My neighbour is an idiot
My neighbour to one side is an consultant surgeon from Egypt, and while this means he is presumably an intelligent enough chap, he was probably having a crafty wank when they were handing out common sense. His complete and utter lack of nous became evident when I decided I wanted a new fence round my back garden, as the existing one had just about lost the will to live.

I replaced the two sides that were my responsibility, but had to approach Dr Numpty about the side between our gardens (technically his boundary). He replied with the demeanour of a merchant in a Cairo market, gesturing wildly with his hands and loudly talking over me before I was halfway through my first sentence. "No, no, no, no - is OK, is OK!". I offered to share the cost, to no avail, and so things were left as they were for a while. In the meantime I cleared the garden of all the stumps from the nasty leylandii that the owners previous to the previous owners had planted several years ago, and wondered what to do next.

Some time later a rather nasty storm hit us one night, and in the morning I saw the fence flat on its side in my garden. When I pointed out to my neighbour that now might be a good time to get a replacement, he said that he'd been watching me digging my holes in my garden, and when I explained about the tree stumps the hand waving started in earnest again - "no, no, no, no - you make it fall down! Is not 'trees'!" as though I had concocted the most fantastic fence-felling ruse. I propped the fence back up against his trees and wondered what to do next.

Then, out of the blue, he came round one day later and told me that he'd decided to get a new fence, just like mine. Keen not to jeopardise this new opportunity I went out of my way to measure the fence and give him a detailed breakdown of materials, splitting the cost 50/50. He was happy with my proposal, so I ordered everything required, leaving the fence panels in my garage so I could thoroughly stain them before assembly.

When he came home from work once and saw me brushing stain into one of the panels, told me he was determined to do his share and asked that I leave the garage unlocked and the "paint" out, which I agreed to do.

The first "incident" occurred pretty soon afterwards - when I came home from work one day my neighbour from three doors down sauntered over with a big grin on his face. Apparently he'd come home at lunchtime and been alerted by a noisy disturbance in my garage - deducing that I was at work because my car was absent and that it must therefore have been a burglar, he picked up the first heavy thing in his toolbox and went to confront the miscreant. However, all the menace left him when he saw who was there - my crazy Egyptian neighbour, painting fence panels, in his usual work clothes. I wish I'd been there to see the bright red streaks and spots of paint all over his white dress shirt and tie, but I had to make do with the colourful description my neighbour enthusiastically provided.

The next time he decided to "help" wasn't quite so funny. My (first) house is fairly compact, with the garage incorporated into the ground floor, underneath my bedroom. At 05:00 one morning I was woken up by the most annoying banging noise coming from the floor, which my sleepy brain finally realised was the impact of heavy wooden panels against the garage wall. I patiently explained to my neighbour after a repeat performance that "helping" before he went to work wasn't very sociable, so he curtailed the early morning activity.

Now, you would expect a surgeon to be dextrous, co-ordinated and, to be fair, clinical in what he does. This particular specimen, however, completely failed to step up to the mark when it came to staining a fence - eschewing the called-for method of brushing the preservative *into* the wood, simply dipping the brush in the liquid and painting a liberal stripe down each slat from top to bottom in one go, leaving visible gaps on the faces of the slats, let alone the edges. I then began an elaborate ballet of moving the fence panels around the garage so that (a) he could only ever get at the "flat" sides which were easier for me to rectify afterwards, and (b) towards the end he'd be painting the three panels I'd decided were destined for the end of his garden, and I had the rest covered.

Meanwhile, work started outside. When he was available to agree on the exact centreline on our pair of semi-detached houses, I dug the first hole, put in the end post, checked and double-checked that it was vertical, immobilised it with a couple of rocks, checked it again, and went to the garage for a bag of post mix. Returned to the garden to find him cheerfully filling the hole in around the post with the earth I'd excavated. Patiently explained that it needed to be fixed with concrete if it was going to stay where it was, dug out all the earth, and filled the hole with concrete instead.

The next step was to remove the bases of the old fence posts ( the fence itself had practically removed itself), which were embedded in the ground in long metal spikes. Realising that the new posts were likely to go in close to the old ones, I went to great lengths to surgically remove them without digging too much earth from around the metal spikes, which made for pretty slow progress, and I only removed two the first night, but with hardly a scar left in the ground. Luckily the furthest post from the house was still intact, so I left it in situ to give me a straight line marker.

I should have expected it really, but it was still utterly heartbreaking to come home from work the next day and see four or five absolutely massive craters in the ground where the other metal spikes - and, of course, the last fence post - had been.

After that, I put up the rest of the fence myself. It was just easier that way.
(Vice Admiral Sir Charles Cockbrush KCB MBE DSO, who is finding it increasingly difficult to log into b3ta.com wants to duck your aunt and kick your puppy, Thu 1 Oct 2009, 15:04, 1 reply)

ClickClick!
Great tale and wonderfully told. You get a click because it reminded me of my fencing woes. I'd had a few beers one sunny afternoon and decided I was going to build a gate.

This was the end result...


(harrumph, Sun 4 Oct 2009, 11:06, closed)