What can I do about my neighbour?

By Shawn Lackie

Remember the saying, you can’t choose your family but you CAN choose your friends? How about neighbours? In 1952, Norman McLaren created a short film, for the National Film Board, called Neighbours. It was so good, it won an Oscar. Talk about being ahead of its time. See if you can find it on YouTube and have a look. It’s THAT good and still relevant to this day. It pretty much encapsulates what happens to people living next door to each other, when things go sideways.

You know the regular truisms about death and taxes. You can add bad neighbours to that. In many cases, it may not have started out that way, and in many other cases, you may not be able to do anything about it but just grit your teeth. We can all share a story or two about bad neighbours. We have had some dillies along the way. Many years ago, when we were living in downtown Toronto, the yahoos next door used to think it was fun smashing beer bottles off the lamp post, at 3 in the morning. They finally had a massive donnybrook, and the guy living on the top floor, basically, beat the snot out of the two downstairs. Lovely. So, we moved into a semi which, as it turned out, was a city home with teenagers who loved to play music (loud of course) to all hours of the morning. The only way I could combat that was to turn on the vacuum cleaner and stick it in the cold air return vent. We had a new born, at that point, but we were new home owners and really didn’t want to move on just yet. That came later, after 2 break ins, one while we were upstairs sleeping. This pretty much confirmed it was time to move.

We ended up in Whitby, for a spell. The guy next door was a nice man but he would brew his own beer and then proceed to drink ALL of it, in one or two sittings. Interesting times. So we moved to another area of Whitby. The guy next door came over, the day we moved in, and introduced himself. He then proceeded to tell me about the neighbours, indicating they were all jerks, except for two people. That should have been a red flag right there. Sure enough, a few years later after his wife checked out, he became the psycho, doing all sorts of weird things, including bashing in my down-pipe. Playing his drums all night. We didn’t feel persecuted because he picked fights with pretty much everyone. It took numerous calls to the city to get him to do simple things like cut his lawn.

Once Whitby really became a smaller version of Toronto, it was time to move on. So we came back to Port Perry which was a great thing, though, in that we have super neighbours. Never a day goes by where I am not thankful for that. To the point, Ross, our neighbour, will bring his snow blower over and clear the front of our drive. It's so nice. How are your neighbours?

Feel free to check out this story and more on my blog site, at https://slackie14.wixsite.com/buy-sell-and-more