I am under duress: though this is an irritation not a major crisis. Scaffolding has been placed outside every window of my tower block flat. Men go up and down in a cage to drill, hammer and inspect. On Monday morning more men enthusiastically pick up their building toys. After the weekend they’re eager to dig deeper into concrete and demonstrate they’re still able to put on a serious work show. At least for the first hour: then there’s a brief silence and play recommences in hiccupping spasms. Now aluminium clips are being slowly fitted to support the future installation of the cladding. Old dense concrete can take it. The more vulnerable residents can’t. My 1960s ‘council utopia’ of twenty two floors, in Swiss Cottage, London being refreshed: erasing the shadow of the nightmare of Grenfell.
Last week I met a carer, in the lift, who’d been visiting a very old man living alone on the top floor. She told me that he won’t use ear plugs or wear noise cancelling headphones. He sits, moans and eats ready made meals. The man hasn’t allowed the builders to enter his flat and replace the windows. Mine have been replaced and recently cleaned from outside. They are good windows but gauze netting and scaffolding obscures my 20th floor panoramic view, further blighted by endless bad July summer days.
No cladding can be put on until each resident’s flat, on each floor, has been done. There is a works schedule. The cladding must begin, at the latest, by September. The resistant old man needs to let them in. He will soon begin to annoy his carer and make enemies, not just of the contractor, but his neighbours. They will make him relinquish his hold on his home. We want the cladding done and the East European cladders to depart. Yet my sympathy is divided between the man and the workers. The work progresses too slowly with two few men. Brexit may account for a labour shortage; rumours abound of hired people having been dismissed because of incompetence and poor training, and that the sort of major refurbishment being undertaken is seriously complex, hence they are running into difficulties.
The sound of their cage and my concrete being beaten begin to take on the shape and force of people digging for coal in a mine. A mine in the sky? That’s absurd. Mines are under the earth not reaching up to clouds. Perhaps it’s because I’ve internalised these sounds so they burrow like a mole into me. I can’t stand this racket. I need to ground myself, some streets away, in the local library. I may not get the kind of quiet that libraries once provided you with before the internet and mobile phone. Yet yellow foam earplugs will defend me. I will come through. There’s a huge difference between an invasive contractor attack and a background library hum.
To stay too long in my kitchen drinking tea, under a florescent bulb doesn’t calm me down. The taste of Earl Grey tea loses its caffeine power. I slump over the table feeling drained of energy as I sip what now tastes like boiled misty water unable to seep into the tea bag, realising its leaves lack flavour because the whole atmosphere of this zero summer is profoundly wrong. At least in the library their fluorescence is further away than the glare from my ceiling light-tube and there are many more windows without prison bar scaffolding.
The work lasts from Monday to Friday (9-4). So why am I moaning? Because it’s gone on for six months and become a way of life that I’m forced to react to. My writing routine has been disrupted. Have I suddenly become inflexible? I used to think I could almost write anywhere, under any adverse or unusual conditions: that I was naturally adaptable. I’d scribble on long train journeys in Europe, retreat to the park on a boiling hot day to make notes or even daydream enough to compose a paragraph or two as I swam at the leisure centre or walked down the Finchley Road. Now the building work has jolted me from my home habitat and routine – propped up, by a cushion, on the bed, writing for an hour or leaning over my desk researching Google things on the PC. Sorry, I feel listless, even mentally lame, having had to limp back to the library with a sense of not having got much done.
Yet I am writing this page. The writer spark refuses to be beaten. I hope I’m not writing rubbish. Or rubbish is writing me. It says 3.59 on my Library PC. They are about to stop the cage for the day and put down their tools. I could write undisturbed back home till bedtime but I won’t. It’s an early evening meal and a Proms concert. I will stand in the Albert Hall and listen to music. Maybe in the interval I will try very hard to recall what John Cage said about noise and then dismiss it.
“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.”
Try saying that to a daily electric drill and sledgehammer. Remember the context of noise John. The context!
vastland 