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For the past ten years, I have been incredibly lucky with my neighbors, but it was not always the case. When I first moved into my house, I was barricaded on either side by two of the weirdest women I had the misfortune to encounter. One was a young mother who was an alcoholic; the other was a young mother who was simply not quite "the full shilling" as we say here. That meant that she had some strange ideas about property ownership, child rearing and what being a good neighbor was all about.

The alcoholic lady did cause me to laugh on occasions. The day she accused my ten year old son of menacing her children with a lawn mower was just one of those occasions. He was mowing our grass, taking it right up to the fences, as instructed by me on pain of no remuneration, while her three younger children watched in delight. Suddenly, her door was flung open and she staggered over to the fence yelling at him to stop, he was frightening her children. Given the fact that they were screaming in that childish, "I love to be in danger" way, and laughing at the same time, I think her interpretation of that situation was rather weird.

Then, there was the day she called, mid-afternoon and reeling from too much cooking sherry, to tell me that my cat was deliberately going up to her bed and peeing on it! You can imagine my bemused response to that one. I pointed out that the cat was a bit of a renegade where dashing upstairs and sleeping on forbidden beds was concerned, but never in his twelve years had he ever peed on the place he liked to snooze. I just told her I would have to walk away before I became angry, as I had never heard such nonsense in all my life. The final straw came when she accused me of growing dandelions to spoil her flower beds. Granted, she did take care of her garden every morning, before she commenced drinking, and did not go out to work, whereas I did. I offered her the opportunity to enter my garden anytime she pleased and do a bit of weeding. She yelled and howled obscenities at me, so I just went in and shut the door. It was a blessed relief for me, her husband and children, when she ran away with a drug dealer. Weird was not the word, horrendous is more appropriate.

The other girl seemed to believe that everything anyone else owned belonged to her. For example, I came home from a day out with my children to find all their toys in this woman's garden, being played with by totally strange children. She had gone into my un-locked garage and helped herself

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