I’ve no idea what the laws on adoption are in France, but I’ve decided that M. Ruggeri the roofer has been with us for so long now, we might as well do the paperwork and make the whole thing legal.

It’s reached the stage where I can’t remember life before Ruggeri: the scaffolding, the enormous lifting machinery, the deep tyre tracks all over what used to be our garden, and the endless noise of slate-cutting, nail-hammering, wood-sawing or just the raw-raw-raw of the infernal machine that lifts him up and down like some bearded Peter Pan.

Don’t get me wrong: he’s a nice bloke, straight as a die, and a wonderful craftsman. But it’s been ten weeks, and I just want him to bugger off. It gets like that with builders in the end. Builders are like surgical procedures: if you knew beforehand just how much pain, stress and indignity would be involved, you’d never do it in the first place.

Anyway, he promises to be through by next Friday, but I don’t believe him. You see, Jean-Pierre is what my aunt Lizzie used to call ‘particular’. “He’s measured” is what people might say today. But to me, he’s just slow. Our roof schedule to date makes the Sistine Chapel a rush-job by comparison. Every day I wander around the site come early evening, beer in hand, and look up to Rooferman with a face that tries to say benign patience, but manages only tired anxiety. I am that mediaeval Pope saying to Michelangelo, “When will you make an end of it?” But as time goes on, I find it hard to believe that His Holiness remained that calm. I bet he said things like, “I can get you some bigger brushes if it would move things along a bit” and even “I ask you should paint the ceiling and I get naked men holding hands. Enough with the cherubs you gay meshuggena, finish already!”

I bet you didn’t know Sixtus IV was a Jewish homophobe. The church was going through one of its funny periods at the time.