The Duty of Care

It was after suffering one particularly bad weekend of debauchery and over-indulgence, inflicted on me by the neighbours that nobody wanted I decided enough was enough.

I'm not particularly brave neither am I one for confrontation. I'm like most people I just want a quiet life, but these savages had decided no-one in the vicinity was going to have a 'quiet' life and since I was bearing the brunt of their antisocial habits I knew I had to do 'something'.

Not the 'something' that was suggested to me by a leading Parish Councillor to get JF to come down with his couple of Rottweilers as 'he puts the kids straight' or by the son of another Parish Councillor - get BL an ex boxer to come down and sit outside your house with a baseball bat for a few nights to give them a warning.

No, I made my first big mistake in this story, I went to the council and genuinely asked them for help.

BIG MISTAKE.......Councils, council employees and in particular councillors who have been pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to 'better themselves' but who are still encroached in their working class attitudes believe they are Gods and not to be trifled with or approached by the common man or woman.

No, it would seem they have mutated from the working class ethics of 'looking out for one another' only to have climbed the slightly higher echelon of council mentality of 'covering ar$es.'

It's a case of
'We tell you what t'do lad and you tek it and if you want plannin' get a few beers in int'club!
The greasy palm tree is indigenous to the North East.

That's the Code of Ethics I was dealing with.

So you didn't have to knock me down with a feather when the answer to my prayer came back that my council didn't owe me a 'Duty of Care'.

Why not? Because I was an owner occupier and as such was supposed to sort out my own problems even though they knew this family and their history as they had prepared to evict them from one of their council properties and the family jumped before they were pushed leaving the house wrecked!

I was told not to bother the council again but to go to the police.

I protested that the law states noise within the boundaries of a property are the remit of Environmental Health, and that the police would only deal with any fracas on the public thoroughfare.

But the ranks closed and I was out in the cold and certainly
not up for membership of

SEDGEFIELD BOROUGH COUNCIL OLD BOYS CLUB .

A Stranger in a Foreign Land!

So,where were we in this unveiling of damage and deceit?

Oh yes! The act of making people accountable and the naming of crooked parts!

But first things first!

The first indication I had that something was not quite right about the place was when the removal men refused to leave anything out on the pavement but bring everything straight indoors.

Over protective?

No!! Not at all, when asked they told me 'Leave anything out here and it'll get nicked, this is a terrible village, I should know I live in Fishburn just down the road. I wouldn't live in this place'!

That set the alarm bells ringing I can tell you.

But not to be discouraged I decided to make the best of my new life, after all I didn't really have much choice.
Here I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, it might be a beautiful house but I could see what he meant about the locale, not the best by any means.

However, this was the North East and clearly legible at the entrance of the village was a sign

'Regeneration by Sedgefield Borough Council
in partnership with the European Union'.

So I'm thinking it has to get better right?

Wrong!! Little did I know but my moving into the village was probably the highlight of the year as everything started to go downhill rapidly after.

All the place seemed to be good for was drunken brawling, disruptive kids and the smashing of windows.
Now if they applied the same amount of energy in changing their lives as they did to washing their necks in booze and wrecking people's property they would be millionaires by now.

But I guess they are happy with their lot - you could certainly see them smiling!

That's an in-joke,by the way, I never saw anybody smile while I lived there, they were all too happy being miserable!

Maybe I had lived a reserved lifestyle but I had never seen people drunkenly staggering along the High Street in broad daylight until I moved to Cornforth and here it was a matter-of-fact, everyday thing.

People never even batted an eye!

But I digress, after the first week I had a place for everything and everything in its place - well almost.
It was then my problems really started. I had a brick through the window at the front of the house. I didn't report it as I thought it must be a case of mistaken identity.
Violent acts of this nature were something I had never encountered before, but I soon realised this was the shape of things to come.

My reasoning was further borne out by a neighbour across the way's daughter who came running up to me saying 'You know you live next to the worst family in the village don't you'?

My face dropped.

It had been noisy since I had moved in but I tried to extenuate the circumstances of having a rabble outside my house every night spilling out of the small alleyway that connected my neighbour's back yard by there being some sort of family celebration taking place.

I resigned myself to maybe it was someone's birthday but if it was it was there was a birthday every single night.
Their lust for intoxicants was something to behold. The vast amounts of beer, cider and cheap sparkling wine known locally as 'Bella' consumed by their family and hangers-on would put a brewery to shame.

No, things weren't working out very well at all and within the first month I was hankering for the South of England and civilisation. I just didn't realise how hard my battle for survival at the hands of yobs, lowlife and officialdom was going to be.
If I had .......I would have walked away then.

There is not a piece of dirt worth dying for!!

The Mayhem Begins.......

I move into my beautiful house and gradually am made aware by other neighbours, who always seem to be looking shiftily about when they talk or tracing an imaginary line on the pavement with their shoe, that I am living next to the worst family in the village.
A family by all accounts that have allegedly been evicted from every house they have ever lived in including being run off a gypsy site. Of course the information given always has the get-out clause of 'Don't tell anyone I told you'!

Such Bravery!!!

My heart sinks, but it doesn't take long before the perception becomes a reality and the Neighbours From Hell begin their war of attrition aided and abetted by every piece of human refuse you can imagine.

They set about systematically laying waste to my property, destroying it with a vengeance and trying to destroy me in the process. They and their unhappy band of brothers, used my garden as a shortcut every day, climbing over my wall and looking in through my windows. They raced their whippets around my garden. They even lifted them over my garden wall to defecate when the mood took them. They smashed windows and doors, broke into my shed, wrote several cars off and this was just them warming up. Little did I know it but they hadn't even got into full flow yet.

This wasn't my worst nightmare coming true this was something I had never even dreamed of.

So who do you go to when you have a problem with your neighbours?

Council?

Police?

MP?

You would have thought so wouldn't you? But not here....no here it's baseball bat mentality!

But that's not me - I don't do fighting in the streets and that's when I came up against the biggest villains in this story..........the

LOCAL AUTHORITIES AND THE BOYS IN BLUE!