25 Jul 10 Nasty neighbours

Don’t you just hate it when someone thinks that whatever you do is subject to their approval simply because they live next door.

“Errr , did you know your house just got flooded?”

As a family we have had our share of bad luck, not least getting flooded out of our house in 2007 and being unable to return until 2009. During that time, the place was initially derelict and then a massive building site for about a year. From time to time we did spare a thought for our semi detached neighbours. They had exchanged contracts to buy their house an hour or two before it actually flooded. The previous owners laid a cheap carpet over the mess and did a runner, not informing the new owners of the flood. In fact our first words to them was something like: “Errr , did you know your house just got flooded?”. They didn’t.

And sure enough, they sold up and fucked off – the best day of our entire experience of living next door to them

The previous family had moved in a couple of years before the flood. They extended their boundaries to maximise its value. In the process they made our drive an almost impossibly narrow channel. They shoved a conservatory near the boundary of the two properties with the windows looking straight onto our garden. They were generally fairly abrupt and not at all concerned about our inconvenience; why should they be? They were just looking to maximise value, sell and leave the pissed off neighbours behind them. And sure enough, they sold up and fucked off – the best day of our entire experience of living next door to them.

The new couple seemed nice enough. But our experience of living next to them started out with us moving out of our flooded and wrecked house. I think I first met them as I was waiting for a lorry to come and take our belongings to a landfill site. Concurrently they were getting out of a removal van to find out that they were moving into a flooded property.

When we did see them, the strain showed.

So we moved out – our place being uninhabitable and they stayed put. As the next two years progressed, we were conscious of their situation. We told the builders not to upset them while they were at work on our house. And sure enough, day after day they became massively upset at the noise, holes coming through the party wall, their wooden floor was wrecked, cracks in the walls and more. The skips outside the property inconvenienced them and tore the tarmac up, noise, noise and more noise. And during this time they even had a baby. When we did see them, the strain showed.

Cheek-by-jowl living was never going to become cheek-to-cheek

And in the year since we moved back into the house, we have found that it clearly has left an indelible mark on their attitude towards us. I get the feeling that they hold us personably responsible. From a rational perspective, this is completely unreasonable, but it has clearly gone beyond that and they are now emotively extracting their revenge for their two years of hell – our hell not really being anything that concerns them. Clearly, from the moment we moved back in, cheek-by-jowl living was never going to become cheek-to-cheek.

Either grow up and act like adults or move out

But it’s all very petty. He wears a permanent scowl and she goes from greeting to whinging within two sentences. They have two (sometimes three) huge 4×4 vehicles plus their parent’s people carrier. As a matter of course they park these so close to our narrow driveway that it takes a three-point-turn to get out. It makes us invisible to passing vehicles. On three occasions passing traffic has screached to a halt as we pull out of our drive and narrowly missed our vehicles slowly emerging from behind a huge block of Mitsubishi military metal 4×4. I think the speeding bus was perhaps the scariest incident – it certainly made the kids scream. We have tried the concilliatory approach, the ‘please could you…’ approach and the ‘okay lets just not let it get to us’ approach. But it is not a friendly relationship, which is a shame really.

I think we could have ignored this pettiness in the hope that eventually they would either grow up and act like adults or move out. That was until Thursday.

More later…