Neighbours

Every so often (and particularly at the moment when the news seems to be awash with presenters trying to find ever more arbitrary things to say about the royal wedding and so keep banging on about street parties) I will hear something, usually on local radio about the tragedy of modern life that is represented by the fact that people tend not to know their neighbours.

Living down a short, dead-end lane, I am on at least 'hello-ing' terms with most of the people who live here and almost without fail they are not people I would choose to spend time with. We have our immediate neighbours - a lovely old lady who is no trouble and allows us the warm fuzzy feeling of occasionally helping her out and, in stark contrast the neighbours on the other side are alcohol-fuelled mental cases who have no idea about boundaries (either physical, personal or social) and consistently impinge on our enjoyment of our garden to the point where even taking items out to the bins can be a somewhat harrowing experience.

The rest of the neighbours fall into two categories - offensively mental and entertainingly mental making the nicknames we have for them surprisingly repetitive.

Eye patch man (deceased) - there wasn't really much to know about eye-patch man, but he had a dog, a slightly spooky run down house and, presumably, only one eye.

Crazy chicken lady (aka Loud Dog Woman) - She owns a large dog who seems to enjoy barking at everything that moves in the vicinity of their front window. She once came to our house to ask us if we had any theories on who might have been responsible for the removal of one of her chickens and its subsequent replacement with an almost identical, but apparently sub-standard, chicken.

Mystery car lady (we do actually know her real name now, but until we found it out, this was her nickname) - she used to own a small car which was perpetually full of crap including cushions, bags of mystery fruit and a selection of soft furnishings and cardboard boxes. When this car died, she purchased what appeared to be a brand new vehicle which remained intact for around two weeks after she took possession of it. Her car was then scraped down the entire driver's side by a van which became less noticeable when she started to refill the new car with another (or possibly the same) selection of crap which still resides in there to this day. We once helped her move a mattress, which turned out to be distressingly stained, from her house to her car, which involved the Boy Wonder dangling it out of a window whilst I tried to catch it below and then the two of us wrestling it into the non-spacious back of her vehicle.

Short shorts - he is, to the best of our knowledge, Portuguese and has a peculiar passion for Daisy Duke style cut-off jeans in which he parades up and down the lane. He has a small car which is possibly the most put upon vehicle in the world. It is at least 15 years old and as though the thrashing that it has obviously taken from being driven wasn't enough, it has also been subject to a variety of maintenance procedures which are of dubious safety. For example, we once returned home to find Short shorts lying underneath his car, which was propped up on a selection of wooden blocks and household items, hammering out a dent with a mallet and a lump of wood. He actually did a surprisingly good job of it, which in no way mitigated the fact that the engine has such serious problems that it cannot travel at speeds less than 30 mph without stalling repeatedly. 

TVR Twat - this guy sums up almost everything I hate about people in general. Our first contact was when we had to take in his cat - we didn't know it was his cat and assumed it was a stray because it was so thin and in such poor condition. When it became clear that he was spending most of his time at our house, and not wanting to jump to conclusions about a cat which might just be suffering from a thyroid problem or similar, I took him to the vet who confirmed that he was severely underweight, was suffering from neglect and had problems retracting his claws from spending so much time outside. After a couple of months during which he barely left the house, we discovered that TVR twat's family were his supposed owners - they reclaimed him for all of two weeks before he disappeared altogether leading us to hope that he found a nice old lady to spoil him and stayed put. TVR twat also, as his name suggests, owns a TVR which he obviously believes requires frequent and seemingly pointless maintenance and which he often just sits in and revs, loudly and annoyingly for hours on end, apparently oblivious to the fact that his neighbours may not wish to hear the gut wrenchingly bad noises which emanate from it. I have also witnessed him using incredibly poor judgement when it comes to roundabout lane discipline.

