It was all from a little misunderstanding about my Saturday afternoon hobby of filling a 44-gallon drum at the bottom of the garden with household rubbish and dead leaves, throwing on a bit of motor-mower petrol and becoming lost in the primal experience of flickering flames and clean, white smoke wafting into the ether. The neighbour on the other side hasn’t spoken to me in thirty years, ever since I told him I would shove his hose up his arse for him.
Eventually her family came and took her away, the new owner rented it out and it’s just not the same anymore. But she farted while talking which made it hard to maintain composure. Her intense face and very detailed descriptions of these shadowy strangers were very compelling as she asked me to go over and shoo them away. She regularly came over either to tut tut about the state of my roses or tell me about the strangers who had recently started to ‘appear’ inside her house and annoy her.
So, what is it all about? And how to fill in my days now? Spend a lot more time with my neighbours? I had known the old darling living alone on one side of me a long time. The treadmill has been switched to ‘warm-down’ mode now there is more time to do things other than the daily habit of going to work and the question that Michael Caine and Cilla Black first asked me back in the sixties: “What’s it all about, Alfie?” emerges from the very depths of my mind as being relevant for the first time in my life. They said, ‘don’t be a stranger’ they meant ‘don’t be a pest’. The farewell party, such as it was, is over. You wake up on the morning that is the start of you never going back to the office again.