Party time

It's reported that young people are very keen on birthday parties for their dogs and cats, spending an average of £120 on birthday cakes, special gifts, favourite foods and new toys.

Well, time for me to dust off my party pooper hat and wonder why on earth cats and dogs need birthday parties. Do they actually appreciate them? Do they know why all these people are hovering around them? Do they like all the fuss and bother?

Why isn't it enough to mark your dog's birthday by giving them lots of fondles and extra grooming, taking them for extra walks or just giving them lots of attention and affection? Some cats and dogs are actually quite shy and might hate all the inexplicable commotion.

Surely birthday parties for pets are more for the benefit of their owners than the pets themselves? They're partly to show how much their owners care about them. But where will it end? Sooner or late it'll become competitive (if it hasn't already) and people will want their birthday party for Fido to be more lavish than their neighbour's birthday party for Rover.

Probably all Fido wants on his birthday is to curl up somewhere warm and cosy and ignore the rest of the world. But his owners may have other ideas.

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Pet owners are complaining that veterinary fees have risen so steeply that some of them have had to put their pets down rather than incur fees of thousands of pounds for medical treatment.

The neighbour from hell

I'm always fascinated by those acrimonious neighbour disputes that just go on and on for years, disputes that surely could have been easily resolved a long time ago with a bit of common sense and compromise.

This one is a splendid example. Yoga teacher Kristyna Robinson endured seven years of misery from her upstairs neighbour Sandra Eveno, until the landlord, the local council, obtained a repossession order on Ms Eveno's flat and she was forced to leave.

Ms Eveno had shouted and screamed unremittingly, had tried to take over their shared garden, had accused Ms Robinson of drug dealing and gang violence, and had made false allegations to her other neighbours and her employer.

Ms Eveno was ordered to pay £15,000 towards the council's legal bills.

Hopefully this will end Ms Robinson's seven-year ordeal - unless Ms Eveno continues to pester her former neighbour despite having moved out.

Clearly Ms Eveno's irrational behaviour suggests serious mental health issues, but I can't see her seeking therapy. More likely she'll persecute her new neighbours just as badly and get evicted again.

We had a similar neighbour dispute when we moved into a London flat in 1993. The young lads downstairs held late-night parties every few days. We asked them to have fewer parties but they took no notice and in the end the local council imposed a huge fine for noise nuisance and they moved out.

We had another neighbour dispute in a previous flat. One of the downstairs occupants had a persistent hacking cough, and when we tentatively told him it was disturbing us, his response was to let our car tyres down.

Which is why we're now glad we live in a detached house with no neighbour nuisance whatever.

City says no

Jenny and I are trying to rewild one of our small lawns, without much success. Instead of lots of pretty wild flowers, we're just getting the usual grass, dandelions, daisies and clover. Clearly we're doing something wrong.

But at least we can experiment with our lawns. Residents of Ontario aren't so lucky. In Canada and the USA (but not in the UK) local bylaws regulate private gardens and the authorities will jump on anything too unorthodox.

Wolf Ruck started rewilding his Mississauga garden with native plants three years ago, but didn't reckon on complaints from the neighbours and his lawn being forcibly mown - and being landed with the city's legal bills. Apparently there's a bylaw that forbids nuisance weeds and tall grasses, and his garden was deemed to have broken the bylaw.

"My property is not abandoned. It's not a blight on the community. It simply seems to offend some neighbours who don't like the look of it" he says. He is appealing against the city's judgment.

Here in the UK we can do more or less what we like with our gardens. We can allow lawns and hedges to grow to crazy lengths, we can fill the garden with rubbish, we can have a bright orange garden shed, and nobody will object, unless some rampant plant is invading our neighbour's property.

If you're on a street with a bus route and you have a tree that's overhanging the street and hitting the buses, you'll be asked to lop off the offending branches. But that's about it.

Luckily we have a tall fence around our garden, so most of the neighbours have no idea what we're up to anyway. We could have a garden full of wild animals and nobody would know.

Keep pushing back against this idiocy, Mr Ruck.

Pic: Not Mr Ruck's garden. I couldn't find a pinchable photo of him or his garden. But there's a photo of him on the link.

