Rogue builders have ruined my summer

It has been a bummer of a summer. Frankly, I’ll be glad when it’s over.

I have always enjoyed that day, usually round about the August Bank Holiday, when suddenly the weather shifts and you can feel the first hint of autumn.

If you’re a glass half full sort of person, you will see it as the beginning of something enticing. Half empty, and you’ll feel a sense of loss.

This year, it came a little early at the tail end of last week, and promises to be merely an interlude between periods of intense heat. The temperature hit 38C this month and weather forecasters promise another scorcher in September.

As the Daily Express was wont to say when Peter Hill was editor: “Stay indoors”.

But the heatwave has not been the only bugbear round our way. Summer, you see, brings builders. And builders bring, noise, dirt and disruption.

This year, four houses in our road are being done up all at the same time – and it has been an interesting study in national characteristics.

The teams at two of the houses are Chinese and Indian, which probably reflects the ethnicity of the developers. Both gangs can be absent for days on end and turn up randomly, which suggests they have more than one job on the go simultaneously.

But while there, they work hard and fast, stick to the rules and leave little mess. (Building is a messy business, most people understand that; but so long as they are doing their best, no one minds.)

Across the road, the builders are East European. It looks as if they demolished the whole of the rear extension of the terrace house they are working on.

They would put the rubble in plastic sacks and pile them in front of the bay window until you couldn’t see it any longer.

Then, one morning, a skip lorry would arrive and eight burly blokes would emerge from the house and empty all the bags into the skip while the lorry waited alongside.

These men swarmed the job, shifting tons of rubble in 35 degree temperatures at lightning speed. But clouds of dust enveloped every car in a 30-yard radius.

I assume this is the cheapest way of getting rid of the debris but they had to be quick because a queue of cars, some with drivers less understanding than others, would form behind the skip lorry. The tooting was tiresome.

Probably Polish, these builders would arrive promptly at 6.45am and stake out every available parking spot, building up their empire bay by bay as the morning wore on. When they began work they were quiet until 8 o’clock when the regulations allowed for banging and crashing.

Alas, this was not the way with the British builders down the road. A more unwholesome crew of scoundrels you won’t find on a building site anywhere.

The first thing they did was to bring the house down; or at least the back half of it. They had torn down supporting walls and failed to do enough propping up. Result: a roar of collapsing bricks and a dust cloud that even the Poles could not match.

It did them a favour, really – cheap and instant demolition – which raises the question of whether it was accidental at all. But in any case, they spent the next few days piling Victorian bricks into a skip out front.

One of them is a young, foul-mouthed simpleton, who is effing and blinding all day at the top of his voice. His mates try to rein him in but his boss, who’s as seedy as a sesame bagel, indulges him and chuckles along.

They break every rule going. Their skip has no light on it at night, and the simpleton chucks rubble into it from the roof – across the pavement. Either side of the skip are a pile of sand and another of gravel. That’s illegal too.

Altogether, it takes up about five parking spaces and they seize another three for their vans and the boss’s giant American-style pick-up truck.

But most worrisome is the way they get rid of their unwanted gubbins, including concrete, down the roadside drain. At least they did until Madame D clocked them at it.

My wife is a bit of a stickler for rules and regs. “I’m going to speak to them,” she announced. She did, too, but first she took some pictures.

That brought Mr Seedy out to see what was happening. Quietly, and with impeccable courtesy, she explained which laws they were breaking. She was forearmed with advice from a family friend who works in enforcement.

As she demolished his arguments with the same facility with which he brought the house down, a neighbour came out to join the debate. He was not happy and this man’s default setting is chin-out aggression.

He berated the builder for his men’s loudmouthed antics and their blaring radio. “There’s obviously something very wrong with that lad,” he said of the simpleton, “but he’s a very hard worker.”

 And he supported my wife’s accusations about the legality of their operation.

Outnumbered and probably fearing he would be reported to the council, the builder turned emollient and instead of knocking off at about 3.30pm, he and his crew were still there at five o’clock, moving the sand and gravel, brushing and hosing down the pavement and unblocking the drain which had filled with water.

I know homes of this vintage need renovation and the process helps to keep the price of our houses buoyant. But I really hope it’s over soon.

*****

An old friend once told me, over a dinner of roast pork with crunchy crackling: “There are no Jews in this house.”

