Creep
Saturday, September 16th, 2006Anyone else have crazy neighbours? We do. There’s loud music at night crazy, and then there’s unhinged crazy. We have the latter. It would be quite nice to have the former.
Some of you will probably know my first tale of neighbourly nutterness. This probably happened a little over a year ago. Getting ready for work Wendi spied some movement in our back garden. On closer inspection she found a man dressed in an orange jump suit with a chain saw merrily laying waste to our rose bushes. ‘How odd’ was her first thought, quickly followed by ‘what the hell’.
Our friendly gardening neighbour then moved onto the rest of our plants and bushes, uniformly trimming everything with his chainsaw to an arbritrary height.
Being on her own (I was back in England at the time) Wen called the police, who arrived to see the once happy bushes and plants strewn around the garden in suitably psychotic fashion.
Seeing the chaos the police brought the guy back around to figure out just exactly how well the cogs where turning in his head. Not very by all accounts. His explanation was that the bushes were hanging over the wall into his garden and that he wanted to rectify this calamitous situation.
He didn’t think he should seek permission first, he was more than happy to don his jumpsuit, fire up the chainsaw and leap over the wall on a step ladder commando style. One can only imagine how long he had watched the roses slowly edge over the wall, simmering with incandescent rage. Roses! Over my Wall! Never! I’ll show them roses!
The cop decided to let him off with a warning and explanation of property law and gardening therein. He also made him clean our garden up, under the watchful eye of Wen. Shortly afterwards our landlord issued legal papers detailing in no uncertain terms what should happen if he decided to step foot over here again.
Which brings us upto date. The other week (just before I was about to come home from England) Wen woke up at 2am. Hearing banging noises and general movement toward the rear of our house she called the cops once more. The noises continued for some time. Then stopped.
Intrigued she called the police despatch to find out what was going on. It turns out our gardenening friend is also a very keen DIY enthusiast. On this particular night he was up on his roof, fixing the roofing on his house. At 2am. The dead of night. Roofing with hammer and nails. Bang bang bang.
Even stranger is the fact he is married, has kids and seems a perfectly normal middle class suburbanite when spied on over the fence.
Anyone else have crazy neighbours, can you beat ours?