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All pale compared to the horror of having the builders in. The mess, the noise, the frangible schedules, the trail of half drunk mugs of tea... In fact, the combination of slipping schedules and a partially dismantled house (and an illness in the family) has forced me to delay a brief business trip to Europe I had planned for this week. Inconvenient does not even begin to describe it.

I mentioned my views on 'The British Builder' to both Joanne Jacobs and Brian Linse when they were in London recently, intimating to them both on separate occasions that these sceptred Isles produce by far the greatest domestic affliction known to Western man since Attila the Hun remodelled much of Italy... but both Joanne and Brian quickly asserted that the British Builder's American counterparts are even worse fonts of woe, calamity and ruined carpets, taking deposits and promptly taking on a strangely ethereal quality.

I remarked on this to a German associate of mine and he in turn dismissed both British and American claims with a wave of his hand, claiming nothing leaves more misery in its wake than the attentions of Westphalian interior decorators. Then an Irish friend of mine asserted that the Irish builders had amongst their ranks many who had been rejected by the paramilitaries for being too destructive and had thus ended up with careers in construction, joining and decorating where their talents had a more ready outlet.

I seem to be detecting a strange form of inverted nationalism at work here!