Forget the ice cream van it's the angle grinder ruining summer

We are fast approaching the high season for extraneous outdoor noise shattering what used to be, in my youth, the peace of leafy suburbia.

- with Joe Riley

And I am not talking about the impromptu carillon-like outburst of a passing ice cream van playing Colonel Bogey’s March in the hope of flogging a few more cornets and lolly ices to already obese kids.

No. Something much more sinister: rather the constant whirring sound of circular saws cutting through steel girders and masonry, and the hammering of batons and beams into place as a legion of covetous homeowners strive to improve their dwellings, turning terraced properties into little palaces or already substantial semi or detached houses into mansions. All in the hope of adding value to places that have already well surpassed the true value of the general real estate which already surrounds them. An obsession fed by countless speculative daytime DIY television programmes promoting property development for sale or rent.