“Do you think my hair looks a bit orange?”
She breaks the silence by announcing, apropos of nothing, that yesterday she smashed all her mugs.
“I took them out of the cupboards,” she says coolly, “then I put them outside and smashed them with a hammer, one by one.”
I put the paper down and look at her. I cannot join up the dots; I’ve always thought that if you cracked my sister-in-law open, you’d find a sound little kernel of unassailable calm in her middle. Her temperament has words like ‘poise’ and ‘equilibrium’ written right through it.
I ask her what caused this icy tantrum.
“Water tank,” she says and the dots join up. Like us, my sister-in-law and husband bought a derelict farmhouse for nothing years ago and have killed themselves doing it up ever since. In driving rain for the most part. I think it’s taken its toll finally.
“But why mugs?” They seem an oddly specific sort of target.
“Because they’re orange,” she says.
More dots that don’t join up.
She explains, breathing deeply, “we’ve just been told we can’t sink our rain-water tank because the entire site is made of rock, which means we have to keep using the well water until we get connected to the mains and…”
“Remind me what’s wrong with the well water.”
“It isn’t water,” she says flatly, “it’s liquid iron and it’s turned everything orange — our clothes, the bath, shower heads, kettle, sinks — even the ******* mugs are orange.” She rustles her newspaper agitatedly. “If I knew 10 years ago what I know now I’d sod the charm and buy a bungalow.”
There is silence for a moment.
“Do you think my hair looks a bit orange,” she asks, “or is it just this light?”
The question calls for an adroit sidestep.
“Wouldn’t it be great sometimes,” I respond, “just sometimes, to have the benefit of hindsight when you actually needed it and not afterwards, when you don’t?”
She stops rustling the paper. “Christ. Imagine,” she says. “What advice would you most like to have been given, before you bought this place?”
I’ve given this question a lot of thought over the years. I say I would like to have been advised exactly thus. Before you undertake to turn a pile of loose stones into a house, you must:
1. Have a marriage that can withstand mixing up 18 buckets of plaster and hauling them up a ladder to your husband who says, “bit lumpy that one, needs more stirring,” every time.
2. Have a marriage that can withstand holding one end of a concrete lintel — which weighs the same as a Ford Escort — while your husband sticks the other end in the gable wall, saying “up a bit… no, left a bit… no right a bit, come on put your back into it”.
3. Employ builders, not three lads that come on the recommendation of someone you hardly know. You must ask who these people are, before you take them on, just in case they might be called Jim, Jim and Jim (I know, hard to believe) in which case, take it from me: AVOID.
4. Be aware that “nipped out to the builders merchants” can mean any one of the three Jims is done for the day, even at 9am.
5. Be by nature the kind of person to whom the term ‘dignified restraint’ can honestly be applied.
6. Know that vision is the starting point, that’s all; it’s one thing standing in front of a ruin and thinking, ‘how beautiful the house will look when it doesn’t have a sycamore growing out of the chimney’ but quite another to get rid of the sycamore and re-build the chimney when it falls down.
7. Pack on some muscle; it helps if you’re built like a bear.
8. Take a long term view; prolonged exposure to JCBs and Kango drills will cause temporary stress fractures across your psyche, bank balance and marriage but bear in mind, this works wonders on perspective: post-renovation, everything feels great, even blinking.
While I’ve been talking, my sister in law has fallen silent. I ask her what bit of advice she’d most like to have been given, pre-renovation. Her reply is unprintable. But in fairness to her, from where I’m sitting her hair does look a bit orange. And I don’t think it’s just this light.
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