Mr Garrulous Cometh.

I had a contractor here this afternoon under instruction from the land agent. His job was to sweep the chimney. I’ve told the land agent several times that my chimney doesn’t need sweeping because I no longer have open fires so there’s nothing to sweep, but they still insist it’s necessary for legal purposes.

And so the contractor came, but he didn’t sweep the chimney because I explained that there was no point. He merely fired up a smoke bomb to ascertain that the up-draught on the flue was adequate and then filled in a few forms. And yet he was here for an hour. Why? Because he was joint top of the league in terms of the most garrulous people I have ever met. Only one other person rides as high as this guy did in the garrulous stakes.

He talked and talked and talked. And then he talked some more. In fact, he wouldn’t stop talking. He told me about the house he’d bought in rural Wales somewhere near the Brecon Beacons. He told me how long the track was that led off the road, and how far away the nearest shop was. He told me how the house was constructed and what it had replaced. He told me how old the previous owner was and why he’d wanted to sell it.

I was given a comprehensive rundown on the make and type of generator in use because the house is off-grid, and the difficulties he’d had with it as well as the mistakes the previous owner had made. I learned about the cost of petrol and duty-free diesel and liquid petroleum gas, and was given full details of the incremental progression of such cost over the past few years. And so on and so forth. On and on and on.

As extensive and boring as it all was, it still shouldn’t have taken an hour. It did so because he was one of those people who have to keep shooting off at tangents, explaining every detail to back up the established fact no matter how tedious and irrelevant they mostly were. And he had to constantly repeat himself, telling me everything twice, three times, four times…

Several times I arrived at the point where my mind became too exhausted to keep listening and switched into private thought mode for blessed relief. But that caused a problem because if the necessity arose to respond in some way, I would have had no idea what the last statement was and been left hanging in a state of mild embarrassment. And so I had to tell my poor, beleaguered mind that this couldn’t go on much longer, so be brave and concentrate.

Eventually he made to leave and mentioned that he intended to sit in his van for a while and have a cup of tea from his flask. In normal circumstances I would have offered to make him a cup of fresh tea, but these weren’t normal circumstances and I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. So then he left and I felt guilty while I prepared to do some gardening. And then it rained.