If you think builders are bad, just wait for Crossrail

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"May you have builders working in your house." This ancient curse, Turkish in origin, strikes fear into us all. For most ordinary mortals building is only a matter of raising the roof or constructing a granny-room over the garage, assuming these to be enterprises of modest expense and a few weeks of managed chaos rather than the magicking of a new St Paul's into existence. But it is never so; with builders, even the smallest family firm, local, recommended, smiling, introduces us to a world of science fiction in which time is infinitely elastic, materials do not materialise and the simple certainties of arithmetic become conjectures conditioned by whim.

We have all experienced it. In the time it takes to convert space under the roof into a habitable rumpus-room for the cost of a new Rolls-Royce, we could have walked blindfold to Patagonia. To convert a bathroom into a shower room for an arthritic parent involves more plumbing, plastering and cost than building the V&A a century ago and takes just as long.

Buy a fitted kitchen at a bargain price and the concept of bargain dissolves when the men arrive to fit it, and so too do the concepts of fit, fitting and fitted. Merely to have a builder in the house to make an estimate means that it is so covered with dust and bootprints that one must call in a Brazilian eunuch and six Filipino maids to restore it to its normal state of contented cleanliness - and the estimate will bear no relation to the cost. One man I know refused to pay the bill; he woke next day to find himself named and shamed by his Maltese builders bearing a placard with a filthy Maltese curse.

If this is what happens when householders from Walthamstow to Wimbledon indulge in trifling improvements, what hope have we if Crossrail is built? Carried away with enthusiasm for the notion that we might all be able to reach Heathrow in 10 minutes, we are prepared to fork out £16 billion. Compared with the cost of the Olympics this may seem a bargain - but will the final cost really be so little? Will it not climb from 16 to 20 and from 25 to 35?

And what of the uncounted costs? How many cubic tons of excavated spoil must be taken away in trucks that everywhere along the tunnel's course will block all other traffic and spew muck on every road?

Imagine Hanover Square as one of the main points where spoil might be raised to the surface. Where would the trucks be directed in relation to the dense traffic of Regent Street or Oxford Circus? Where could buses be diverted and how much more might they be delayed? How long might these problems last? Imagine this along the whole route of Crossrail and then recall that no great engineering endeavour of the recent past has been completed within estimate or schedule.