Let’s ruin a new home

From the outset I would like to explain that we were not moving to a ruined castle, a pre-war tenement building or even a revitalised loft – but to an apartment only a few years old, in quite a good condition and built by a developer of repute. We somewhat euphemistically referred to the changes we were planning to make to the layout of the rooms as “cosmetic”. But it turned out that cosmetics can take different shapes and forms. The main roles in the macabre performance that lay ahead were taken by the members of the drilling and demolition team. The fact that they came from Góra Kalwaria, on Warsaw’s southern outskirts, should have raised my suspicions. There’s nothing wrong with the town itself; however, the word ‘Kalwaria’ means ‘Calvary’, bringing The Passion of the Christ to mind, a rather gory film that the lads with the pickaxes seemed to have stepped out of. These pickaxes were definitely worthy of the 21st century: shiny