another chance to catch pneumonia

It's been hard enough to get a quote out of anyone to fix my roof. My roof, which was fixed (ha!) the summer that I moved in. That has been quietly leaking into the front corner of my bedroom ever since. Which on closer examination has been vaguely patched by the previous owner of this house with plaster at the front of the parapet. Plaster which I can only assume he tired of applying appallingly to the interior walls and thought he'd stick on the exterior on the basis that he hadn't botched that enough yet. The poor deluded fool.

I digress. It's my flashing. It needs replacing. I have had a couple of roofers come and squint at my roof and tell me that it's cracked where it joins the parapet (oh yeah...shit..shit..shit..), and one friend who also pointed out that my roof is sagging in the middle and is therefore demoted to 'harbinger of doom: ignore at all costs' status. And then the quotes singularly failed to arrive. A combination of work, weariness and the desire to bury my head as deep as possible prevented me from chasing them too hard. And then I had a morning's release at work.

After several phone calls which happily ended amicably I finally recieved a white envelope in the post on Saturday morning. I had been unable to understand why my new best friend the roofer was unable to tell me the price over the phone but concluded that he was following some arcane builder tradition. I ripped the envelope open eagerly, hoping that the price would be less or even mostly the same as the other bloke who at a staggering four weeks after visiting still seems unable to locate his first class stamps.

Wrong. I was wrong. How wrong is it possible to be? Wrong to the tune of three hundred pounds. That's three hundred pounds more than the original 'ballpark figure' I was given four and a bit weeks ago by Mr Royal Mail.

Holy fucking crap, to put it mildly.

Anyone got a long ladder?