Neighbour from Hell

Mr Collins was a Victorian spec builder, responsible for thousands of redbrick villas in north London’s Metroland. One of them, since 1981, is ours.

The Mr Pooters of the 1890s were proud of their vernacular features: lofty, corniced ceilings, pillared porticos, stained glass, marble fireplaces, Puginesque tiled floors.

Having a large family, we needed the space. After stripping the hall wallpaper, we found the pencilled draft of a notice: ‘This House can be completed in 10 days. Decorations to suit Owner or Tenant. Apply J Collins, Athenaeum Court, Muswell Hill, N.’

We chose our Cole & Son wallpapers according to the precise date: 1896.

Sadly, no such respect had been accorded the detached houses that had stood across the road until 1969. They had been replaced – pre-‘conservation area’ label – by a high-rise block, Eleanor Rathbone House: flats for 62 elderly Jewish refugees.

Miss Eleanor Rathbone, Independent Labour MP from Liverpool, championed Holocaust survivors. In her name, this chimney-like, monolithic, flat-roofed tower of pre-cast concrete panels had risen while residents watched aghast. Storey piled on storey: 12 in all, obliterating sunlight.

Visitors to our house would say, ‘Nice house – ghastly building opposite!’

Then, one day in 1987, I heard that its architect was still alive: Walter H Marmorek, aged 75, from Vienna. He agreed to an interview for my Sunday Times column – àpropos the Prince of Wales’s ‘monstrous carbuncle’ views.

He was absolutely charming and so was his historic office in Gray’s Inn Square, its date etched in stone on the lintel over his door: 1667. But above his desk was a framed image of his monstrosity, photographed from the south: pristine white, gleaming in sun, amidst trees. Nothing like our rear vision of its damp-stained, grey concrete lift shaft, a blot on our landscape, visible for miles.

Dr Marmorek had never been back to see his handiwork.

‘This was how we built in 1969,’ he shrugged. ‘High, and economically.’ It came in within budget (£270, 487).

‘Did it please you as much as the 17th-century buildings around you now?’ I asked.

He laughed and said that was a leading question. He even said, ‘Architects have a disadvantage, compared with doctors. We cannot bury our mistakes.’

Quite. Reinforced concrete and galvanised steel in inappropriate places can’t be forgiven, like a passing, ugly fashion: they are unavoidably visible, for all time. Architects’ names should be prominently displayed on every building. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ says Christopher Wren’s epitaph (‘If you seek a monument, look around you’). Today, we ask desperately, ‘Quis fecit?’ – ‘Who did it?’

Dr Marmorek sent me a Christmas card every year thereafter. The first residents of his building have all gone, as has he – aged 100, in 2013. He was childless but his legacy lingers.

Last year, the current owners, a property firm, started rebuilding the low-rise annexe to his original tower. Our objections to their planning application were fruitless. In came the bulldozers, diggers, scaffolders and flapping plastic sheets – a year of noise and disruption.

Two storeys are now five. So we watch as another featureless slab blights our life and blocks our view.

I hear the writer Robert Byron’s words: ‘Of all the arts, architecture is the nearest to the most people, affects their happiness most closely, obtrudes on their sight most often…’

Why are accidents so amusing? Oliver and Matt Pritchett have the answer

I’ve often wondered what members of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) do for a bit of fun.

How rollicking are their Christmas parties? I am sure they are not a patch on the larks we have at SPoMA, the Society for the Promotion of Minor Accidents.

We were founded to celebrate the joy of grazes, bruises, trips, twisted ankles and barked shins, which can, let us admit, be funny to witness and even better to talk about later.

The black eye, the exaggerated hobble, the arm, in a sling or the larger-than-necessary plaster will always get the conversation going. It can be a particularly rewarding pastime for the elderly to share. A much better topic than, say, the unseasonal weather. You can always delight your friends with your swollen upper lip and the story to go with it.

My own special party trick is to squirt one of my pills from its blister pack, then spend a minute or so crawling round on the floor looking for it, bump my head on the furniture as I haul myself to my feet, then get a dizzy spell and lurch about the room. My ungainly skating across the kitchen on a stray ice cube, ending in a collision with the stove, has also been much appreciated.

Comedy would be all the poorer if there were no minor accidents. Life would be drab if no umbrella was ever blown inside out and no pedestrian was ever drenched by a puddle and a passing car.

I am not sure if a banana skin has ever actually upended a pompous gentleman, but there is still hilarity to be found when your (or someone else’s) flailing downfall is brought about by damp autumn leaves or a discarded slice of pizza on the pavement.

New members are always welcome at Mishap House, the headquarters of SPoMA. You will feel at home as soon as you arrive in the quaint, dimly-lit, low-beamed and highly polished entrance hall and you are sure to get a warm greeting from our Hon Sec Mrs Hardacre, known affectionately to all as Butterfingers.

Membership entitles you to join in our many risky activities, such as pulling a muscle or stubbing a toe in the Tuesday Unfitness Class. Or you may choose just to have a relaxing drink in our licensed bar, Spillages, down the steep staircase in the basement.

On many occasions, you will hear the familiar sound of cutlery, plates, saucepans and assorted vegetables hitting the floor as Mrs Hardacre holds one of her ‘drop-in’ mornings.

And on the last Friday of every month, we celebrate Minor Burns Night, a ‘show and tell’ occasion for people who have blisters from their cooker or their iron. Noteworthy scalds are also a feature.

Join SPoMA today and get a free gift. For men, it’s the society’s tie with its attractive gravy, toothpaste and raspberry-jam motif. For women, it’s a stylish, leaky pen.

So take care – but not too much.

Oliver Pritchett wrote for the Sunday Telegraph for 40 years. His son Matt is the cartoonist on the Daily Telegraph