Kids deprived

Urban parents want their children to be able to play in the street, as they did themselves when they were young, but increasingly they're being forced to keep their children indoors because of complaints from neighbours and local councils and because of heavy traffic.

Neighbours are objecting to balls landing in their gardens or hitting their cars, and councils are saying that the children are causing a nuisance, obstructing the highway and making people feel "unsafe" in their homes.

When I was young I didn't play in the street myself but plenty of other kids did and I don't recall any complaints from anyone. In those days people were more tolerant and didn't see any problem with boisterous children.

Allowing children to play in the street gives them a lot more freedom than if they're stuck indoors and constantly watched by their parents. It's a shame that the practice is dying out.

Increasing traffic doesn't help either, as it makes roads more dangerous and chokes them with parked cars that might get damaged. In many residential areas there's a 20 mph limit but drivers don't always stick to it.

Emma Wreyford in Bristol has an 11 year old daughter. "It should be such a lovely age for that sort of outdoor play but it's almost impossible. Here the car is king and public space is there for the rights of drivers to store their cars."

I don't see any obvious answer to the problem. Cars aren't going to conveniently disappear and intolerant neighbours are unlikely to suddenly be more tolerant. A lot of children are being deprived of a sense of freedom our generation took for granted.

Doodle house

Would you be happy to live in a house that's covered with doodles from top to bottom? With not a single square inch left uncovered - doodles on absolutely everything from walls and ceilings to beds and kitchen utensils.

Twenty eight year old Kent artist Sam Cox became so fascinated with doodles that he decided to cover his entire house with them. Luckily his wife Alena seems to be as keen on the doodles as he is.

He says the couple who sold him the house begged him not to doodle on the walls but he ignored them. "They told me, whatever you do, please don't doodle. I didn't listen."

There's no way I could live in a house festooned with doodles. They would just be too overwhelming, too disturbing. And surely with doodles everywhere you look, you'd be dreaming of the wretched things?

The artist claims he hasn't had any complaints from his neighbours yet - so he has no plans to tone down the property's appearance or move house any time soon.

If he ever wanted to sell the house, I imagine not many people would like the idea of living with wall-to-wall doodles rather than more conventional decor. I doubt if suburban Kent is ready for such avant-garde eccentricity.

What do you think? Could you live with thousands of doodles or would you run a mile?

PS: Lots more pictures in the link above

Lying dead

I'm always taken aback by accounts of someone lying dead for weeks - or months or even years - before their dead body is discovered. I'm especially taken aback when it turns out they had dozens of neighbours, some of whom suspected the worst but were ignored when they raised the alarm.

The body of London woman Sheila Seleoane lay undiscovered for some 2½ years before the police finally broke down the front door and found her body.

She lived in a 20-flat block in Peckham. Several of the neighbours hadn't seen her for a while and had noticed an increasingly revolting smell. But when they contacted the housing association that owned the flats, and contacted the police, nothing was done, even though she hadn't paid any rent since August 2019.

You think it couldn't happen to your own neighbours, but it can. Some years ago the man living next door to us lay dead for several days before someone checked on him and discovered his dead body. He was very much a loner so it wasn't that surprising. Jenny and I had only met him a few times and he was never very friendly so we never got to know him.

It seems to be a very English thing that you don't have much to do with the neighbours. And of course if they go everywhere by car, you never bump into them on the street so there's little chance of befriending them.

It's not the case in Northern Ireland where people are much more likely to know their neighbours and would actively investigate if someone hadn't been seen for a few days. It's hard to imagine a person here being dead for several years without anyone knowing. We know most of our immediate neighbours and would certainly ask questions if they hadn't been seen for a while.

But what an awful way to go - gradually decomposing while your neighbours go about their daily routines.

PS: An inquest into her death will be held on Thursday

Pic: Sheila Seleoane's front door

Half a tree

I'm always fascinated by neighbour disputes. They're usually so bizarre you couldn't make them up. Endless rows about things that seem utterly trivial, things that could have been resolved rapidly over a friendly cup of tea.

A Sheffield couple complained about the next-door fir tree that was overhanging their own driveway. They said pigeons were nesting in it, making a lot of noise and crapping on their car.

