Monday 29 September 2003

I have a problem...

and it's me.

I live in an old stone cottage in the countryside. On one side we have a garden with parking etc at the end. On the other side is an old orchard (that used to belong to the rectory) that has been allowed to deteriorate.

The orchard is owned by the Barnes family trust (some of whom live in Canada, curiously enough). Behind the orchard is a barn that has been recently converted to a house by our ex-next door neighbours. They spent a lot of time negotiating the purchase of the barn and some of the other land, but the way in which we first found out about it was when the local council put planning application notices up about it. Communication has always tended to be like this from them to us.

Anyway, zip ahead to the present. Saturday I was out cutting down the herbage at the back, as I have done for the last 12 years or so, when up raced the ex-neighbour and started 'wondering' what I was doing and explaining that he was planning to do it all tomorrow. Cut a long story short, the ENs now rent this land and are responsible for it. And they don't want us out there, even when we don't interfere with them.

My problem? I don't particularly care for land or property, but I'm not happy about this arrangement. In the previous set up the people responsible more-or-less let us get on with it (on one occasion when they DID get difficult the nettles reached over our ground floor windows). But these people want to put sheep out there, and based on our experience with their chickens when they were neighbours, this doesn't bode well. There are other aspects that I don't have space to go into here.

They're within their rights to do this. I want to live in peace with them, but I have a problem with it.

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