Neighbours, Every body Loves Good Neighbours

I hope you sang the title of this blog post as you read it.

As we have lived in a few different places, we have always tried to be friendly with our neighbours. Growing up, I was lucky to have the wonderful AT as my neighbour, who was only 9 months younger than me.  We are still friends, although catch ups are unfortunately very rare.

Christmas mornings were always drinks with the neighbours, with all the kids out the front riding their new bikes etc (why do I never see kids out on Christmas morning with all their toys - OMG I am sounding old).

We have been fairly lucky as we have had a few wonderful neighbours at different places we have lived in.

Our first family home in Willoughby in Sydney, we had elderly neighbours both next door and across the road who were all lovely people, always ready for a chat (my kind of neighbour!!)

Then, when we moved to the Upper North Shore, we had a lovely American family with a little girl who loved to play with Horse Girl and the Senior Sergeant (part of the play included dressing the Senior Sergeant up in fairy dresses - lucky he was only 3!!!)

Then we had the most wonderful couple - Mr S and Mr E.  Oh, how I miss them. They were so lovely, well they still are I am sure, and many a drink or two was shared with them.

When we made our big move, we had great neighbours - they were the ones who rescued Lucky the Chook you may remember.  The last couple of places were more just a wave to the neighbours -sometimes that is the best that can happen.

Now we have elderly neighbours on either side of us and a families across the road. Interesting that we now live closer, physically, than ever to our neighbours, yet the families do not even acknowledge us. We have certainly tried the friendly wave, the friendly greeting, nothing works!! Oh well, their loss!!!

Then on one side of us, we have a lady who thinks my name is Lillibeth. I do not know how Lisa becomes Lillibeth, nor that I am actually so closely related to the Queen of England, but oh well, whatever floats your boat.

Then on the other side of us we have lovely J. He is 83 years old, and lives with his incredibly spoilt and incredibly chubby German Shepherd.  Now J is a lovely fellow, but unfortunately he is of Hungarian/German/Scottish/Ukrainian descent and I cannot understand a word he says. So, I talk to him, he replies and my usual reply is "yes".

Unfortunately, this can often result in him looking at me with a somewhat disturbed look as I obviously should not be answering 'yes' to some of his comments.  He now also shouts at me - I think he might be thinking I have a hearing issue when in fact, I can hear him I just can't understand him.

This has come to a head this week in a slightly unfortunate incident. I was out hedge trimming with my hedge trimmer (mmm, not quite straight there!!!) when J started commented on my hedge trimming skills (I only know this because of his use of sign language).

What I now understand was that he was questioning my trimming of a particular plant on the fence bordering our two houses. I thought he was praising my skills, when, in fact, it now appears he was actually asking me if he could dig that plant out of our yard and put it in his yard as I obviously didn't like it as I had trimmed it to within an inch of its life.

My replies of "oh yes, yes, mmmmmm" has now resulted in him coming in and digging the plant out of my garden and popping it in his own garden bed, leaving a gaping hole in my front garden!!!!!

Oops!

Oh, well, off to the nursery I go to find a replacement plant for the unexpected hole in the garden.  Might drop into the bookshop to see if I can find a German/Hungarian/Scottish/Ukranian  dictionary for some translation help.

Cheers

Lisa xox