The Times Magazine 9SPINAL COLUMN
MELANIE REID
hen we set out to
build a disabled
annexe in the garden,
we had the fond
notion it would be
fairly straightforward.
Single storey, small,
modest, contentedly
agricultural-looking. Tin shed porn. Not an
architrave anywhere. It would be up in a few
months, wouldn’t it?
We’ve been on a learning curve.
What they never tell you on Grand Designs
is the maddening stuff. Trees. Archaeology.
Local authority firewalls that send emails to
junk. Holidays. Bats. Planning consultants
and designers who disagree, leaving you
floundering. Even baby problems, like
penetrating massive utility companies to ask
about electricity and water connections.
Trees first. Now I love trees. I plant trees.
I talk to trees. But I also know there is a tree
hierarchy. Some carry less heft than others.
We have, in the corner where we hope to build,
an ash tree, two trunks fused together. All the
ash trees nearby are affected by ash dieback;
this one has several dead branches.
But it’s a tree, and under planning law all
trees, be they mighty 300-year-old oaks or
half-dead scabby ashes, merit a full-scale
exercise in conservation. Ideally, we’d move
the building many metres away to protect its
roots, but there isn’t enough room to do this.
Our planning officer, sympathetic to our
housing plight but bound by the rules and
regulations, has been helping us explore acompromise. This involves him consulting his
trees and woodlands officer, which, as you can
imagine, takes time.
It also necessitated a bat survey. This took
time to arrange too. Bat men and women are
busy people. Our bat man – gloriously called
Robbie – came in February and communed
with the ash tree. Health and safety forbade
him to climb it – ashes are known as widow-
makers – but he examined it with binoculars
and put an endoscope up the trunk cavity,
finding no evidence of roosting. As he said
cheerily, “If you were a bat, would you? There
are lots of much better places here.”
Months passed; buds sprouted. The bat
survey is now under discussion with the
local authority ecologist and the trees and
woodlands officer. If it gets to next Christmas
I will definitely have cracked and driven
my Tramper at full speed down the garden,
revving a chainsaw with my good hand, and
committed hara-kiri against the tree.
Oh, and we’ve accepted an archaeological
watching brief. This means that when – if
ever – the digger comes to break the earth,
archaeologists will need to be there to peer at
what’s in the hole, because our area has some
Pictish stone carving.
As with trees, I love archaeology. I’ve read
Alan Garner’s Red Shift ten times. I’ve sat in
awe by cup and ring carvings in nearby fields,
pondering the ancients. I’m also aware, from
trying to cultivate it in the past, this corner of
the garden was a 20th-century farm midden- wire, oil cans, broken buckets, scraps of
broken machinery – and contains no outcrops
of rock. But I accept it has to happen. I accept
everything. I just wish they’d hurry up.
What they also never tell you on Grand
Designs is the dominance of process – the
achingly methodical creation of a mountain
of bureaucracy, an end purely in itself. The
hideously long email chains. The waiting. The
weeks when no one does anything. The notes
from professionals that begin, “Apologies for
the delay, I found your email in my junk mail.”
If I’m honest, some of the problem is ours.
Two lifetimes spent in newspapers, where
deadlines are immediate and unmissable,
where regardless of anything you get the job
done before you go home at night, has left us
temperamentally unsuited for this. Journalism
is the antithesis of working for the civil
service or in planning or corporate strategy,
occupations where life moves, er, sedately.
Look, everyone is really nice. But just
occasionally I want to explode with frustration
and, yes, self-pity, and scream, “Never mind
the fecking tree and bats and possible human
traces from the 3rd century – what about
today’s urgent human needs, in the here and
now, with unsuitable housing and a finite
amount of time left to enjoy life? Surely
that weighs in the balance somewhere?”
And then, with a sinking heart, I remember
that it’s taken two years to get this far and we
haven’t got within a sniff of construction yet,
so Dave and I just keep smiling. n@Mel_ReidTimes
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her
MURDO MACLEOD neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010
W
I want to scream.
Dave and I didn’t
know what we
were letting
ourselves in for...