I’m watching the bloody news, and there’s this local report on a ‘bartering’ system in the Suffolk countryside, set up by some crazy woman. She stands there in front of her Aga, resplendent in some bog dirty floral hippy smock, blathering on about how there’s this underground community of like minded berks she’s set up. Pure Wicker Man.

Cut to the news reporter cleans the windows of her fly-blown shack, and in return gets a voucher. In return for this voucher he can get the services of another person, to do any odd jobs around the house or garden he might see fit need sorting the fuck out.
Cut to clips of other members of this ‘bartering’ community. There’s one biddy that’ll weave you a basket, another that will sort a playa out with some jam, another that will plat your pubis into the shape of rare birds from the Fenn district. I exaggerate – but you get the picture. Like minded hippy folk, dog owning, good people.
But then it cuts to scene of another ‘helper’, this is only a quick flash, showing ‘Mr. Jones’, who, for his contribution to this band of country specialists, ‘Does woodwork and carpentry for £15-£20 an hour’.

Reader, you know it, he was a builder.

£15-£20 an hour, tax free, above the fucking going rate for skilled craftsmen – or as I like to refer to them, ‘bastards’. £12-fucking-fifty is the going rate to have some half-man half mongoose come into your house, come into my fucking house, walk in there in clodopping spasto-boots ensconced in mud, concrete, shit, spegma, dead slugs, Wehrmacht strength glue, L’Oreal Elvive, and glide across your floors like Torville and Dead – leaving a trail of coloured, chemically burnt in evil fucking industrial action paintings on your Coir matting, or Husk for you Kosovans out there.

Demand tea, tut, frown, scrunch, get all bloody Simean when I’m trying to explain the job to the bastard before I rush off to work (it’s 8.00am). Explain the job, draw a diagram, write it down, tap it in morse on his brow, show coloured pictures at the end of a maze at the end of the lab to the fucker. Press the red button, press the red button.

He did a good job though. Tidy. Nice finish.

So, to conclude, they’re not all bad. Just most of them. 98%. You are more likely statistically to die in a plane crash which involves crocodiles than you are to not get thoroughly fucking in the arse by a builder, in February.

Peace.