Crazy end neighbour - him and his whole family are just nuts. Our first encounter with them was shortly after we moved in when they left a note on our car telling us that the weight of our vehicle was cutting off his electricity and water. Knowing that this was bullshit, we continued to park on the public road outside his house, receiving several more notes which we ignored, until they decided that instead of using their ample drive, they would instead ensure that one of their cars is always blocking the parking spot. They also have what must be a genetic tendency towards playing loud music in their cars with the doors open. The whole family do this, including those who don't live there, meaning that every so often we are treated to incredibly loud renditions of appalling music being blasted out of their cars. Their children/grandchildren also don't see the problem with honking their horn by way of a farewell, regardless of the time of day or night. Crazy end neighbour and his wife also have an unnerving habit of talking to you about things that you cannot possibly know as though you are privy to the intimate details of their personal lives, which makes for some awkward situations when you're trying to work out what the hell they are talking about.

Crazy shouting child and family - we first came across crazy shouting child when he went through a phase of shouting loudly about things in the garden which we could hear from ours. Some of the conversations were bordering on the surreal, including one where he had a conversation with a boy called Charlie who we can only assume is fictitious, about a time when they had shouted over the fence at one another previously. When we were painting the outside of the house, he walked past with his parents, pausing only to shout at full volume 'Hello, man up a ladder!'. His mum just said 'We aren't very good at stealth approaches' and dragged him on past. Crazy shouting child's parents are also pretty odd - his Dad seems to experience almost as much social awkwardness as I do, and once stopped dead in the street and stared directly up into the sky to avoid making eye contact with me. His mum is perfectly pleasant, but once backed into a stationary vehicle and tried to claim she wasn't completely at fault because 'there wasn't normally a car parked there'. His brother seems quite shy and little bit geeky, but it has been fun watching his progression to teenagerdom as he wanders past our house to go to school events, hang out with his oddly be-hatted friends and generally mooch about as teenagers should.

So, when next I hear someone bemoaning the fact that nobody's having street parties because there is no neighbourhood spirit, I will send them a link to this post to perhaps explain why that is.

Am I the neighbour people tell horror stories about?

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and talking about the various crazy neighbours we have all had over the years. We relived the hilarity of a drunken Boy Wonder deciding to talk to the people we occasionally saw naked (and saw us naked, let's not forget the really awkward part!) when he saw them in the pub, and discussed the merits of living next door to a drug dealer (very good neighbours - strange smell in their daughter's bedroom!). We were talking about shared gardens and I told the story of when we lived in the top flat of a converted house with no access to the garden. It was summer ball season and I had gone to one while the Boy Wonder was playing at another, so I had come in at around 6am, absolutely knackered. Outside, parading along the fence in the downstairs garden was a wailing cat, so I opened the window to shout at it, which had no impact but was at least easy to do. Once I had exhausted my enthusiasm for shouting, I decided to go for something with a little more impact and after a little spirited rooting around in the drawers I came across some old party poppers. 'These will do the job' I thought to myself, and so I was terribly disappointed when the earsplitting noise I had anticipated was a little damp squibbish and failed to arouse any response from the bloody cat. So not only was I not asleep and slightly drunk, but I was becoming increasingly convinced that the cat was deliberately mocking me, so I decided that I would try appealing to a different sense and formulated a plan to throw dried pasta at it in the hope of startling it off its perch on the fence, or at least breaking its concentration and forcing it to re-evaluate its choices of hobby. In a similar fashion to the party popper, I could envisage all this taking place within the space of around two minutes with me landing a few choice shots and putting the whole thing behind me. What actually happened was that I discovered how difficult it is to accurately throw pasta across a 10m garden at a 45 degree angle from a sash window at a small, moving target - very. One last attempt I thought, and stamping back to the bedroom I decided to revisit my original plan of startling the damn thing with a loud noise, and the option which presented itself to me was a good hard slam of the large sash window in the bedroom which at least faced the garden fence. I gave it a whack, the glass cracked and the cat's basic position of 'Fuck You human!' was established. Once I had had some sleep, I realised that not only was the window now broken (I accidentally made this less of a problem, on which more later) but our downstairs neighbours now had a garden full of dried pasta and party streamers. This is exactly the kind of thing you read on websites 'I came home one day to find my garden looked as though a group of impatient Italians had been partying in it - WTF?' or find out from your friends about their neighbours. Having said that, it's done now, and out current neighbours have won all the prizes going for inappropriate behaviour, so I feel sure they have no tales to tell of our exploits which wouldn't be met with disbelief or outright hilarity!