The adjacent family refused to have the tree either pruned or removed, so the fed-up neighbours got a tree surgeon to cut down the half of the tree that was over their driveway.

Not surprisingly, the other family were outraged, though there's little they can do as the law allows you to cut down overhanging tree branches. But the tree now looks pretty weird and naturally attracts a lot of comment.

What would I have done if I was the fed-up couple, I wonder? I can see their point about crapping pigeons, as pigeons often crap in our back garden. But abruptly cutting down half the tree is a rather drastic and aggressive solution.

I might have suggested cutting down the offending tree and planting a new tree well away from my own driveway. There are fast growing trees like eucalyptus that would look fine in a few years. But clearly the family for some reason are very attached to the fir tree.

Surely they knew that fir trees are potentially very large trees that can reach 262 feet (80 metres) and were likely to overhang the neighbours' property sooner or later? So why plant one in that unsuitable spot?

And how come there are no pigeons nesting in the remaining half of the tree?

Pic: the offending tree

Sign of the times

If your neighbour put a small BLM sign in their window, would you think "Good for them, it's a great campaign, we should all support it"? Or would you think "People shouldn't put up controversial political slogans in their window"?

A resident of Cheam, a posh south London suburb, has caused a stir by sending an anonymous letter to a neighbour complaining about the Black Lives Matter sign in their upstairs window. The offended party (they don't say if they're male or female) says the sign "does not reflect well on the neighbourhood" and looks like "a protest message to your neighbours".

I can't help wondering if the origin of the family in the offending house (Aj Shehata's parents were born in Sudan) might have something to do with the complaint.

It seems like an absurd over-reaction. The BLM sign is so small it's barely visible. Most passers-by would probably not even notice it. Yet the letter-writer thinks it's a serious blot on the landscape.

The Shehatas' neighbours are also bemused by the complaint. Some of them say they'll put up BLM signs in solidarity.

My own neighbours have had "Thanks to the NHS" signs in their windows for months. Nobody is the least bit bothered by them.

It would be a different matter if they were displaying (for instance) huge "Bring back the death penalty" signs. I would be the first to leap into action and demand they be removed. But a miniscule BLM sign? Some people clearly have too much time on their hands.

If the letter-writer had had the decency to ring the Shehatas' doorbell and have a proper conversation with them, the matter could probably have been resolved quite easily without the need for a stroppy anonymous letter.

Pic: the Shehata family's house. The BLM sign is inside the circle.

Domestic cocoon

It's still seen as normal to actively socialise. If you confess to being not much of a socialiser, or even preferring your own company to the company of others, you're still seen as a bit abnormal, a bit weird, a bit standoffish. You're dismissed somewhat disparagingly as "a loner".

I have to admit I'm one of the weird brigade. As Patti Smith says "I'm not a very social person. I could go days without talking to anyone in particular".

I like the odd chat with my neighbours or my book club mates, or my hairdresser. It's convivial and energising. But I don't need constant company. I'm very happy pursuing my own interests, thinking my own thoughts, wandering through the far reaches of my imagination. What more do I need?

I know most psychologists declare that socialising is good for your mental and physical health, and that too little socialising is bad for you, but that's a bit of a sweeping judgment. We're all different, and some of us are quite healthy enough keeping ourselves to ourselves.

I'm glad the hairdresser's daughter is thriving at her new school. I'm intrigued that the next door neighbour has taken up cycling. But I don't need these chance conversations to maintain my well-being. They're rather like that extra slice of cake that I don't really need because I've had plenty of cake already.

But the emphasis on a chatty "normality" means many people are still too embarrassed to admit they're reluctant socialisers. So when necessary, when they're obliged to mingle with others, they pretend to be eager to talk, or even to be the life and soul of the party. Then they thankfully retreat to their domestic cocoon.

Isn't one of the true pleasures in life lounging on the settee with a good book, oblivious to the rest of the world?

A mug's game

I'm always fascinated by neighbour disputes, especially the really crazy ones that go on for years and cost a fortune. What motivates people to push these disputes to the bitter end, whatever the financial and emotional cost?

