Darlings, it was simply fabulous
THE next time anyone tells you that builders are rough, tough manly types, tell them to take a hike.
For the truth is that they're all a bunch of luvvies.
I was among 200 volunteers from Northern Ireland who have just returned from building 10 houses for Romanian orphans in a week for the charity Habitat for Humanity.
The penultimate night of our week of building was the highlight of the entertainment industry year; not the Oscars, not the Baftas, but Big Build's Got Talent, possibly the biggest chance for budding superstars to make their mark since Hughie Green appeared in flickering monochrome on a Rediffusion TV in the corner of the living room.
There, I've gone and given away my age again.
All day from early morning, rumours swept the site about what unknown talents would be making their debut appearance.
Rumours, for example, that Jenny Williams was going to do a fan dance using the giant Mr Smiley and Mr McFrown lollipop signs which were used to convey good and bad news at the breakfast briefings every day.
Or rumours that Peter Farquharson was going to stage a 17-hour performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle, followed by the Ride of the Valkyries in wheelbarrows pushed by Rhinemaidens wearing golden overalls and armed with silver plastering trowels.
All day long, when they weren't cutting and fitting soffits or sanding and painting walls, groups of builders could be seen trooping off to the sloping meadow behind the site to practise their dance routines under a blazing sun.
From inside the houses came snatches of everything from You're The One That I Want to cleverly rewritten versions of Hotel California.
At lunchtimes, auditions for the fashion show saw formerly butch joiners and plasterers mincing across the site, hand on hip and pout firmly in place.
It was all too much, particularly since a combination of too many beers and not enough sleep the night before had left me feeling half dead when I woke up.
By lunchtime, I was feeling more like half alive, which a statistician would tell you is exactly the same.
Which just goes to show you how much statisticians know, since they'd probably also have said that since the showers were still alternating between boiling and freezing, they were on average at an equable temperature.
For a little break, a few of us walked up the long hill behind the site, then turned to gaze at the Carpathian Mountains on the horizon, then down at Beius, and in the foreground the hive of activity which had been our workplace since the start of the week.
We were silent, and when we spoke at last, it was with the same thought; that three-and-a-half days ago, what had been a patch of waste ground at the edge of the town was now 10 almost complete houses; a transformation so swift and complete that words struggled to express it.
We walked back down the hill, and I returned to House 5b to help Keith and Frank, a veteran joiner from Ballymena, to fit soffits, the short tongue-in-groove lengths of wood which fit between the outside walls and the overhang of a sloping roof.
Watching Frank measure the space to the nearest millimetre, then Keith cutting them and Frank tapping them into place and nailing them home, was to watch two masters at work.
These were men who in an instant summed up complex practical problems, found a solution in another instant and applied it in a third instant.
They were problems which it would have taken me from now to Christmas and a half to solve, and yet Frank, a modest and jocular man who kept us laughing all afternoon with his dry wit and easy-going banter, dismissed his talents modestly when I praised them.
"Och sure, it's only common sense," he said as below us appeared the imposing sight of the head of the local Romanian Orthodox Church, Bishop Sofronie, sweeping down the street in flowing blue robes, his several gold chains of office clanking with every step and in his wake an entourage of silent monks.
At the exact moment that this procession arrived below us, there stepped out of the house opposite the figure of Coleraine priest Fr Raymond McCullagh, who was not long back from building 150 houses in Ethiopia and who had been working so hard all day that he was covered from head to foot in plaster and dust.
"How you doing?" said Raymond, extending a white-caked hand which the Bishop accepted gingerly. "Fancy giving us a hand?"
"I will make a symbolic gesture," announced the Bishop, stepping inside and holding a paint roller against a wall briefly for photographs, then brushing his hands and sweeping off with his entourage.
The day's work done at last, we headed wearily home to shower and prepare ourselves for the evening's entertainment.
At first, all did not go well. The bus which was supposed to collect us sped past, and only returned almost an hour later.
In fact, it was lucky we were late, for we arrived to find a display of Romanian folk dancing which would have been delightful for 15 minutes, but which went on, by my reckoning, for three-and-a-half weeks.
As we were hunting through our phrasebooks for the Romanian for "Stop dancing. We want our dinner", they twirled to a satisfactory conclusion, and we sat down to eat.
Only for the Mayor to start a speech, the gist of which was that Beius hoped to be rid of poor housing by 2012. If he'd finished his speech by then, that is.
I could already see the headlines in next week's Beius Bugle: Two hundred die of starvation in hotel horror. Mayor arrested.
At last we ate, and the first of the 21 acts signed up for the evening began. Naturally, House 5b had prepared a witty sketch called Star Trek: The Dark Side, a mildly risqu performance for five characters; Brain, Eyes, Ears, Libido and Scottie.
It was so well greeted that several adoring members of the audience rushed up to the stage at the end and threw themselves at our feet.
Sadly, it turned out that they had just tripped in the rush to get to the bar before it closed.
After that, I have a vague recollection of a disturbingly large number of drag acts which I would condemn as an affront to the morals of the nation, were it not for the fact that I found myself appearing in one of them, a fashion show involving an eclectic medley of ripped T-shirts, work tools, earrings and manbags.
Tragically, at the end of the night, our sketch was beaten by three Romanians singing hymns. Naturally, we immediately suspected a religious conspiracy against Libido, and when we discovered that the result had actually been decided in advance for the sake of political correctness, we went on the rampage through Beius, burning churches, slaughtering goats and virgins and staging a black mass in the town square in scenes similar to when the town had been razed to the ground by the Mongols in the 13th Century.
Oh, all right. We just sighed, had another beer and went to bed.
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Weather for Belfast
Tuesday 14 February 2012
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