What makes a good neighbour?
Cat Daddy and I have always been extremely lucky with our neighbours. Over the years we’ve had one neighbour* who was quite unpleasant, and another** who was just downright odd, but everyone else has been delightful.
*I saw her let her dog go to piss on our front wall and, right after I objected, we had a surly typed note through our door telling us “You don’t own the street; in fact, you don’t even own that house”. A few days later, as if by magic, a dog turd appeared on our front path. I wanted to pick up the turd and post it through her letterbox but Cat Daddy vetoed my plan, muttering something about “no proof that it was her” or some such nonsense.
**He once knocked on our door and asked if we had any bananas. No explanation or context e.g. “I’m in the middle of a recipe and I’ve just realised I don’t have any”, “I’m about to slip into a diabetic coma and I need sugar quickly”, that kind of thing. We didn’t have any bananas. He had never knocked on our door before then, nor did he do so after that.
When we lived in W13 we had a cat-hating elderly neighbour who used to knock on her window shouting “Shoo!” whenever Louis Catorze was in her garden. She eventually became friendly with Cat Daddy when he started doing handyman things around her house, although that friendliness was put to the test when she came round to complain about someone or something shitting on her lavender; naturellement Catorze entered stage left at exactly the wrong moment and did exactly the wrong things.
Here in TW8, every single neighbour, without exception, is wonderful. That Neighbour, although his nickname may not indicate as such, is lovely. In fact, many followers of Le Blog assume that he is so called because we don’t get along with him, but it’s really because he is the one who always brings Catorze back when he escapes out at The Front and wreaks havoc. When I related the latest drama to a friend and asked them to guess who escorted the escaped inmate back to his cell, the friend would always say, “Not that neighbour again?” And so the nickname was born.
As for what makes a good neighbour, these are our criteria:
1. Liking cats. Or, at the very least, not hating them.
2. Being kind enough to ignore any cat-fight sounds and, if asked, claiming not to have heard them.
3. Pretending to believe my lies when I deny all knowledge.
I don’t feel that we ask for much. But then anyone who lives near us has to put up with Catorze, so I don’t suppose we’re best placed to be fussy.
louiscatorze.com 
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