It's just like being in Torquay...

Polly: Just don’t panic!
Basil: (completely overcome) What else is there to do???

Ouch. We had hoped to avoid Fawlty Towers moments – or at least postpone them until we had guests to be rude to next year – but every build has its hiccups. In such a complicated process, there’s always something that will go awry before the final whistle. There has been no Grand Design without an empathetic grimace from Kevin McCloud (caused by something transparently disastrous). And when there’s no shared language between builder and client, well, the potential for mishap is expanded still further. Ours came last week, when in an instance rather to close to Basil and Mr O’Reilly for comfort*, we turned up at the house to discover that our builders had put then opening for our main door in the wrong place.

I know, I know. From this angle you can’t tell what might be wrong, but when you arrive on site to see your main door cavity 60cm left of where you ordered it to be, you might also like to find the nearest Spanish waiter, blame him and bash his head against a wall – or your own (head, not wall).

This slight setback occurred after two solid weeks of hard graft trawling the internet for Montenegrin legal advice after the twin sets of lawyers we consulted about setting up a company here gave us conflicting advice. This led to an awful lot research of our own on how to get around a couple of tricky legal requirements, research that very nearly drove us mad (and which I won’t bore you with at this point, mostly because I’m still not entirely sure I understand it all myself). No sooner had we found the solutions we needed – to everyone’s relief – we had the above to contend with, which is why this entry in the blog is a little bit later than usual. Oh, and we had two more visitors, nearly succumbed to cabin fever after a week of incessant rain and accidentally acquired a dog…it’s been the usual boring three weeks…

When I was still working in publishing and attending my tenth and final Frankfurt Bookfair, my good friend Chris (then working in Switzerland) trained half-way across Europe to watch England’s Rugby World Cup defeat of France with me. Now that he was working in Zagreb in Croatia, we suggested a repeat performance and Chris gallantly agreed to fly down to Dubrovnik, jump in a hire car and head over the border to Montenegro to visit us – and all just for a weekend! Needless to say, it was great to see a friend from home. Chris seemed to enjoy himself, even becoming the first of our guests to successfully clear his plate at the celebrated Voda u Kršu…

It was even better to hear him enthuse about the lake and our plans, a real ego-boost just when we were beginning to feel a little mentally fragile. Less welcoming was the record thumping handed out to our eternally rebuilt rugby team by the ruthless Boks, a humiliating scoreline we watched unfold from Chest O’Shea’s Irish bar in nearby Budva. Don’t let the phrase “Irish bar” deceive you into thinking this was just another crap foreigners’ hang-out playing diddly-eye music and with about as much emerald charm as a punjeni plješcavica – Colm Mitchell is a genuine Irishman whose tiny bar not only serves the only draft Guinness in Montenegro, but has also proven to be the only one in the whole country where live international rugby can be – ahem – endured.

"Do you know why I'm penalising you? Because you're no bloody good"

We found ourselves back at Colm’s a week later as, gluttons for punishment, we turned up to watch what would turn out to be England’s second heaviest defeat at Twickenham at the hands of the All-Blacks. This time we had my father in tow. The first member of my family to visit since we left the UK in June, his stay unfortunately coincided with the worst weather we’ve had this year – four days of solid, torrential, non-stop rain. It made it rather hard for Dad to get a feel for the place, as pretty much everything, including our house, was getting buried under some serious precipitation. On the plus side, he did at least get to see what we were up to, and that stream to the side of the house that we thought was permanently dry turned out to be anything but in winter!

In fact, when you can see past the rainclouds, Virpazar and Skadar are both looking more beautiful than ever as the lake's waters have risen by over two metres, turning rivers into broads and attracting ever larger groups of varied birdlife. In fact, given the worsening weather, we’d made reasonable progress with the build. It’s often said that the hardest and slowest part of any building project is getting out of the ground, and so it has proved. In the one good day our workers had before the heavens opened, they managed to get a whole metre of double-skinned wall done, which together with the water pipes and newly concreted konoba floor left our house, for the first time, looking like somewhere people might actually live one day.

Of course, then the wraps came off the konoba door and it transpired that it didn’t line up with the balcony above it, and this in turn led to all manner of swearing and threats about garden gnomes that our guys didn’t quite understand. We eventually realised that the simplest solution to this lack of symmetry was not to mess about with the doorway but to extend the balcony and move one of the concrete supports across the frame of the door, which we were assured was not a difficult job – merely one that should not have been necessary.

By then, however, we had a rather different problem.

Regular readers (all four of them) will be familiar with the fiend in feline shape that we call Tuzi. A stray kitten we saved from certain death, he has become part of the family. After saving Tuzi, we vowed that there would be no more adoptions of local strays. However, that was until we found a straggly, shivering mongrel hiding out in the garden of the flat we’re renting. It was clear she’d been in a fight, as one eye was shut and she had blood all over her face. The weather was horrible, she had nowhere to go and we had a covered balcony, so we took her in, cleaned her wounds and built a waterproof shelter for her. What made things harder was that the dog turned out to have a completely adorable personality. Tuzi wasn’t hugely impressed, of course, and quite what we’re going to do with either of them if we ever want to leave Skadar for a week or two, we have no idea. I blame my father. With heavy hearts, we were all set to wash our hands of the dog until he gave her a name and personalised her still further. So now we have a dog (sigh). Say hello to Tatiana, folks…

Of course, we might not have become so attached to “Tati” had any of us actually been able to go anywhere. As I write this, we’re into our seventh day of torrential rain, which means that we’re still more or less under “flat” arrest and the build has ground to a halt. Only on Tuesday did the clouds lift for even as much as an hour, so we’ve been getting a little bit restless and starved of the usual entertainments you might enjoy if you were rained in in the UK. Come December 11th, things might change as Montenegro’s very first multiplex is due to open in Podgorica’s Delta City shopping mall (we’re dying to see the new Bond film, but have nowhere to watch it yet!), but until then, we’ll have to make do with the second series of Heroes on DVD that my sister got me for my birthday. Oh, and rescuing stray animals, of course…

"Quick, get a picture of us, it's not raining!"

*See "The Builders". Laugh lots. Carefully.