So we keep schtum. But, eventually, that time comes when we feel it is safe to come out from behind the rock and confront the posse head on.
Bring on everything you can, we are ready.
But first, tradesmen. I admire them enormously, but I also fear them more than malaria. These people can do what they want to you, they can fix your house in such a way that, if you have offended them during the job in question, they will eventually cost you unending pain and fiscal ruin. So the trick is to treat tradesmen like they are God.
We have always done this.
Whatever they want to eat or drink, they just have to ask.
Peking Duck, 1978 Montrachet wine, 59 Afghan biscuits - there are absolutely no limits.
Tradesmen have talked to me of house-owners who gave them tea and coffee and then charged them for it at the end of the job.
I won't say what these tradesmen did in return, because this is the sort of stuff I was talking about before, stuff you release many years later, when the house has collapsed like a pack of cards balanced on the side of ten-pin bowling ball.
There are times when tradesmen palpably blunder, and you are confronted with the testy problem of how to behave.
Even to admit to have noticed.
Imagine, for example, and I am speaking hypothetically here, a circular shower unit installed backwards. There is only one sensible way to react to this. No worries, mate, you should say, we were hoping for more floor space. And, hey, thanks, we don't have to open any doors!Last Thursday was the fourth year anniversary of us getting a new roof. I did everything in my power during this job to please the roofers, smiled at them constantly, made conversation about the decline (then) of Otago rugby, and gave them $20,000 at the end just so we departed friends.
But somewhere along the way I messed up, I offended the master roofer in a way I will never know, and I think now after four years, it is time to roll this tawdry tale out for general inspection.
During the roofing, the master roofer noticed one of our two ornate, dare I say it, elegant, finials, was rotting away. He said he had a friend who could knock one up to complement the one still standing. I think he said it would be eleven grand, or four hundred, numbers become meaningless with tradesmen after a time, and we naturally said yes. And a few weeks later, he shimmied up the scaffolding and affixed our new finial.
It was a penis.
There is no other word for it. I can only wonder how this jape has been ferried around tradesmen's' smokos over the past four years, about the poor bastards who did whatever it was we did, so the roofer stuck a penis on the roof. Go and look at it, they will have been saying, you won't believe your eyes. A friend, during a discreet anniversary celebration at the weekend, told me there is one like ours in Grange St.
There may be hundreds of them all over Dunedin, the work of silently resentful tradesmen raising their middle fingers to all us complacent recidivist house-buying baby-boomers. A new city slogan is ominously rising in the east.
All I know is, since last Thursday, I no longer describe our house as the one with a red letter box.
•Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
