When we put the house on the market, my environmentally conscious neighbours disappeared on a holiday so long I asked another neighbour where they had gone.
‘On a cruise,’ she said, but I thought that unlikely, because these people have a book on climate change on a shelf near their front window, so how on earth could they have gone on a ship for a month, churning out more carbon than the entire village put together?
Why would it be scary to encounter fairground people, or adventurers by the public toilets at night?
They can’t have done, obviously. But in any case, they were gone a month and when they came back they seemed very happy, wherever they had been.
The long vacation certainly had an air of celebration about it, which I thought might pertain to me moving on, because we don’t see eye to eye.
When the For Sale sign came down after the house didn’t sell, I felt almost apologetic, especially if they had spent a lot of money going somewhere exotic to celebrate my departure.
I see it from their point of view. They are two deeply principled left-wing vegans. I am a right-of-centre blabbermouth living with a builder who drives a big old dirty pick-up truck. He often says that if you could come up with the worst possible nightmare neighbours for each other it would this particular combination.
They are concerned about sustainability and the planet, we don’t tend to worry about carbon emissions because we’re too hard-up to go on holiday. They are the sort of people who get things done by being pillars of the community. I am the sort of person who complains about what’s being done, while the builder b’s response to every petty torment is to throw a load of builder’s rubbish in our front garden.
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