Everybody Needs Good Neighbours

You might remember my mini-rant about my neighbour Mr Singh, the absentee landlord. In the interim Mr Singh has had a very heated debate with an irate builder/skip company owner about filling his skip too high (I'll freely admit, I was hiding behind my front door listening. And sniggering....I'm such a child) and I mean high. He had put four old house doors, one on each side of the skip, and tried to pile it to twice the original height with rubble. This was despite it being very overloaded at the time of our altercation. As the argument proceeded Mr Singh grabbed hold of a pick axe and started madly pick-axing rubble off the top of the load in a bid to reduce the level but the plucky little skip owner, all black leather bomber jacket and shirt-and-tie combo, stood his ground....there was no way that they were going to take the skip piled high as it was.

'Tee-hee Mr Singh' I thought. 'Put that in your pipe and smoke it!'

So, as you can guess I was most surprised when I came home from work the next day and the skip was gone. All that remained was a very large amount of rubble, the construction equivalent of a CSI body outline. Plus several old doors, bits of wood and so on, and after a couple of days even that had been swept into a roughly tidy pile. I thought that was a bit dodgy and imagined drunken revellers, passing by in the early hours of the morning, hurling a brick through our window 'for a laugh'. Days went by and even though I saw Mr Singh coming and going a couple of times (and gave him my best Paddington hard stare when he looked my way), the rubble didn't move. I was debating whether to ring the Council but my usual dilatoriness prevailed and I did nothing.

Don't I feel bad about that now?

On Sunday morning Big Man answered the door to a policewoman who asked whether he had heard anything (like what? A rumbling, tikka-flavoured fart from me? Mr Charming drunkenly falling upstairs? Red going backwards and forwards to the loo after too many Jaegerbombs?) at about 3am that morning, because someone had broken into my neighbour's house - Pam and Terry on the other side of Mr Singh - and managed to nab some silver before Terry went hurtling downstairs. And what do you think the b******s hurled through my neighbours' window to gain access? Ten points to whoever says 'one of Mr Singh's brick bits'.

With good neighbours like Mr Singh, who needs enemies?