IMAGINE that I am about to move to a fancy new house. The first expense lies in getting an architect to draw up plans for my home. Bang goes a few thousand at a guess.

It’s modern, expensive and ecological, but that’s the thing these days. Blame Grand Designs on the television. That’s where I got the idea from. Anyway, plans drawn up, architect paid, ground cleared – what could go wrong now?

It turns out the neighbours don’t like the plans. Perhaps they haven’t been watching Grand Designs. These plans are so stylishly water-tight they didn’t even elicit one snigger from Kevin McCloud, who has come along to see if my house would make one of his TV programmes.

But damn those neighbours. They insist my new house is out of keeping and won’t fit the historic corner of York in which I want to build. That is not fair, but never mind. The people on Kevin’s show always have to put up with these problems.

So take a deep breath and bung more money at the architect to modify the plans (which is to say change them a bit in ways barely discernible to the naked eye). There, that should do it.

Oh, and before I hear whether these new plans are acceptable, I need to demolish the perfectly good house standing in the way of my planned new home. But first, I will have to build another house on a busy bend on the other side of town, to re-house the people I am going to make homeless so that my view isn’t spoilt.

Job done – well, half done, these things take time. What else can go wrong now? Pretty much everything, it turns out. The new house has been refused planning permission and is now abandoned, Kevin McCloud has gone off in a creative huff, and it looks as if I shall have to settle for a house someone else has built instead of moving into my own grand design.

To further complicate matters, I sold my old house to fund the abandoned one – and now I am having to rent it back from the new owners.

And all that money I spent on architects, getting the land for my house cleared, and paying for another house to be built to replace the one I wanted to knock down? Looks like it’s gone down the big drain I had dug but will no longer need.

Oh well. Onwards and downwards… Just imagine if people behaved like councils.



AS IT happens, when the council’s plans were first published in The Press, I had the bright – but, in the event, fairly useless – idea of seeking Kevin McCloud’s opinion on the proposed HQ. That should be fun, I thought, sensing enjoyable mischief. Sadly, Kevin declined the bait.

So his comments on the proposals were never forthcoming. Well, he probably gets all sorts of pesky journalists sending such emails. Mine was deflected by an assistant.

The following exchange extracted from a Q&A interview on the Grand Designs website will have to do: Q: Have any of the grand designs ever not been finished and thus not shown on TV?

A: Hehehe, yes! They’re the ones you don’t see and they’re the ones that really hack me off because we spend months filming them! Mercifully there aren’t too many of them.

Unmercifully, we almost had one of them right here in York, as it were.



• ON TO the crazy world of religion. Pope Benedict XVI caused a worldwide stir by saying condoms aggravate the scourge of Aids in Africa, rather than helping to prevent it. How did he get his papal head round that one?

Not the pope’s fault, says the Archbishop of Cardiff. It’s down to his PR advisers. They misinterpreted what the Pope said.

In other words, blame the press officers.