Resident disruption will be kept to a minimum...

They have been digging up our road for months now, almost three months to be exact and the end is nowhere in sight. I remember the meeting that we went to last November. We walked down our quiet Autumn road to the hotel across the way, looked at the plans, had a cup of coffee, and were told by a very friendly chap with a clipboard and a tie that the work would take place in three phases and that ‘resident disruption will be kept to a minimum’.

‘Resident disruption will be kept to a minimum’ hang on to that thought as I report from the war zone that I now inhabit. Our own private war zone that’s as dusty and rubble littered as the streets of Beirut.

This war zone was once a quiet residential haven where children could play tennis in the road (bloody kids – watch out for that speeding Audi!) and where, at this time of year, we could sit out on our gravelled front yards on designer benches sipping wine and watching the world, including the occasional star from Coronation Street, pass us by.

Initially the war started at the other end of the road and apart from closing off the entry and reducing the already scarce parking, it wasn’t too much of a problem. But then one morning I came out of the house to find that I was imprisoned behind a heavy eight foot high blue wire mesh fence.

‘Oh my God’ I thought. ‘We’ve been invaded and imprisoned by the Huns / Martians / Jehovah’s Witnesses / National Monster Raving Loony Party’.

Of course it was none of these – it was far worse, we were imprisoned by WORKMEN!

Now I have nothing against workmen, but they have set up a portacabin by the bowling green at the end of the road where they spend their time playing cards, drinking tea, smoking fags, and spitting. Then, at the end of the working (card playing, tea drinking, fag smoking, precision spitting) day they block off every available inch of car parking space with signs, cones, bollards, plastic hazard tape, oil drums, boxes and any other obstruction that they can find to allow them to all have parking spaces for their BMW's when the arrive at seven the next morning.

I and the other residents are left to find parking ‘elsewhere’ which usually means a fifteen minute walk from car to front door in the rain carrying a dozen bags of shopping.

Parking is so at a premium that I’ve seen Barry from number 12 and Ian from across the way duelling with rapiers to decide who should have the last single car parking space available on the road. ‘To the DEATH!’ Well not quite, but definitely to they both run out of breath.

All the drives are blocked with barriers to avoid the residents driving into the ten foot deep, four feet wide trench that has been dug in the centre of the road. (Come on chaps, follow me, over the top and into no-man’s land!... KAPOOM!)

And then there is the noise which starts at seven and finishes at six, and the shaking caused by the twenty or thirty diggers, JCB’s, and dumper trucks that clutter and block our road – I’m sure that I saw a Sherman tank in the distance last week.

The dust which covers our cars, benches, abandoned wine glasses, plants and which gets traipsed all over the house will takes months to disperse. The crumbling Victorian pavement is sliding away into the road. The spring evening light is blocked, and there is an ever present smell of damp drain and methane.

So why are we being put through all this?

Well, there are a couple of houses further up the road that have cellars that are prone to flooding every sixty years or so and after centuries of complaining to the council they have at long last got their way and the main drains are being replaced.

Oh well – only another two months until they finish digging, three months for the road to settle, and then a month or so to resurface. So it should all be over by Christmas and at least we can be take some solace in the knowledge that ‘resident disruption will be kept to a minimum’.