The new weird neighbours again plus other bits

This morning whilst doing my morning stretches in my sunny office I spotted the new neighbour leave the house in his PJ's and move the bins from the street to inside their front yard and directly outside my office window. Can't he just do what everyone else does and put them down the side of the house. But this is proof that he is living there. I don't see him much and it is all still a mystery. But I got to see him up real close (my windows are hard to see into so it's great for checking out the street). As I mentioned earlier he is a rather good looking fellow with a kind face. So what is he doing with Mrs Weirdness fagger, boozer? Not knowing this vital piece of information is driving me crazy. I must take some affirmative action this weekend in an attempt to meet them. We are cutting our other neighbours tree down in the front yard so it could be a good opportunity.

Our other neighbour is really great. She is an extremely unattractive gay woman who is a manager in the Tax Office. Poor thing. Doesn't seem to have much going for her, but she has a big old house and garden and keeps to herself, which is fine by me. She is concerned though about the nationalities of the people in the street. When we first met her she went to lengths to point out where all the aussies lived. I got the impression she didn't like the previous neighbour where the Weird family now live. I'll call him Achmed for privacy purposes.

Achmed was originally from Beirut but owned a small sunglasses business in Sydney. He was a bald, chubby man in his mid 50's with a big mole on the back of his neck. One day his doctor told him he had to lose weight, and went on a fitness kick that lasted a week. He would dress in bright red 80's scoopy shorty shorts and white tennis shoes and run up and down the street, breathing loud as he went to attract the attention of the other neighbors to his scoopy shorts and possibly in the false belief that this was burning even more calories. He would sit out the front of his yard smoking his hubbly bubbly bong of roasted sweet sherry tobacco, creating a wafting trail down the street. He would also sing Lebanese songs as he tended his prized roses in the front yard, sometimes dressed only in a singlet tucked into his big white undies. Often he would brag about the daughter from his first marriage who was a pop star a few years earlier and was marrying a well know radio personality. Sometimes she would come over with her sister, and together they would smoke the hubbly bubbly out the front as well. On these days the waft was thick and I used to have to shut all the windows and doors. Sometimes the radio personality would come to although I never saw him smoke the bong. He would hide under a black cap, his back to the street, but there was no mistaking the big expensive black 4WD when it pulled up. It was so absolutely tantalising I was always keeping an eye on proceedings to ensure I didn't miss one bit.

One day Achmend built an extremely illegal bread oven in the backyard and every few weeks he would lite a fire and cook flat bread for his lunch. The smoke would pour into my yard and swirl around my clothes on the line. I used to get annoyed but knew it was easier to stay friends with him, especially when his new wife would come over with huge plates of succulent roasted meat and home made tabbouleh and biscuits after one of his big charcoal BBQ's. He usually held these in his front yard and my partner would smell the roasting meat over the fence then look sadly at the healthy chicken and steamed veges I would put in front of him. Sometimes Achmend would hand huge ripe tomatoes and cucumbers grown in his abundant garden over the fence, and snort a little at our sad droopy looking tomato plants in the corner.

His new wife was a beautiful young Lebanese girl who spoke little English. The story was that when he first moved into the area he began sexual relations with the Belgian woman living on the other side of him. When that soured he took off to Beirut to get himself a beautiful new bride half his age. The Belgian woman then put up a big colour bond fence between the properties so she wouldn't have to see him and his new bride. She then claimed his lemon tree in the back yard was encroaching on her space over the sagging wooden fence and chopped it right back. This started a verbal war and occasionally when I was chatting to him in the front yard he would begin a tirade of expletives about "the bitch next door". Even the day he left he stood in the middle of the street and said "we are sorry not to see you anymore, but her", pointing to the Belgian woman's front yard and screaming, "she is a bitch. Nobody in this street likes her, nobody", sweeping his arms up and down the road.

It actually took Achmed days to move. And he wasn't particularly tidy either. There was mess of dumped household goods in his front yard and along the median strip for days which passing cars and other neighbours would poke through. I even saw the Cypriot lady across the road shoot across early one morning in her PJ's and grab two plastic garden chairs then lumber back to her yard with them, quickly forcing them through the white lacy ironwork gate. Eventually an industrial waste bin appeared and he filled it to the brim with the remnants of his life. I couldn't resist and had a peak at anything I could sell on eBay. Amongst the stuff was a dumped framed picture of his daughter in her pop star days and a few of her music CD's. Nobody wanted these.

But the best part of the haul was the old sunglasses. Thousands of them new and still in boxes were dumped in their thousands. I grabbed as many as I could and donated them to the local charity for homeless people. I now keep my eye out for any vagrants wandering the area in Achmeds cool sunnies. The local schoolkids also found them and the word must have got around the school, because each afternoon more boys would appear at the bin, crawling over like rats squealing and fighting over them. There were so many kids one afternoon that eventually one chubby boy decided order was needed and yelled "they are $1.50 each" in trying to stop the hangers on that had appeared and possibly making a profit in the process.

When it was time for the new neighbours to move in, the bin was still there and a fight broke out between them, the real estate agent and Achmed. I couldn't understand everything from my front sun room spy centre, but I did overhear that the new neighbours had moved in a day early when the bin should have been gone. 3 days later a big truck removed the bin and all that was left was a squashed set of broken wraparounds.