Saturday 4 January 2014

The Builders (A Cautionary Tale)


So what's your New Year resolution?  Maybe it's time you finally got round to building that extension you've been contemplating for years? If so, here's a word of warning you might want to read first.  If you're of musical bent, it can be sung to a rather well-known tune by the name of "Those Were the Days".

Once upon a time we had a kitchen,
Functional but cluttered to extremes,
So we planned a glorious extension
And wallowed in idealistic dreams.
We got the builders in,
Cement began to spin,
They turned the house a dirty shade of grey,
The garden’s full of skips,
We’re out of PG Tips,
And you should hear the music that they play.
We got the builders in,
That was our greatest sin,
For once they came, they never went away.

We retreated to an upstairs bedroom,
Hoping for some respite from it all,
Till with one blow from his mighty mallet
Pat demolished our supporting wall.
We got more builders in,
They all had double chins
And ample flesh on permanent display,
They caused a real to-do
By bricking up the loo,
Then burst a pipe and washed the cat away.
We got more builders in,
Our nerves are growing thin,
The population’s growing every day.

We got settled in a downstairs cupboard,
Hoovers and gas meters all around,
Then we got a visit from the council
Telling us they’d judged the place unsound.
We got contractors in
Our house to underpin
And weigh it down when it began to sway,
So back and forth they passed
Soon treading down the grass
And now we own a public right of way.
We’ve got contractors in,
So pour another gin
And please don’t ask us why we’ve come to stay.


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