turn and, giving the door a tug so the bell makes an extra loud clang, stomp out into the street, where – like Mole in The Wind in the Willows after his encounter with the weasels – I think of all the things I should have said. Especially that I have before-and-after photos that prove the roof's the same height as it started. Still, I console myself with the thought that if he does cut up rough with the Planners, I've got documentary evidence that should clinch the case i
n our favour, once it reaches the Supreme Court. And I suppose the Christmas card list will show a saving of £1.40.
CHAPTER 26
OF WALLS AND WIGMAKERS
Something's been bothering me whenever I go into the kitchen, or rather into the concrete cell with a pencil mark on the wall where the oven's going to be. I can't put my finger on it. But one evening when Maggie and I are doing a tour, trying to time travel to the days when the heap of planks will be transformed into a sofa and the ladder by the door into curtains, the suspicion jumps out of the shadows.
We've come to understand that rooms on a building site always look small. But that kitchen cell really does look impossibly small. I rush out to fetch the tape measure and Anthea's plan from their permanent home in the back of the car. Maggie holds one end of the measure while, brow crinkled, I peer at the numbers on the other. There's not enough light and I've got my wrong glasses on.
'Here, let me have a go,' says Maggie, and we swap ends. She can't see it either. She keeps her finger in place and takes the measure outside. But it's a gloomy night by the cement mixer, so that's no better.
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 21
