One of my concerns when I moved into my new apartment almost exactly a year ago was the proximity to a building site next door (a new metro station). My fears were allayed by the agent, landlord and apartment management team who all lied through their teeth assured me that the construction was reaching it’s final stages (despite it just being a dirty hole in the ground at the time) which would be completed within months, and anyway, construction was strictly limited to between the hours of 8am to 7pm on weekdays only.

Of course, they knew and I knew that this was was all a load of horse-eggs but I figured that since the apartment was double glazed (a rarity in Shanghai) it was worth the risk. I was right too, most of the time it’s very quiet but occasionally (last night for example) it keeps me up, oh, and for reference, the metro station is still nowhere near completion one year since moving in!

Building site owners (of whom many are amongst my readership), here are some recommendations for night-time work:

• Pumping concrete -if you’ve not heard this it’s basically a continuous scratchy low pitched (and very loud) wailing (imagine Swiss James doing an impression of whale song)
• Grinding concrete – even if there’s none that needs doing it’s easy to locate a discarded block to give some of the young lads some practice.
• Dropping steel scaffold poles onto concrete instead of carefully placing them down (my personal favourite) – best done in sets of 3 to 5 at 15 minute intervals.
• Hitting things very hard with a sledge hammer – to be performed sporadically throughout the night.

The building site at 4:20 am this morning , at which time all of the above activities were well under way

And again at 5:58am