Cilla Carden of Perth, Australia, is planning more legal action against her neighbours, citing their cooking smells, cigarette smoke, chairs scraping on concrete, reflective light, the sounds of children playing basketball, and pet birds.

Seriously? Aren't all those things just what you would expect from a family enjoying their home? Are they meant to creep around super-silently, avoiding any kind of noise or smells or signs of their existence? I would say Ms Carden is ludicrously intolerant and unable to live and let live.

Jenny and I have had a few problems with neighbours, but there's no way we would pour money into lawyers' pockets to deal with them. There are always other ways of sorting things out.

We once had a flat in a London mansion block, and the neighbours were fond of riotous all-night parties. We kept a detailed diary of the disturbances and asked the local council to take action. The neighbours were fined a large sum and moved out shortly afterwards. Result!

A few years before, in another block of flats, our downstairs neighbours were amazingly noisy, one with a constant hacking cough we could hear all too clearly. We asked them politely if they could be less noisy, but their response was to let down our car tyres.

While we were still wondering what else we could do, they moved out and were replaced by a much quieter couple we befriended. Problem solved.

Now we live in a detached house so neighbour nuisance is less likely, though we did have some neighbours who were also fond of late-night parties. Luckily they tired of such revelry, two of them moved out and the one person left is quiet as a mouse.

Legal action? It's a mug's game.

Neighbourliness

It's conventional wisdom that we should be friendly with all our neighbours so we can support each other in an emergency or whenever we need help - mowing the elderly neighbour's lawn, lending garden tools, watching the house while you're away, and so on.

But in practice it doesn't actually work like that. The neighbours might prefer to keep to themselves - especially if they have several kids and are fully occupied with parenting, or are just the reclusive type, or they decide you're not on their wavelength, or they don't want you to see the mess they surround themselves with. All sorts of hidden reasons in fact.

Then again you might think you're quite capable of dealing with emergencies and sorting out your problems without the neighbours poking their nose in, so why cultivate friendships you don't really need in the first place?

Although Jenny and I have been living here for ten years, we don't know the neighbours very well. Mostly we know their names and we say hello to each other but that's about it.

I take in parcels for the couple next door, and trim our joint hedge occasionally. The couple next to them are much friendlier and we've had some good chats since they moved in a few months back.

There's another neighbour a few doors up who looks after our house while we're on holiday, and we're very friendly with him and his wife and kids.

But the other neighbours keep themselves to themselves and I know next to nothing about them. I seldom meet them on the street as they travel everywhere by car.

I know much more about my Facebook friends than my neighbours, and that probably applies to most people. My Facebook friends may even give me helpful advice in a crisis my neighbours wouldn't even know about.

Well, so be it. I just take my neighbours as they come.

Shrub shortage

My thoughts have returned to neighbours, after Kylie told me about an Australian couple who got an anonymous letter saying their front garden was "in a disgraceful state" and they should "shape up or ship out".

Other less judgmental neighbours have rallied round to defend the Ackroyds, who can't understand what all the fuss is about.

The letter, directed at Ebony Ackroyd, objected to the kids' playground, the old tyres, the weeds and the lack of shrubs, and complained that her idle husband never did any work in the garden.

"Just take a walk up White Avenue and observe every house, there's none in the deplorable, lazy state as yours" says the letter. "If you and your husband can afford fancy haircuts, you can damn well afford six shrubs for your front."

If you look at White Avenue, Hamilton, on Street View, it's a sedate, suburban street with large houses and no doubt plenty of snooty, censorious neighbours who bristle at any garden without manicured lawns and well-tended flowerbeds.

So some households don't apply arbitrary aesthetic standards to their front gardens but just use them as they see fit. If they prefer kids' toys to shrubs, that's their business. It's not as if they're drilling for oil or selling fish and chips. Why does someone get so hot under the collar as to leave a stroppy anonymous letter in the mailbox?

I could think of a few front gardens in my own neighbourhood that are full of junk, builders' rubble and old bikes, but a snotty note isn't the answer. All that does is spread bad feeling and defensiveness. Especially if it's anonymous and you're looking suspiciously at all your neighbours, wondering who can't live and let live.

