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Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

The building opposite the window of the bedroom has been completely gutted. Round the front, as you walk past under the scaffolding the covers the four floors, if you look through the badly boarded up windows, through the cracks in the wood, there is no ceiling. Wires hang down like ivy. The floor is a mess of concrete, bricks, rubble and dust. Men in hard hats, faded denim and heavy jackets walk in and out, smoking and carrying heavy tools.

At the back of the building, looking through the bedroom window, the building is also enclosed in scaffolding. The boards creak and protest as the men walk up and down. There are no windows at the back of the building, and so all the debris is brought around from the front via the roof, and dropped from a height through the yellow plastic tubing that snakes down the side to the ground. The men call and yell at each other like monkeys in a zoo. Two of the five have stage Irish accents, the kind of Irish accent only developed after living in another country for long enough. They are working and moving hidden from the rest of the street, and are acting as though unobserved and unsupervised.

When the noise started, I woke with the shock of assumption that someone had accidentally broken through the wall of the bathroom beside the bedroom, but the laughing and joking and impressively eloquent swearing continued between the men, and I slowly realised that the window next door must be open, channeling the noise through. I drift back to sleep, and dream that I am standing at the window of the bedroom, watching the men at their work, swinging through the scaffolding like monkeys in the jungle.

This entry was posted on 26 November 2004 at 3:17 pm. 0 comments

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