This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Making house calls
The builders are in. This is, in the medium term, a good thing. When I moved into my house (over ten years ago now), it was in the knowledge that it was a “fixer-upper”. A late-Victorian mid-terrace, it appears that it was last renovated sometime in the seventies, when it was wired, plumbed, given a lean-to kitchen extension — and had all the original features ripped out.
That last decision on the part of previous occupants is more than a little heartbreaking. Neighbours whose houses had the benefit of neglect in the twentieth century have beautiful plasterwork detailing and (most enviable of all) cast iron fireplaces with handsome tiles. What were the owners of my house thinking when they gutted it, replacing anything of any character with naff panelling and boxy blandness?
Probably they thought that what they were doing was all very modern and chic. Less fussy! More liveable! Fashions change in homes as in everything, and my yearning for a period restoration will probably seem hopelessly dated to whoever lives in my house in another 20 years or so (assuming, I suppose, that my house hasn’t been swallowed by the river by then).
The strangest thing, though, is what my house’s earlier custodian chose to leave alone — specifically, the lath-and-plaster walls, which collapse into chunks of black dirt when the lining paper is removed. I like to imagine my proud Harold Wilson-era predecessor, reflecting on his smartly minimalist new decor, carefully choosing not to think about the fact his house was still substantially made out of mud.
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Building for the future
Not quite as ancient as my plaster, but still disconcertingly mature: my actual builders. As I type this, there are two of them smashing a new doorway through an old wall, and both are in their 70s. One of them will be out of action imminently when he goes into hospital for a knee replacement. They’re outliers, but not as much as you might imagine: according to one survey, the average age of a construction worker in the UK now is 50. You can blame that on two things. The first one is the failure of apprenticeship programmes to bring forward the next generation of workers; the second is Brexit, which led to Eastern Europeans who were filling the gap in the workforce going back home.
All this bodes very badly for the future of an industry that is supposedly going to deliver 1.5 million new houses by 2029.
• • •
A bit of where’s your father
A brief escape from house chaos and into London to catch Oedipus at Wyndham’s Theatre just before the end of its run there. Updating the myth to the present day, director Robert Icke turns Oedipus into a Macron-style centrist politician played by Mark Strong (with a Madam Macron-style glamorous older wife played by Lesley Manville).
This Oedipus is a man in a suit who assures the voters that he’s different from all the other men in suits. When he promises to uncover the truth about the old leader’s death, he doesn’t know that his fetish for honesty will have the most terrible consequences for himself and those he loves. It’s a story with lessons about power and truth that echo down the ages.
Its big moral is probably this: keep an eye on where your blood relatives are at all times. It’s not, though, what you’d call a conventional family day out. So I was surprised when pre-show I heard a voice somewhere in the lobby calling out, “Where’s dad?” I really hope that party pinned their patriarch down before anything fatal happened.
* * *
Dyer straits
After the theatre, there was time to see the National Portrait Gallery’s remarkable Francis Bacon exhibition, Human Presence. In the last room, you find Bacon’s paintings of his lover George Dyer, mostly made after Dyer’s suicide. A series of studies of Dyer’s head are even more distorted and grotesque than usual for a Bacon; a bleak triptych imagines Dyer’s lonely, gruesome death glimpsed through a bathroom doorway, a figure slumped on a toilet.
The painting that I couldn’t shake off, though, shows Dyer on the steps of the hotel where he died, gripping the black square of the doorway behind him as though he were clawing his way back into the nothingness. (Or, depending on how you see it, trying to resist being dragged into oblivion.) It’s a haunting picture of memory, mortality and loss. And, because everything is merch, in the gift shop you could buy a print of it on a tea towel, so you could desecrate Dyer every time you washed up.
Downward dog
One family member who isn’t coping well with the building work is Jessie the dog. For me, the remodelling is an inconvenience (with a substantial payoff at the end). For Jessie, it’s an outrageous imposition. Strange men come into her house every morning, making an intolerable noise with circular saw and nail gun and impeding her project of napping for 80 per cent of the day.
Insult to injury: she’s even lost her favourite sofa, a bulky Ikea monstrosity that she had marked as her own by licking it until no human felt like chancing it. I don’t know whether a labrador is capable of feeling chagrin, but I can’t think of a better description for the look on her face as we were dismantling her beloved old perch for the tip.
To make it up to her, we bought her a fancy new bed — the finest in the pet shop, with high sides and thick, firm upholstery. Whenever Jessie is in the bed, she seems cosy enough. But then she remembers the remaining sofa, and, before long, she’s padding over to nuzzle her way between the humans. I’m beginning to think it’s not about comfort at all: I suspect my dog has status anxiety.
