'They knocked our aerial,' she says, wide-eyed, 'and so I asked one of them if he could get the boss for me so he could sort it out, and he just stared ...'

'He just stared?' I say.

'Yes! And then I asked him again, and this time he just said "no" and then walked off!'

'He said "no"?' I say, now as shocked as she is. 'And then walked off?'

'He said "no" and then walked off!' she says.

My heart sinks. This is terrible news. Terrible because it means there is the possibility I will now have to do something. But I'm a pacifist! A man who avoids conflict wherever and whenever possible! A situation like this, however - in which a man has been rude to my wife on my property on my watch - well ... this calls for action.

'I'll call you back,' I say, to the man from the phone company.

'Sounds like you'd better!' he says, cheerily, and I hang up.

'So ...' I say, trying to work out how brave I'm feeling, 'how big was this man?'

My wife just raises her eyebrows.

'What I mean is,' I say, 'where is this man?'

She beckons me to the window and slowly lifts one of the slats of the blind, and points a man out. He is leaning on my wall, smoking a roll-up and laughing with his mates. He's wearing a hard hat and he looks like he spits. What's more, he looks like he probably spits at dogs, and when he does, they fall over. He drops his roll-up in my front yard and he looks up. We make brief, startling eye contact.

'Him?' I say.

'No,' says my wife. 'The one next to him.'

There is a smaller man, and that's a good thing, but he's still got back-up. He's got his mates. I'm just a boy with a small wife builders are rude to. And it's not like they're my builders. They're builders sent by the council to buff our street up. They're maverick builders outside my control. I'm nothing to them!

And then I think of the thousand pounds the phone company wants to charge me because I - shock! - used my phone. And how they'll be working on their excuses already, about how foreign megabytes are more expensive than British ones, and how if I'd looked at page forty of the fine-print on the 3,000-page dossier I'd signed fifteen years ago, I'd know these things, and I puff my chest up, and I swing the door open, and I say, 'You - I need a word ...', and the builder looks at me, and he looks at his mates, and I separate him from the pack, and I stare him straight in the eye.