A fight to the bitter end
Thank goodness we’re moving house soon. Tensions are running high on our wee street and the sooner we’re out of here the better. Our plan to move was fuelled by the construction work taking place next door, but until the last couple of days we’ve managed to turn a blind eye to most things going on and have simply shrugged our shoulders and counted the days till we’re away from here. Until yesterday.
Every day we arrive home to a variety of flotsam and jetsam that’s been hurled into our driveway/garage/garden. Pretty annoying, but we just throw the stuff in the bin or, in the case of larger items like barrels, carry them back to the construction site. The builders’ daily lunch debris is just left in situ which has been rankling me a lot though. They have been leaving their Zorba’s bags and a variety of fizzy pop cans for LB and I to tidy up after them. You might think, what with my landlady choosing to host coffee mornings at our table and chairs and the builders taking their daily lunch breaks in our garden, that we have a veritable paradise in our backyard but actually, it’s a midden. I’ve no idea why they choose to come here, but it seems that our garden has been designated as their lunch spot.
I was working from home yesterday and could hear loud voices coming from our garden, and I finally snapped. I went outside to see a builder, feet up, quite at home, munching away whilst conducting a conversation with our odious former next door neighbour whose plot is now the building site. (We’ve not been on speaking terms ever since he described me as ‘titsira’ – wantonly naked/shamelessly naked – one afternoon after spotting me in my back garden in a bikini).
Initially calm and polite, I said, “excuse me.”
They looked up.
“Um, are you having a meeting in my garden?” I asked.
“Yes. What’s your problem?” Odious Former Neighbour asked.
“Well, you have a 750 square metre plot next door in which to have lunch and meetings, so I can’t understand why you choose to sit here in my garden,” I pointed out.
“Are we disturbing you?” he asked in a rather confrontational manner.
“Well, yes,” I replied. Clearly not seeing my point in any way nor realising at this stage that perhaps making himself at home in the garden of someone he recently insulted was perhaps taking the piss a bit, he asked, “So, how are we disturbing you?”
By this point my calm demeanour was starting to slip somewhat and as I went through a litany of examples of how they have been disturbing me – totally destroying our driveway, leaving aforementioned rubbish on a daily basis, removing a rather necessary wall of our garage etc, etc – I could hear my voice rising octave by octave.
“You’re moving anyway,” Odious Former Neighbour cleverly responded.
“That is not the point. And anyway, why do you think we’re moving?”
He then decided that the best form of defence was to shout at me and hurl insults in Greek. I asked them to tell me where he lived now so that if I was in his neighbourhood I could have lunch in his garden. In the meantime, the builder, having finished his lunch, was ready to get involved. Aside from shouting, “you have no mind! You have no mind!” at regular intervals between bites of sandwich, his involvement had been rather limited, until his final riposte which was to repeatedly shriek at me, “This is MY country. This is MY country.”
I was a bit shaken by all of this so went inside and called LB who, having heard what had just happened, also reached saturation point. Within a few minutes he was home. He’s far calmer than me and not at all confrontational and went over to the site to try to reason with the builder.
He came back shaking his head, telling me it’s impossible to reason with someone who’s only form of defence is to yell that he used to be a policeman so knows the law better than us. LB told him that it’s not a competition over who knows the law better, it’s a matter of respecting people’s property. He also pointed out that the fact that I’m Scottish doesn’t mean he has any more right to come into my garden. Again the “I used to be a policeman” argument was used, at which point LB gave up trying to have an intelligent conversation with him and just said that from now on, regardless of who knows the law better or who used to do what, at no point should he or any of his colleagues come into our garden.
“Hey my friend. I have pride. You know what? Even if you invited me into your garden now I wouldn’t come,” he said.
Thank God for pride.
