You don't really appreciate having a bathroom that's rather guaranteed to remain private to your flat until people suddenly start turning up and doing things to it. When I came back on Wednesday, the builders had obviously come back and done something because there was sort of green dust in the bath and the room smelled of bleach. I had almost hoped that they had gone back early to do whatever they needed to do, but when I waited around the next morning, a tall zombie-like man turned up two hours after they said they would arrive and I left him redoing the tiles on the wall when I went out to work.

I thought that was the end of it, but today at the exact moment Whitney was leaving to go to New York, another one of them knocked at the door and asked if he could see the bathroom ceiling. He took a look at the crack in the corner, said he would paint it quickly when he came back in a few minutes, and left.

Three hours later, there was another knock at the door, and he went through to the bathroom again, stepped into the shower area, felt the ceiling and was surprised to find it still damp after we hadn't used the shower for forty-eight hours (because courtesy of an apartment that happens to be empty at the moment, our usable shower is now handily placed up four flights of stairs at the other side of the building). He said that he would have to look at it further when he came back on Tuesday, demonstrating the weakness of the top of the shower by tearing off considerable portions of the ceiling and throwing them in a nearby bucket.

Apparently we can use the shower now, but I'm not really confident of that, to be honest. Just before he left I went in to feel for myself, and was rather worried to find that not only was the ceiling wet, it was actually soft, and I've put a terrifying dent in it with the touch of my fingers as if it were made of sponge cake. I told him of this and he didn't seem to regard it as particularly worrying, just saying that if they had to knock it down and put another load of plaster up, they would.

I've arranged for them to arrive when Whitney and I definitely won't be around to see the process.