THE BUTLER

The ongoing feud with my neighbour Gary

I think it started when I told Gary his daffodils were coming up a little later than last year. He seemed annoyed by this and asked why I felt I needed to call him at work. So I went to the army base to tell him in person and he said that’s not what he meant.

The next day I came home to find my own fully-bloomed daffodils had been crushed completely flat. Gary appeared at his front door and said he saw a man sitting on them, but he ran away just before I got there. I asked him about the mud stains on the back of his jeans, but he said he was tired and had to go to bed immediately.

Perhaps I should have left it there, but I decided instead to take the wipers off his car and put them back on against the inside of his windscreen.

Gary responded by leaving his Halloween decorations up throughout November even though he knows how spooky I find them.

I replaced the bird seed on his bird table with extra strong laxatives. The wonderful birds that usually pay a visit suddenly stopped coming since birds famously don’t like laxatives and have no interest in trying to eat them.

I asked him to return the egg white separator that I lent him, but he claimed he had already returned it. Well since that’s how he wanted to play it, when he asked me to return his father’s ashes that he lent me, I gave him a different urn filled with ball bearings. He didn’t notice until months later when he scattered them over an unfortunately smooth surface and pieces of his ‘dad’ were rolling around everywhere.

He bought himself a drum kit and would thump and smash at it as loudly as possible until the late hours every night. Then he got himself some bagpipes. Then a cathedral-grade pipe organ. He was even playing them at the same time! To be fair to him, once he got the hang of it he got them sounding pretty good together, but those first couple of weeks were hell.

I sent a photo of his patio to Sensible Patio Digest magazine where it was featured in their ‘Slabs of Shame’ section.

He lobbied the council repeatedly to have my Swingball set removed from my back garden. Each time he gave some ridiculous reason — it would attract lightning, it was depriving his garden of sunlight, it would attract ghosts. Eventually the council sent three large men to yank it out of the ground and hurl it into the back of a van, all in front of my weeping son and his friend Edmund.

Thanks to one of my contacts at the Ordnance Survey, all official maps now show Gary’s house with stink lines.

And with the help of a couple of old pals who are higher-ups in the Land Registry department responsible for property boundaries, I managed to get about 60 eggs lobbed against the front of his house.

He invited everyone in the neighbourhood to a barbecue except me. They tried to hide it from me by conducting the entire event in the narrow area up against his side of the adjoining fence between our back gardens, which is the only section that isn’t visible from my upstairs window. There must have been over 100 guests squeezed in there, all crouched down and whispering and passing notes. I only found out because one guest with a particularly long nose turned their head eastward to look at a passing helicopter.

I started a rumour that the local farm suffered a poor harvest that year because Gary had put a curse on it.

He bribed my barber to give me a bad haircut for two years. And I’m pretty sure he bribed the local radio station to play songs I don’t like some of the time.

While he was out I thrust my fist through his letterbox and gave the inside of his porch the middle finger for a good ten minutes.

He snuck into my bedroom while I was sleeping. He lifted open my nose like the lid of a barbecue grill and filled the inside to the brim with pepper. This of course brought on a violent sneezing fit. He then placed a strawberry cream pie in front of my face, and the force of the final, most powerful sneeze splattered the pie’s gooey contents all over my snoozing wife, making her look like some cartoonish Mrs Claus-type figure.

It wasn’t always like this. We used to get on really well. We spent many summer afternoons chatting over the fence about our mutual love of Mini Cheddars. He once fixed my sewing machine when I broke it while trying to invent the ‘slumberbund’ — a cummerbund you can wear to bed. And occasionally he would phone me late at night in tears and I would go next door and help him finish his jigsaw puzzle.

But I wonder whether we can ever return to those days. By way of an olive branch I offered him a delicious pecan pie I had baked (he had returned the egg white separator). But as he started choking I remembered that time he told me he was extremely allergic to pecans the day before. I apologised, and, using his car, drove him to the hospital where the doctor told Gary he may never walk again (I hit the car park wall at 40 mph). I apologised, and called myself a cab. I’ll try reaching out again when he’s better, I thought.

When I got home there was a man sitting on my daffodils.