I may have mentioned before my religious nutter neighbour who thinks she owns the neighbourhood. I don't think I have mentioned every aspect of her increasingly paranoid and unstable behaviour. I suppose I ought to feel sympathy for someone who is showing the early signs of dementia but she is such as smug cow, I lost sympathy a long time ago. I don't think I mentioned the recycling bag war. According to the legend on the recycling bags we are supposed to leave them just outside our property but if we do, she protests, saying we must leave them at the end of Gert Cottage Boulevard. If we do that, the newsagent gets stick from the paint shop. And anyway, Mr Patel will not take any nonsense from the Mad Cow, not after she in her stuck up cow way told him "This isn't Calcutta, you know...".
I'm not sure I told you of the time we left our old carpet out to be collected by Lambeth (a Bulk Collection we had pre-booked a fortnight in advance), and she decided at eight o'clock in the morning she would put it into the skip of the paint shop. (Her telling Jimmy this halfway through the morning was her way of having a dig and accusing us of dumping - no, we did it by the book, ringing Lambeth, and not putting it out until the night before in anticipation of a 6am - 6pm collection slot).
I don't think I mentioned the time she and the Patels were having a raised voice row outside my house. I stuck my head out to see what was going on: Raised Voices could mean Big Trouble. I half expected her to accuse me of nosiness; my comeback would have been Raised Voices May Mean Big Trouble.
Just before ten this evening, I hear a horn honking. And again. So I look out the window. She is sat in her car on her driveway; she's blocked in by another car which shouldn't be there, but as it's driverless, I am unclear what horn honking will do. And it's not as though her visitors have never blocked us in - there was blithering idiot visiting once who parked in such a way that we could not get out on foot, and he seemed oblivious to the fact that if we had been trying to get in we could not have knocked on any doors to ask for the car to be moved. Because that's what you do when blocked in. It's what happened in Streatham and Westcliff, and what I have done on occasion, for example when one of her priests blocked in my friend's car. The horn blew a third time so I went out and asked her to stop blowing her horn outside my living room window.
"Somebody's parked their car!" she whimpered petulantly.
"Well, it's not me," I said. "There's no need to blow your horn outside my living room window...you Selfish Anti-Social Nuisance Neighbour..." note absence of swearwords...
As I retreated indoors I heard her ghastly husband screaming "How dare you talk to my wife that way?" All I can say is that, good thing he's 80+, nearly blind and post-several strokes. Otherwise, he might just have got an even sharper end of my tongue. Or more. (She's younger, quite a lot of younger than my mother and not very much older than Jimmy, but dementia - diagnosed over the phone by my mother from my narrative - is no respector of mere numbers). Or I might easily have retorted "I dare because she has the temerity to honk her horn outside my window, which I interpreted as the sound of someone in danger or distress. (Which of course means if she does try to attract attention when in danger we might be minded to ignore it).
All really trivial and hardly the Neighbours From Hell. But I just resent her supercilious stuck up "We're Opus Dei Catholics so our shit don't stink oh and by the way we own you and you will bow down at our every whim." They used to ask us favours, and, being Good Neighbours, we would try and help - for example, agreeing to look after her husband when she went to some Holy Conference in Rome about Eradicating Safe and Reliable Contraception, Especially Condoms To Women At Risk From AIDS in Africa. She has to ask the neighbours because the weird drug dealer son has moved from leaching off the parents to being a constant absence and the son who never visits anyway is off studying to be a priest at Opus Dei College in Rome and not allowed back to Britain except for their funerals. Did I mention that part of her job in Eradicating Safe and Reliable Contraception is lecturing people on how to be parents? Jimmy has done quite a few odd jobs for her. I watered the garden and fed the cat when they had to go away, and, yes, they did give me the customary appreciation (a bottle of cheap undrinkable plonk), but it's all take take take and no give.
As I say, all terribly middle class and middle England. But I didn't move to Brixton to be part of Middle England, and if she wasn't such a hating and hateful person, I would find the palpable decline in her mental powers to be sad.
But she's always been a bitch. Years ago, my sister and family were staying. I was in bed, B-in-L was in the shower. Neighbour knocked on the door and demanded the car be moved. Sister, holding Nephew #1 in her arms, because he was, at the time, a babe in arms, said the car would be moved "When my husband gets out of the shower." Which wasn't good enough despite the fact that my sister was holding a baby. When B-in-L came out of the shower, he asked her what the problem was, he had deliberately parked the car to allow her plenty of room to get out, but she said that she couldn't, so he suggested that she learned to drive. Of course I was "oh my god, you can't say that, she's my neighbour, I have to live with her," but the paint shop men were applauding him for saying what they had wished to say for years!
And indeed before I had even moved in, and my vendor took me round for introductions, her only question was did I have a car, to which my reply was no, but I would not rule it out in future, and many of my visitors would have cars. She instructed me that they were not to be parked beyond a certain mark. When Jimmy had a car, she kept driving into it and telling him, pointedly, how she had scraped her paintwork on his car, as if it was his fault. To which his unspoken response was "she should learn to drive."
At least since the last row over her building noise, she has stopped dropping around on Sunday evenings and failing to take the hint that a) me in a dressing gown with wet hair b) the TV being paused and c) no offer of a drink meant that she was not over-welcome.
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