A trip out of the house in the early afternoon to collect a few things, we returned to discover that some idiot had parked their car sideways across both our driveway and the neighbour’s — and that the neighbour’s landlord’s car was parked in front of that…. Tooting on the horn brought nobody out of the house so we parked in the street and went inside.

Five minutes later as I’m in the back garden the old Greek landlord comes out into their backyard showing two young Greek guys around — he’s waxing lyrical about how it isn’t a wide block but it is a long block of land…. Hmm, is there more development afoot? There’s two things you can do with a house like this; renovate it to a classic federation cottage, or bulldoze and build big brick boxes. These guys don’t look the federation cottage type, I wonder if we’ll be seeing another building permit soon… and this one would be a major eyesore and barrier to our place, not to mention leaving us feeling like we are in a canyon if it is more than one storey!

A little later I watched the two young guys get into the car and leave, unblocking our driveway. Ridiculously, half an hour later I met the landlord as he was leaving and asked if he knew who had parked the car that had blocked us in. “Car, car, I no see no car here…”. He shrugged and walked away, lying through his teeth.

We shall see….