Just be careful where you put those old tyres.

Pics: the Ackroyds' front garden and Ebony Ackroyd

New neighbours

My new neighbours - will they be okay or will they be the neighbours from hell? Will they be friendly and welcoming or will they be sullen, snobbish and standoffish?

It's the question I always ask myself when I'm moving house, and since I've lived in thirteen different homes, I've asked it a lot.

If I knew my neighbours would be a pain in the butt, I might very well have cancelled the move, but usually there's no way of knowing what they're like until you actually move in and find out. Short of grilling all the other neighbours, or spying on them for a week or two, you're in the dark.

We've seen the whole range of neighbours, from the charming couple who took in our parcels when we were out and trimmed our hedge for us, to the anti-social arseholes who had all-night parties twice a week and ignored every complaint.

Most neighbours were neither one or the other, just inoffensive, unassuming types who kept to themselves and wanted no contact other than "hello there" or "have you seen my missing car keys?" Their lives were a complete mystery until the day we moved out. For all I knew, they were kidnappers, drug dealers, internet trolls, bondage enthusiasts, you name it.

When I lived in a bedsit in Abbey Road, London (yes, that Abbey Road) the elderly woman upstairs proved to be an alcoholic who would reel in at any time of the day or night, stinking of whisky and sometimes throwing up on the stairs. She was well beyond help, even if I'd known what help to offer.

In another bedsit at the Angel, Islington, the landlord lived upstairs and was also an alcoholic. My requests for repairs or properly-functioning appliances or removal of the putrid rubbish dump outside my kitchen window would be brushed aside in his hurry to get to the pub and down a few more pints.

Our best neighbours were probably a lovely couple called Ricky and Sheila who became good friends and helped us out of all sorts of difficulties. It was one of our saddest days when we heard Ricky had died in a head-on collision with another car. By some miracle, his daughter Katy, who was in the passenger seat, survived with nothing but a few bruises.

Party fever

Well, the fifth blogiversary party is well under way at Nick Towers, and hundreds of guests are dancing, drinking and coking the night away in a frenzy of uninhibited enjoyment seldom seen in the sedate residential district of Belmont. Already I'm having to placate angry neighbours who're threatening to call the police or unleash their slavering dogs.

In fact I'm worried the party is getting a little out of hand. I can hear the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood from one direction, and piercing screams and ripping fabric from the other. I do hope the priceless Victorian chaise-longue and the exquisite Ming vases are still in one piece.

Various celebs have somehow heard about the glittering soirée and dropped in uninvited, but I haven't the heart to dispatch them to some far inferior gathering in the less salubrious cul de sacs of east Belfast. I won't bore you with a tedious round of name-dropping, but Katy Tunstall, Annie Lennox and Natasha Bedingfield are shrieking with laughter just a few yards away.

I dare not peek into the bedrooms to find out what unlikely couplings are taking place or whether the beds are wrecked beyond repair. I must say all the generous displays of cleavage and acres of uncovered flesh are creating an atmosphere so sexually-charged I think I shall pass out with over-excitement.

Some sort of gambling frenzy is occurring in the Janis Joplin Suite, and astounding quantities of banknotes are changing hands at dizzying speed. Suitcases full of cash are being brought in every few minutes by the chauffeurs. I gather a very famous toothpaste heiress has just kissed goodbye to a few million.

Several extremely sozzled novelists are exchanging scurrilous gossip about a certain veteran actor. They seem unaware that the actor's less famous brother is standing behind them, listening to every word. I have a feeling an ambulance might shortly be required. If not for them, for a number of guests who've visibly gone native.

Everyone agrees it's already the party to end all parties. Anybody who's missed it will be out of their mind with envy. Oh, hang on, there seem to be a couple of police officers at the door. Or are they guests in fancy dress? Or am I too stoned to tell the difference?

Unsightly smalls

You'd think a humble clothes line in someone's back garden would be pretty uncontro-versial. Well, think again, because in the States it's becoming a serious bone of contention.

Many householders hate the things. They think they're ugly, vulgar, over-intimate and spoil the look of the neighbourhood. They want to get rid of them completely.

