Having fun

When one’s children are small – well, dash it, even when they’re not – one tends to think that they’re superior to the general run of other people’s children. You know: sweeter, cleverer, more charming and all that.

Mine actually are all these things, of course; but even those with lesser offspring are inclined by evolution to admire them. Which is just as well.

I believe, however – though I may be misremembering – that if one of my children had stood out in the garden on a lovely summer’s day yelling over and over again, “This is my garden – aeeeeeeeeeeee!” I would after a while – say at a conservative estimate after the fortieth “aeeeeeeeeeeee!”– have taken the little darling gently by the hand or another convenient part of its anatomy and led it inside with the suggestion that it might like to listen to a story, since there are other people on the planet who might be enjoying working peacefully in their gardens on a nice afternoon.

This child was several gardens away in the street at right angles to ours. Just as well, or I might have – oh, I don’t know – thrown slugs at it.

Our street is normally very quiet. It’s a cul-de-sac with five houses in it and the inhabitants are: D and S on one side of us, well into their sixties; us, and we’ve established that we’re 59c and nearly 59a; N and K next door to the other side – in their 50s, childless; A, about 70 and unmarried; and Mr C, also unmarried and well down the 59 alphabet. When we first moved here, 21 years ago, I was unnerved by the quietness. I felt that one could easily die and lie festering in the middle of the road for some months before anyone passed by and noticed anything amiss.

However, I quite like it now. But this evening the people up the hill – not in our street but on the corner of it – are having a party. They put up a tenty thing earlier and all their friends are standing in this tenty thing or beside it and going

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

This isn’t a terribly good photo – I didn’t have the nerve to stand in the middle of the street to photograph their tenty thing, but here is: the green bit is the tenty affair, the brown bit is their fence and you can see some heads of partygoers over the lower bit of the fence. It was 9.30 at night when I took the photo and it’s now 10 but it’s still quite light outside, which is why one can keep gardening here till 11 if one wants at this time of year if one doesn’t mind being eaten by the Great Scottish Midge or deafened by people’s noisy parties.

But I’ve been driven in. The air is filled with the revolting smell of barbecued meat (yuckyuckyuck – I hate barbecues – why do I, a vegetarian, have to have the air in my garden smelling all meaty?) and “I Will Survive” is belting out, further polluting the atmosphere. They might at least have played some decent music, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or something.

Grumpy? Me? I can still hear them hahahaing from where I'm sitting in the study. Where's the rain when one wants it?