Taking nice things

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house,
thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife,
nor his manservant, nor his maidservant,
nor his ox, nor his ass, nor his pot-plants
nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

If it didn't happen, they wouldn't be making Ten Commandments about it? And these judeo-christians are really trying to head things off at the pass with their exhortations to damp down or eliminate the feelings of envy. Good luck with that. Meanwhile current law hereabouts cares not a whit about your covetous turmoil . . . so long as you don't act on it and make off with yer man's wife or her ass.

In 1986, we bought our first (of two) houses: a late-Victorian mid-terrace two streets away from a railway-cutting in suburban Newcastle upon Tyne. At that time a friend was writing software to digitize the address-scape of Britain to facilitate the early targetted direct-marketing sector of Capitalism. He reported that our street was coded: ⅓ council housing [#39]; ⅓ owner occupier [#37 us]; & ⅓ private rental [#35]. And we #37 and our abutting neighbours at #39 and  #35 matched this profile precisely. We were the beginnings of gentrification with our books and bottles of wine. After inhabiting a micro-farm for nearly 30 years where the nearest neighbour is 300m away, I can imagine going back to life where we could smell next-door's cabbage boiling for dinner and endure their full volume kid's TV on Sunday morning.

There was no garden attached to #37, but the previous owner had low-walled a corner of the back-yard and planted a sad looking cotoneaster. That yard was just big enough to park a car IF we grubbed up the shrubbery. A strip of concrete 1.5m wide [less for the bay-window] fronted the house. The original uniform cast-iron railings had all been cut off and carted away (?to make battleships?) in WWII but they had been replaced piecemeal for most of the houses. On Summer evenings, we used to sit out front on the stoop or on kitchen chairs to watch the sun set over the end of the street. The unintended consequence being that we met more people from the neighbourhood. After living there for a while, we acquired a job lot of a dozen plants in pots - mostly pelargoniums - and put them all out front on the downstairs windowsills and up against the fence. We made more friends when folk stopped to compliment us for bringing a splash of colour to the street. It might have been super-bougie for some bluff no-nonsense Geordies, but not all. It felt like doing a small-small thing for our community - and ourselves.

Then one night a local entrepreneur nicked off with ALL our plant-pots, just leaving rings of unbrushed dirt where the flowers had been. The galling thing about the whole sorry saga was the knowledge that what had been a public good had become a private benefit. Certainly, our plants didn't re-appear somewhere else in the area - I had a bike; I checked. At least it was less invasive than Mr Ahmed at #41 having his front-door robbed.

And because there's nothing new under this sun, someone from Carrigaline Co Cork has had her day in court for robbing [or more likely fencing] six hanging baskets from a Tidy Towns venture in the hamlet of Inch near Killeagh, Co Cork.  The cunning TidyTowners had buried an Apple AirTag in one of the baskets which enabled them to track their time effort and care property to Carrigaline. Carrigaline is all of 50km from Inch; y'have to wonder that there weren't low-hanging baskets nearer to the intended destination. In contrast to NuponT in 1987, we know where the perps live:

Pelargonium? Today's jigsaw puzzle today.