Looking forward, we are about to have new neighbours on two counts. I use the term loosely as the first neighbour in question refers to a house at the end of the street. “We should be in by Christmas,” they declared, rather optimistically three years ago. But the noisy, gung-ho builders are still there on a regular basis, oblivious to the fact that there are other residents living in the same street!
Recently, a rather large van attempted a disastrous forty three point turn outside our house. The driver was more occupied in impressing his mates with his one-handed, rally style, steering wheel control rather than listening to directions, and promptly reversed into our decorative yet extremely functional, terracotta down pipe, smashing three metres of the feature to smithereens!
Luckily, our good neighbour witnessed the incident, which was very fortunate, as the driver was about to slink away under cover of brick dust. Not a nice thing to do in any neighbourly circumstance!One would have hoped that an apology, along with some commitment of reparation, would have been instantly forthcoming. Yet no! The word sorry doesn’t seem to apply here, although the words ‘tranquilo’ and ‘no te preocupes’ were bantered with the typical throwaway attitude. But we were both worried AND concerned, as our decorative down pipe had been destroyed through carelessness. Yes, accidents do happen!
Yet it is only morally correct to expect that responsibility is also taken. We want the pipe in question to be fully and aesthetically restored and repaired. This incident happened five weeks ago, and to date still no visible repair. We have reminded the cavalier builder three times yet so far - ziltch! Not a very good start for future, neighbourly relations!
And then, the other evening, we heard a mad scrabbling up on our roof. “That must be one massive cat,” said Other Half as we rushed outside. Up on the roof was some kind of mad woman, hanging on to and shaking our television aerial. In fact, she was trying to wrench the appliance from its fixing.
Her speech was slurred. She had obviously had one over her five a day! Incoherent. Unbalanced. We eventually recognised the intruder as the‘problem’ daughter of a feuding family who own the neighbouring property.
We learnt that the empty property has been put up for sale. Disturbed daughter had been cut off from any financial proceeds, hence venting her spleen by trying to cause damage to the exterior of the property. She actually broke into the house and tried to flood the place before ending up on the roof. Luckily, security cameras picked up her crazed antics and the cavalry arrived to wrest her from the rooftop.
The moral to this article - you can choose your friends, but sadly not your Mallorcan neighbours. Hopefully the new ones will be saints? Or maybe we should start thinking about moving?
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