Both he and his wife, and thus their children, are ethnically Jewish. What he meant was that they were not pious; in fact, they were agnostic.

But there was another, less obvious message. These friends were born during and just after the Second World War. Their people and possibly their own families had endured years of unparalleled savagery at the hands of the Nazis.

The way many of the survivors saw it, it was wiser not to put your head above the parapet. Discretion could be a life-saver; assimilation was the key to safety.

Then, in 1948, the state of Israel was founded. Jews once again had a homeland.

As a young man, I thought I had a handle on Israel. It was a tiny country just four days older than me and I admired it and its people. They were tough, clever and resourceful.

Its founding fathers were socialists, Ashkenazi Jews often from Russia, Ukraine or Poland. They formed communes, or kibbutzes, to work the land and defended their new nation with their lives from warlike neighbours.

I was working then for the Yorkshire Post and had a couple of Jewish friends on the business desk. The girl was beautiful in a quirky, unconventional way, and the man quit his job and volunteered to fight in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

I always wanted to go to Israel but never did. There was always a war or an intifada or a terrorist bombing campaign that made a family holiday less than enticing.

Now I have no desire to go. If I ever did understand Israel, I don’t any longer.

It is a divided country, no longer idealistic and Left-wing but controlled by deranged far-Right zealots who have its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in their power.

Netanyahu is an evil man, cunning and ruthless and allegedly corrupt, who is accused of war crimes in Gaza, where the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) killed women and children in an indiscriminate bloodbath as they sought to wipe out Hamas.

It was unforgivable, just as the act that triggered it – the murder, rape and torture of Israelis by Hamas fighters on October 7, 2023 – was unforgivable.

Donald Trump’s misbegotten war on Iran – partly engineered by Netanyahu – unleashed simmering tensions in Israel.

Settlers in the West Bank exploited the sudden chaos in the Middle East and the mood of fellowship that followed Israel’s strategic alliance with the United States to turn on their Palestinian neighbours.

These settlers are nothing like the first generation to put down roots in the newborn state. Many are American Jews; virtually all are Zionists who believe Palestine is the ancient home of the Jews and are determined to expel the Arabs, whom they regard as squatters.

Under international law, their settlements are illegal but they continue to be built with the active encouragement of the Israeli Government and figures such as Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a settler and leader of Otzma Yehudit, the Jewish Power party.

Ben-Gvir is one of the minority far-Right politicians who hold Netanyahu’s fate in their hands. Without them in his coalition, Netanyahu could not govern and would be exposed to corruption charges he is fighting in court.

So the settlers are free to harass, attack and sometimes kill the Palestinians with the tacit acceptance of the IDF. The Palestinians’ olive trees are burned, the roads to their homes blocked with rubble. They are menaced with assault rifles.

Israel is out of control. The zealots sow hatred. Inevitably, they will reap war.

*****

Ignoring the danger, five teenagers wearing masks speed the wrong way down a motorway in a BMW. All five are killed in a collision and two sisters and a seven-year-old child are critically injured in the car they hit on the M9 in Co. Kildare, Ireland.

A film clip on TikTok shows them in the car with police in pursuit soon before the crash and Irish Taoiseach, Micheal Martin criticises those who take such risks for social media likes.

Days later, five more young men drive the wrong way down the A66 in Cleveland and collide head-on with a police car carrying two armed response officers. All seven are killed. Again, damning film is found on social media.

There used to be a game called chicken which involved a kid standing in the path of a car (sometimes even a train) until the last possible second, then jumping aside.

Occasionally, the reckless youngster would misjudge his timing and be killed. But at least he didn’t take anyone with him.

Now they are driving lethal weapons towards innocent people. And for what? If they survive, they are hailed as daredevils and enjoy a moment of online celebrity.

What a waste of lives. Social media has a lot to answer for.

*****

Just when you think the Greens can’t get any more bonkers, they excel themselves. Now they want to take away Tasers and pepper spray from police.

They are also toying with the idea of closing all our prisons and scrapping the counter-terror programme Prevent.

There has been a predictable outcry. Me, I’m crying with laughter. With every fresh stupidity, their chances of influencing the outcome of a General Election edge closer to oblivion.

Greens leader Zack Polanski says on social media: “Worth asking why the billionaire press constantly attacks us.”

That’s easy. We do it because they are dumb-arse amateurs who are entirely unfit to govern and probably don’t really want to.

RICHARD DISMORE

25 August 2026