The builder who's been working on my flat for nearly three months is acting like a bad boyfriend. He doesn't ring me when he says he will; he won't answer my calls, and he's full of false promises.

And I, in turn, am beginning to behave like a neurotic girlfriend. I wait by the phone, leave increasingly rude messages for him and give him guilt trips about not doing what he'd said he'd do.

It all culminated last weekend when I gave him an ultimatum for doing the job and getting his tools out of my flat. It seemed to sink in and he said he'd definitely have everything done.

"See you on Saturday," were his parting words to me as I breathed a sign of relief that he'd finally be out of my life. Anyway, I nipped round to the flat on the Friday before his departure was due and realised he hadn't touched it for the whole week. I got on the phone straight away and, with a barely controlled wobble in my voice, told him I'd seen the flat and that he had obviously planned to get the work done in the next 12 hours.

On Saturday morning I turned the key to the front door knowing with a creeping anger that nothing would look any different. And it didn't. Him and his lazy ways.

There are only odds and ends left to do in the flat but I am angry on principle. Angry that nothing I say will alter his snail's pace and suspicious - with good reason - that he can't be bothered to appease me because I'm a woman and, of course, women get overly uptight about these things. My argument is that women only act like paranoid girlfriends when men behave like bad boyfriends.

Anyway, to finish the tale. He didn't turn up for a full week after that Saturday and switched off his phone where I kept leaving foul-mouthed messages.

I couldn't sleep for the angry conversations bubbling in my mind and I had serious thoughts of throwing away his tools and changing the locks.

Finally, after six days of silence, I tried phoning him again. The anger had drained out of me and this is the moment he must have been waiting for. He answered, which took me by surprise, and, without a hint of apology, he said he'd been busy.

"Busy with what?" I said. There was a short silence before he told me that his mum had fallen getting off a bus and he'd gone to her house without taking his mobile phone with him so didn't get my messages.

I only felt a little guilty about how rude my messages had been until I told a friend about his excuse. "Oh, that'a fine one," she said. "His mother's probably already died fifteen times this year."