You can hear what you can only guess are the front windows being smashed, the heavy scrape of steel sheets being dragged across parking lot tarmac and thick steel bars being hammered furiously into place.
You can occasionally catch glimpses of stocky caucasian men in dark blue overalls with heavy duty gloves, carrying mallets and lugging about other equipment. You can sometimes hear their thuggish voices.
They appear to be working fast, no time for delicate craftsmanship or to admire what they're doing.
I do understand that squatting is legal and that if the workmen had spotted the removed Sitex from SoundsNorwegian's room (taken down again on Thursday), there is nothing they can do about it. That they'd have no legal grounds to enter the flat or initiate an eviction, which they can't do anyway (and even if they can, they can't do anything without going through the proper procedures).
Even so, the clatter of them working away so closely has been unnerving. The local authorities being literally on your doorstep whilst you are squatting on their property -- not something to relax to.
Tomorrow, the flat below us is due to go the same way, for the family are being rehoused.
I wonder what any residents watching this moment are thinking. I catch one young African woman in the opposite block, draped in spirals of vivid pink and gold wraps, observing the proceedings carefully from her living room window. What must be running through her mind.
Certainly through my mind that, regardless of all the things and money you have invested into your home ie. the DIY, the furniture buys, the carpets, the painted walls, the crockery, when it is your time to leave, it will all be torn up, dismantled, destroyed, gutted, and then thrown away.
It all amounts to nothing. A comment on the nature of consumerism perhaps (but maybe not).
Oh, and I manage to spot the workmen's van (photo cropped to exclude phone number and company name) :
Sitex steel/polymer screen erectors, aka Orbis, we know where you live..
