The Cheerful Builder has returned!!!

Again.

He has a new car and has been on holiday since I last engaged him, but it was very good to see his face again. Or, indeed, anybody’s face.

I explained the problem to him – viz, the loft would currently be very useful should I wish to open a haddock smokery. But as a conventional storage area it is currently under-par.

He winced, in his Cheerful Builder-like fashion, and started to mix up some cement-stuff to cover the cracks in the chimney stack. I put the kettle on.

The Cheerful Builder drinks coffee like someone who has been crossly told not to by David Blunkett. I cannot believe that somebody can drink that much coffee and still be alive. I have my suspicions that he actually stores it in big plastic containers then runs some sort of coffee van in the evenings, going round the villages selling recycled ‘fresh’ coffee.

I watch him like a hawk as he goes back to the car for some tools. There is a bulge in his jumper, but I think he is just a bit overweight.

While he is here, we have asked him to build a wall in the loft, between my house and Short Tony’s. At the moment we have one big loft between us, which is not very practical.

For a start, our chimney debacle also fills his house with smoke. And secondly it would be easy for him to creep across the joists until he’s over my bedroom and bore holes in the ceiling, in order to install small cameras and recording equipment to video me in bed and sell it over the Internet.

You might think that I am being paranoid, worrying about my coffee being re-sold and videos of me in bed wearing women’s clothes being traded over the Internet, but that is exactly the sort of complacency that allows terrorism to flourish.

We can never be too careful.