A year ago I was in Scotland gloomily gearing myself up to move to England. It was the obvious, sensible, practical move. The company I worked for was closing its Scottish office and moving operations to their English office and was prepared to relocate me, their offices were within 30 miles of where my daughter lived, and moving would take me back with the general bosom of my extended family.  There was even a certain tidiness to the process since it was my previous employers who had relocated me to Scotland 15 years earlier.

So I am moodily drinking coffee and typing this at 5 in the morning in a large and rambling Spanish townhouse in a small Costa Tropical town and thinking why the hell am I here?

Oh, I know what happened. I chose challenge, I chose a new life and a massive project rather than the meek defeat of growing up and accepting growing old.

Numpty.

Right now I am flatter than a flat thing and that’s partly la bloody grippe. The driving energy which has carried me this far has foundered in the evil tentacles of this awful flu epidemic, but after a 20 hour sleep I am slowly reconnecting to reality after days of wittering and panicking and being completely irrational. Now I can take stock and look at the slow-motion train crash which has been happening for the last month and how FFS do I get back on track?

It was all going so well. My new neighbour has been friendly from our first meeting back in February and said she had a wonderful local builder she could recommend. Good, because although a lot of the work was just making good, there was some plumbing and rewiring that would need professional input. One of the major factors in me even taking on the challenge was having a ex-pat friend here who is a retired builder and would do the rest at mate’s rates, with as much inexpert assistance as I could contribute.

All started promisingly . Her wonderful builder speaks not a word of English but with her translating we agreed on the building work I wanted done (turn the horrible existing kitchen into a bathroom, create a kitchenette in the living room, and add a shower room upstairs) fairly straightforward stuff.  He quoted a price for labour, said he would apply for the certificate to do the work through the council and open an account for me at the builders merchants. The job would take a week, two weeks at most, and he would start at the end of November.  This was early October, and seemed ideal, it would give Nick and me time to get most of the lighter renovating sorted.

Okay, he only actually arrived 19th December, eek. When he did, he announced he and his assistant would be on a daily rate of 180 euros, double eek. He later brought in an electrician, who charged separately, and a plumber, who charged separately, and the first thing they did was say my existing drains couldn’t handle another three loos so up came the old waste pipe. He was shocked at my intention of tiling over the existing kitchen tiles, and instead stripped the old kitchen back to bare walls, replastered and tiled. The upstairs bedrooms would now be two shower rooms, not one shared Jack and Jill one, so I did know my original quote needed doubling. I mentally tripled it to allow for contingencies.

Ha. Their work rate slowed, and slowed – they wasted two days tenderly laying temporary tiles very slowly one at a time in the atrium, despite my shrilly insisting it wasn’t necessary since the entire atrium would be retiled. (Geez, Spanish men are chauvenists. Just saying.) Then the real silly buggers stuff started. They drilled a hole through the ceiling for the first of the upstairs loos in the wrong place, but stubbornly refused to patch and drill again in the right place, instead opening a huge hole and channel for extra piping in my living room ceiling.  NOOOOOOOO.

Finally they drilled in the right place – leaving me with the huge hole. Then they demolished an alcove in a room we’d completed instead of putting in a four inch hole for a waste pipe.

I dissolved into shocked tears (tranquilizarse, tranqulizarse) and hysterically phoned my friend in Tenerife, who speaks fluent Spanish, and they had a shouted argument on the phone. The builder insisted the damage was misunderstandings because of the language barrier, and not his fault. The “one week, maybe two” was now four weeks and no end in sight and costs were through the roof. Talking of roof, that needed fixing too. With winter rains starting, I insisted via the friend the roof was now the priority and then that was it, they must go.

Even while fixing the rotting beam in the roof he ‘accidentally’ damaged the next section but I didn’t care, they had to go before they created any more work for themselves at my expense. The relief when they finally packed up and left was overwhelming. The bill had quadrupled, the job wasn’t close to finished, but the biggest bits had been done and we could finish the rest.

And then Nick got the flu, the full-on raging version. I was over at his on Thursday, to take him groceries and pet food and he’s as weak as a kitten, I doubt right now he could lift a single brick. It could be weeks before he can get back. Maybe never. This is one mean flu.

Best laid plans of men and mice gang aft agley. What the hell do I do now?

Rant over, for now. And interestingly, I realize I’d still rather be challenged and baffled and frightened here, than sedately settled in pre-retirement countdown in England.

So that’s something. But I’m not enjoying 2018 very much so far.