may 29 6am got up at half five for the dawn chorus. there wasn’t one.

What made me think of Phil? Three or four years ago Matt moved into the ground floor flat next door. He was cheery and neighbourly and we soon got to know each other. His dad Phil was even cheerier. He came round to help his son sort the place out. The first time I met him he was in the side passage between the two houses getting worked up about the trailing tangle of wires on the walls and on the ground which characterise the entrepreneurial spirit of the IT revolution of the last twenty years and more. Roads and pavements dug up, satellite dishes like idolatrous statuary all along the facades of the streets, and wires strung up the walls and in through holes drilled in the window frames – a separate competitive and often short lived system for each flat – to bring messages and entertainment and business and conversation into our homes. But now nobody seems to know which wires work and which don’t. Some of them might be door bells. Is it safe to cut through that tangle? Phil thought it was a disgrace: shoddy workmanship, irresponsible companies with an eye for quick profit, each new craze cancelling the last . Look how these wires have just been tacked on to a rotten fence in the front garden! Privatisation for cowboys, no regulation. Phil was going to hold them to account and clean it all up. For me as well as Matt. So much to do…. Matt’s mum came too, and their lttle dog, who barked at my dog, and whenever they were around we were all chatty and neighbourly in an old fashioned suburban kind of way, or so it seemed to me having been used to young people moving in and moving out of the three flats next door and scarcely a word spoken.

One day a few months later, after Phil had spent a good few weekends working on the flat and the garden, he invited me to see the cellar, which he had made into a workshop. I was amazed. My cellar was like an unlicensed tip for hazardous waste. Matt’s cellar had beceome a brightly lit, well ordered, colourful space.It was the HQ for Phil’s crusade against the decay and corruption of London. He was from Windsor. To stand in that cellar and take in the labelled shelves and cupboards, the oiled, sharp tools, the miraculous absence of rubbish and dust was a revelation to me: I looked into the honorable heart of conservatism, which I hadn’t known existed. I was able to respect the respectable.

Anyway – wondering at the quantity of free time available to a man so vigorous and relatively youthful I asked him why he had retired early, and he told me the story.

He was a builder and an engineer but more recently he had worked in recycling. Not the kind of recycling that we are familiar with, but industrial recycling. His last job had been at Aldermaston, at the nuclear research facility, sorting out the waste on a contract worth altogether nearly a billion pounds. Now one day a woman working in the office happened to say to him, oh, Phil, I didn'[t know you were in last week! and Phil said, no, I wasn’t! And the woman said, well, it says here that you worked such and such a day, and the next day too. So she showed him the record, and Phil found that the company he was working for had been submitting fraudulent claims for months. So he began to question this. But one evening he got a phone call from one of the managers who seemed drunk and said, all right Phil, how much do you want? Not just corruption but bribery too! Naturally, he wasn’t having any of that, being an honest man he determined to expose the truth.

But he soon felt very alone, and a bit scared. Not that he really though they would murder him but still, it would be so easy for him to have an accident. It must have been like finding yourself in some familiar Hollywood story about the little man fighting back, refusing to be silenced. Or the honest hero cop. He or she is in a very dangerous situation but won’t give up. Only this being a true story Phil did give up. But it affected his sleep. He still woke up very early in the morning with the injustice gnawing away at him. He had got somewhere with his complaints. KPMG (or was it PWC?) were employed to look into the burgeoning scandal. Naturally, it wasn”t only Phil’s records that were being corrupted. They concluded that the whole thing was due to administrative errors, and the contractors had to pay back a 100,000 pounds or so. Peanuts. And for his trouble, Phil was blacklisted. No one would give him work. That’s why he’d retired. He thought of telling the Daily Mail. I said, why not go to Private Eye instead. But he told no one. And he asked me not to tell Matt or Matt’s mum that he’d told me. He didn’t want his family to know that he was still obsessed with it all.

It’s because of the cellar that I know that what he said was true.

Soon after he was diagnosed with a swift cancer and died.

One day I told Matt that his father had told me the whole story. I thought he might be angry on his father’s behalf. But he just said that Phil should have forgotten about it and moved on. Soon after that Matt himself moved on. He’d increased the value of his flat with a spacious extension and the marketing business was good so that he could afford to buy a house. He had a porsche. (Matt, it’s not a one syllable word.) Don’t make trouble, don’t be a whistle blower. Go along with the system and it will be kind to you.

The dead wires still hang from our houses.

Matt had a secure, high fence built between his garden and mine. Phil brought his gardener over from Windsor to do it. So then he became screened off, but he and I could still call out to each other if we wanted to, so it wasn’t too much of a barrier. His new garden had a jungle theme, by which he meant bamboo, cordylines and phormiums. They’ve grown – they were big to start with; Matt splashed out. Now they stand high above the high fence. The other day I thought, I hate that cordyline. I’ll have to move house. It was humiliated and mutilated by the winter snow and ice but now it’s moving onwards and upwards. A young woman moved in next door. Matt said that an estate agent had told him that he could make his flat the first one million pound one bedroom flat in Stoke Newington! But I don’t think he got quite that much. I’ve only met my new neighbour once as she’s hardly ever there and although the weather is finally warm I can’t really call out over the garden fence to someone invisible whom I don’t know.