If My Neighbours Must Siphon the Street's Gravity, They Could at Least Warn the Postman
There is suburban boundary friction, and then there is having your morning toast drift toward the ceiling because Number 4 wanted denser hydrangeas.
I have never considered myself an unreasonable neighbour. When Neville and Miriam Quigley at Number 4 painted their front gate lime green, I said nothing. When their cat spent a fortnight glaring at my bird feeder, I looked elsewhere. Their hedge has been advancing over the pavement for years, and my response has remained limited to several pointed coughs. But siphoning fifty thousand tons of local gravity into a garden shed for prize hydrangeas is beyond what any ratepayer should be expected to tolerate.
It began on Tuesday, over a boiled egg. My teaspoon lifted from the saucer, hung in the kitchen air, then drifted towards the ceiling fan. The butter dish went next. By noon my slippers were three inches above the linoleum, while my water bill had lodged itself in the guttering and had to be recovered with a garden rake.
I made a polite enquiry over the fence. Neville wore lead-lined boots and welding goggles, which did not inspire confidence. He said the disturbance was an atmospheric anomaly over the duck pond. The copper cables from his garage, he explained, belonged to an experimental compost tumbler. As for the hum passing through my radiators, that was apparently the drainage board flushing the mains.
“The parish charter is entirely silent on the curvature of local space-time.”
That account did not survive the open garage door. Between a push mower and three sacks of peat stood an unlicensed mass-concentrating centrifuge, about the size of a cement mixer. It glowed violet and groaned as it drew the street’s usual downward pull into a glass terrarium. Miriam stood beside it with a brass clipboard, noting the density of a blue hydrangea already estimated to weigh as much as a delivery van.
The rest of Elderberry Close has noticed. The milkman abandoned his round after two pints of semi-skimmed rose into an ash tree. Clement Vole, our neighbourhood watch coordinator, spent an hour attached to a lamppost while trying to deliver the bulletin. Residents later approached Neville in lead sinkers, with the subdued gait of people carrying their own weather systems. He was unmoved. ‘The parish charter is entirely silent on the curvature of local space-time,’ he said, then offered everyone a courgette dense enough to crack the pavement.
By Thursday, I had called the district council. I asked for an urgent inspection of domestic mass distribution, a phrase the planning officer wrote down very slowly. The borough has rules for hedge height, noise and incinerators. Gravity accumulation, regrettably, has escaped regulation. An inspector did attend, briefly, until his clipboard crossed the boundary and lodged in the chapel weather vane.
Neighbourhood life asks for patience. You overlook the lime-green gate, the hostile cat, and the hedge with territorial ambitions. Private plant nutrition is another matter when it involves the fundamental laws of physics. If the Quigleys need to anchor my armchair to the skirting board before they can win a rosette at the autumn flower show, they should take up watercolour painting. Until then, I will drink my morning tea through a silicone straw and wait for my slippers to return to earth.