No, the picture does not lie. Our garden now has a two foot trench excavated all the way up to the barn. The poor bugger (that’s the builders mate, not the mole) has been digging it for about three days. I think he was getting flashbacks to the Somme. I’m expecting a firing step and barbed wire to follow.

The cat hasn’t been seen for a while and the only way to get into the garden is by donning a pair of seven league boots. Now you may wonder what kind of construction project would require such a hugely costly and major piece of civil engineering. Well let me tell you. It’s a sink.

Yes our version of the channel tunnel has been horribly over-engineered to take a single water pipe. There was going to be a shower and bog as well but once the words “cess pit” and “a shit load of cash” were mentioned, we spent our entire life savings on this trench instead.

In other news, the waste pipe for the sink has been installed using a “heritage building” technique known as hammering a big hole in the well. This well is the only thing I’ve ever owned which is deeper than this trench. We may have to knock down next doors house to create sufficient rubble to fill it in.

That’s my office. What you can’t see is the lovely floor they’ve laid. What you also can’t see if how they had to take it up after we found the door was in the wrong place. Yes, really that’s the level of client professionalism our builders have come to expect.

As with every project I’m even peripherally involved in, it’s lurching from crisis to crisis intersecting only occasionally with building regulations, correct use of dangerous power tools and sanity.