Years ago I had a neighbour who was somewhat ahead of his time. Had he been born forty years later he could have been in the vanguard of some revolutionary young idealists, determined to change the world -- or make everyone suffer in the process.
This man, who I will call Dave, had been in the police force. He had, no doubt, served his community well in his time in uniform but he was retired when we moved in next door to them. He was still active, and being active made him want to interfere in other people's lives. Dave was the sort of man who would offer good advice that he had no intentions of following himself; he would have made a good modern lefty in that he could dispense instructions for what you should do but neglected to follow them for himself. All the while he would say he only did it because he cared.
Dave was outwardly a genial chap in many ways but it soon became clear he had fallen out with members of his family and was disrespectful to his wife. I doubt he did anything bad to her but he would airily dismiss what she might say in front of other people and according to some accounts he wasn't nice to her at home. More than that, he liked to interfere in other people's lives -- and certainly in their gardens.
It wasn't unusual to come home and find Dave had climbed into our garden (as he did with other neighbours) and do something to the plants. He would clear what he deemed to be weeds or trim a rambling plant you may have liked. The worst aspect was he would clamber over the fence (no, wait, he forced it down to get in) and then apply weedkiller where he thought it was needed. Given that we did not use weedkiller anywhere in our garden this wasn't the best news we wanted.
One day when everyone was out he brought his weedkiller round and 'watered' a glorious, bright evergreen hedge between ourselves and the neighbour on the other side. The hedge developed terminal brown patches, which upset both my wife and I and the old guy we shared the hedge with. "The weeds were getting out of hand," Dave said imperiously when asked if he had done it. You see, that was his attitude in that something had to be done no matter how damaging it was. He was just the man to do it, too.
The trait of the left is just the same: nothing can allowed to simply be if you have something to hand with which you can poison a few healthy, if untidy, plants.
(The man's attitude was summed up when he started feeding our dog some gravy that made our pooch fart badly. When I asked him not to do it his response was: "We'd get used to it." Trust me, dog flatulence isn't something you want to get used to, but Dave knew best.)
Dave's greatest moment of interference was when one autumn morning he got up early and as day dawned he was up another neighbour's apple tree collecting the fruit, apparently on the basis that he hated to see things go to waste and he thought the family at number 57 had no right to let the fruit go uncollected on their own tree. As he never spoke to this family (they had fallen out some time before) he hadn't bothered to ask if they were going to collect the apples. Dave came to a conclusion all on his own and went ahead before anyone was up.
However Mr 57 and his wife slept at the back of the house and as the man opened the curtains that bright morning he was astonished to see Dave up the apple tree in 57's back garden, helping himself. Cue a storm of colourful shouting for Dave to remove himself at once.
Of course Dave had been a policeman and had, as far as coppers needed, a rudimentary grasp of the law. However trespassing apparently wasn't one of them, or rather if it was then it was the intention was all that mattered. Dave intended to make his surrounding world better his way so perhaps he thought that property and trespass were irrelevant. Again, a good solid left-wing trait we see all too often. Your property belongs to them when it suits them.
We eventually moved away from Dave and his unhappy wife and I believe they moved too, possibly to fresh pastures where neighbours could get a free weedkiller and apple collecting service even if they didn't want it.
Lucky them, and lucky weedkiller manufacturers to have their own champion. Thanks to people like Dave I expect there won't be a single weed or even a flower between the paving stones on the road to hell.
No comments:
Post a Comment