At least you don’t live next door to Jeffrey Dahmer | Peter Goers
Nowadays, everyone installs cameras to record troublesome neighbours and you can watch these videos forever on YouTube, writes Peter Goers.
Opinion
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Hell is other people. And other people are often a mistake. There’s little worse in life than a bad neighbour. A neighbour from hell can drive you nuts.
A bad neighbour can take you to the edge of sanity and can make perfectly reasonable people vengeful and even violent.
Nothing gets to you like a bad neighbour because of their proximity and stubbornness.
We live cheek by jowl with neighbours and what we share with them can easily become divisive – a tree, a boundary, car parking, animals, noise, power tools, renovations and all these things and more can make you irrational, maddened and can ruin your suburban life.
The well-known Christian pop star Guy Sebastian has built a $3.1m mansion next to a modest bungalow in Maroubra and this Guy and his neighbour Phillip Hanslow are at war and this has become a sad soap opera and is yet to resolve in court.
As a Christian, Mr Sebastian would be well aware of Biblical admonishments about neighbours: “For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping the one commandment: Love your neighbour as yourself” And, “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself”.
Let this be a lesson to us all, but dear God, loving one’s neighbour is often easier said than done. The Bible also helpfully tells us “Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s ass”. Fortunately, in Maroubra, neither Mr Sebastian nor Mr Hanslow seem to have a covetable ass. I wish I had one.
My neighbours (who don’t covet my ass) generally hate me. At Woodville, I had a party every Friday night for years. You may have heard stories about these parties and they’re all true. They started late and always finished by dawn. My Italo-Australian next-door neighbours never complained and yet they must have been driven spare by the disturbance but should a leaf from my garden flutter down on to theirs, they complained.
I had a neighbour from hell who dominated a shared narrow driveway and communal car park with four vehicles. Maddened, I even bought a de-registered car to stop him using so many car parks. It didn’t work. He successfully petitioned Telstra to remove a handy public telephone box from the front of our building. I wanted to call Telstra and ask them to keep the phone box and remove the neighbour.
On arrival at my apartment in glorious Glenelg, a neighbour wrote to The Advertiser complaining about me and wishing I’d never left Norwood. Welcome to Glenelg.
We’ve since come to a polite detente although her dog still hates me. I do have other lovely neighbours.
Sadly, we are less aware of community and neighbours these days – unless we hate them.
We love all trees except our neighbours’ trees. Every fence is too high or too low and always in the wrong place.
Test this by hiring a very expensive surveyor who will tell you the fence is in the wrong place.
Hacking over-hanging branches and chucking them over the fence and making missiles of dog poo and discouraging tom cats from peeing on your property is always fun, and makes you feel much better.
Nowadays, everyone installs cameras everywhere to record troublesome neighbours and you can watch these videos forever on YouTube and these endless disputes are macabrely amusing because they are not our neighbours.
Disputes with neighbours can take over your life and eat away at you. Nice, considerate people can become consumed by anger and vengeance.
Recently in Canada, a judge allowed a citizen to continue to give the one finger salute to a neighbour because its constitutionally lawful as freedom of expression. What a relief.
A bad neighbour can always be worse. At least you don’t live next door to Jeffrey Dahmer who dismembered bodies.
We can’t live without neighbours except with the ones we can’t live with. If in doubt, use a very powerful leaf blower at dawn.
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