These days it takes over a year to renovate a small London townhouse, groans the Countess du Ruel. About the time it took to build Rome. Just kidding! But there’s nothing funny about the building works going on in the posh postal codes. The horror of these renovations is spreading like a virus, worse than Swine Flu. Everyone is infected.

All over London you hear moans and groans about works next door, but building regulations don’t change and planning laws outrageously favour the projects. No one thinks about the poor neighbours.

When I say renovations, I don’t mean just re-doing a room or taking down a wall. I mean taking down every wall, floor and ceiling. It’s the flavour of the month. The only winners are the architects, who charge Big Time. And the biggest losers are the kind hearts and dear people who live next door.

Buy a high-ticket house and sure as Monday follows Thursday you’ll spend another £1.5m tearing it apart, then put it back together so that it looks like every other white, minimal, global interior bought by every other oligarch and Fat Cat. Joking aside, they strip these houses down to the bare earth and then drive small tractors through them as they burrow out the new cellar.

My friend Evangelina gave a dinner party the other night in Cadogan Square.  Three of the four couples there were complaining that for the last year their lives had been hell…literally. This is due to the deafening drilling that was going on in four houses on Paulton Square.  In every case a basement was being dug, and their lives were being made miserable by the drilling that sounds like Concorde is landing in your drawing room. You wonder if all of London might just cave in due to all these new caves called cellars.

Because the planning laws favour the building projects, neighbouring properties have little means of redress. I met someone at a christening who asked me what she could do to temper her neighbours’ anger about the nightmare building works going on in her home. "Get ready for your neighbours to hate you," I advised, remembering last year’s chimney breast removals in our next-door neighbour’s house.  "Buy them fine wines, have their cars washed, and have their windows and soft furnishings cleaned.  Still they will never speak to you again."

Our small cul-de-sac in Chelsea was once a delightful place to live.  Then along came a property mogul, and there went the neighbourhood.  He started a year-long campaign of hell for all his neighbours.  Now no one speaks to him on the street. We all look away, remembering the horrible months of blocked roads, skips in residents’ parking, dust, dirt, noise, and down right damages to our houses.

Most Fat Cats take the line that "It doesn’t have anything to do with me. Talk to my project manager. I don’t want to get involved." Well, who does it have to do with? He’s the boss, he calls the shots, he pays the bills. But he pays squillons to his minions not to be bothered. The wheeze is to "blame it on the builders." Then as soon as the project is over, and before you can put in your claim, the builders are bankrupt, and there’s no one to sue. The next day the builders open up under a new name, and on it goes.

A builder friend of mine told me this was the new game in town. 

The whole thing spins around the issue of liability. It assumes that all liability can be laid upon the builders, so that Boss Man sits it out in comfort on his yacht in the Med without a worry. Meanwhile, the angry neighbours go crazy, and the project managers say Mr So and So is abroad. No one buys the fact that the boss isn’t responsible, but mostly the boss men of this world – usually hedge fund managers – get away with it, because it’s too expensive to sue. And we are frightened by scary stories of Mr Big’s battalions of legal forces squashing us like dung beetles.

Somehow we suffered through our year of torture. Along with the credit crunch, we endured loss of income because we couldn’t let the house during the noise and dust and chaos. My husband couldn’t write, because it was too noisy to think. My asthma became so bad I couldn’t stay in the house. Then we had the cost of solicitors and surveyors to make sure they weren’t building on our property or tearing down our boundary fence. Mr Big got away scot free. We don’t speak on the street. I’m still smarting from the fact it’s too expensive to sue. His chauffeur picks him up every morning to drive him to another day in his seamless life.

However, someday! Someday! Come the revolution, I’ll be Madame Lafarge knitting at the foot of his guillotine. I’ll blow him a farewell, toothless kiss before the blade comes down. Eventually the planning laws will catch up with what’s happening in London, and a revolutionary army of disgruntled residents will storm the Bastille (their local Councils), chanting Vive la Neighbourhood! Finally the victims will win some rights. The Mr Bigs of this world will get their comeuppance! And there’ll be no mercy for the architects. Thumbs down!