But other people are all in favour. They see them as a natural and sensible way of drying clothes that's also environmentally-friendly. They want everyone to use them.

Temperatures are rising, and not just in the tumble-driers. Line-lovers are deliberately flouting their landlords and neighbours and hanging out their clothes to dry anyway. So take us to court, they say. It won't stop us.

They point out that tumble-driers use about 10 per cent of household electricity, second only to fridges and freezers. This is a colossal waste of energy when energy consumption is going through the roof. And what's so ugly about a clothes line anyway?

Jenny and I always use a clothes line in good weather. Or drying racks inside when it isn't. We've never used a tumble-drier and don't intend to start now. We know that clothes dried outside always smell fresher and cleaner when we bring them in.

Nobody gets steamed up about clothes lines round our way. You can see them in every other garden, even draped with lacy underwear. Nobody thinks they're unsightly or unseemly.

Okay, so our clothes line doesn't sport many fashionable designer labels. Some of the clothes may be past their best. Some may be ten years old. We don't care and nor do the neighbours. There are more serious things to get our knickers in a twist about.

The loner

In the house behind ours lived a middle-aged man called, shall we say, Derek. He was a confirmed loner who seldom ventured on to the streets. In the ten months we've lived here I only saw him two or three times.

What information I have about him comes from another neighbour and is pretty sparse. It seems he was a retired civil servant with no other interests apart from drinking and watching TV. He wasn't very healthy and several times I saw an ambulance outside.

His parents and his wife had all died and he had no other living relatives except a distant uncle. He appeared to have no friends, and not much contact with his other neighbours. The social services had been in touch with him but whatever help they gave him clearly didn't go far enough.

One evening he rang our doorbell and asked for advice about his TV, which wasn't getting a proper picture. I gave him what tips I could and off he went again.

In hindsight I thought maybe I should have invited him in for a chat, but his rather reserved manner deterred me from doing so.

A couple of weeks ago a policewoman appeared at the door and told me Derek had been found dead. He had probably been dead several days and she wondered when I had last seen him alive. I could only say it was some time ago.

It's very tragic when someone becomes that isolated and cuts himself off so methodically. Something in his personality, some chronic lack of confidence, always prevented him reaching out to others. And in every street there's probably someone similar, crying out for human affection but unable to reach it.

Flats for sale

The fashion for apartments is still all the rage in Belfast (and Northern Ireland generally). The Titanic Quarter will have heaps of them and so will St Anne's Square. All over the city they are still sprouting everywhere like mushrooms. But personally, having lived in three flats in London, I wouldn't want to live in one again.

The fact is that apartments are more in the builders' interests than the occupants. The builders make shedloads of cash packing the maximum number of people into the smallest possible space, while the residents are always at the mercy of noisy neighbours, hopeless management companies and runaway service charges. And probably you don't have your own garden or a permanent parking space either. But the builders can get away with it because the soaring property prices (the fastest rises in the UK) mean that flats are now the only affordable option for a lot of first time buyers.

By selling our ludicrously overvalued flat in London, we were able to buy a house in Belfast outright so we finally escaped the mortgage millstone as well. Now we have complete control over the maintenance of the house, we have a biggish garden, we have one adjoining neighbour who is never a problem, and we have plenty of parking space.

Flats are falsely glamourised as being compact (i.e. small) and easy to look after (i.e. small), with all the tedious maintenance taken care of by someone else. But the rosy image doesn't necessarily live up to the reality. You may very well find out the hard way that in a block of flats none of the residents care very much about the other residents, and expect to lead their own (sometimes raucous) lives regardless of anyone else's well-being. If you make a polite protest about someone's selfish behaviour, you may get a very impolite response.

I remember an occasion in London when I complained about the constant noise from the flat below, only to find my car tyres let down the next morning. The downstairs neighbours at another flat had to be prosecuted and fined by Environmental Health before stopping their all-night, drug-fuelled parties.

I think there should be a strict quota on the number of flats allowed to be built, with a presumption that the majority of new-builds are houses with all the civilised qualities they imply. In my opinion, flats are strictly last-resort accommodation for the desperate, the deaf and the debt-ridden.