Hit the road, Zim.

I do miss the mango tree.

‘Desperate times call for desperate measures.’ Not always but quite often.

‘Needs must when the devil drives.’ One of my all time favourites.

And, as a friend often says, ‘When between a rock and a hard place, get a pillow.’

What else could I think when my next door neighbour, the 92 year old Widow Parrot, called to me from her living room window, yet again? This last time, she asked me to trim my lillipilly because it was blocking her view down the street. The street has no view and in any case, that is what 'The Bold and the Beautiful' is for.

For five years I'd been a virtual prisoner in my own front garden. Whenever I ventured out to weed or prune, Mrs Parrot would appear and regale me with tales of her weekly physiotherapy visits and specialist appointments. Did I know of such and such a surgeon? Was co-enzyme Q 10 better than vitamin E? Could her mower man do anything about his gammy left shoulder? What did I think of the Courier Mail’s latest report on flesh eating viruses?

I did try to handle this with all due deference to Mrs Parrot’s lonely, elderly, widowed, arthritic status. In the meantime, my thistles were growing into a jungle and whole families of tigers were moving in.

To be fair, it wasn’t just Mrs Parrot and her sticky-beaking that was the problem. The house itself was a 1952 post war nana-house with a red brick base, fibro-cement (read ‘asbestos’) upper and galvanised iron roof. It was the architectural equivalent of gusseted support hose. A tiled rumpus area had been added at the back in about 1982. According to Mrs Parrot, the addition was poorly built because the builder’s relationship with the owner’s wife had ended badly.

True enough, the rumpus was a problem. Whenever a summer storm dashed in from the south west, rainwater would run off the sun-baked yard, under the skirting board and onto the tiled floor. This was despite the previous owner’s attempts to fix the problem with a large drain. I asked Otto D'Plumber to come. Otto had been a few times before so I knew him reasonably well. Yes, he could redirect the downpipe at the outside corner and realign the drain.

The cost was listening to his long and detailed thoughts of an overseas holiday. Otto’s mother had recently secured her release from a pair of grossly emphysaematous lungs and in going aloft, had left him a modest inheritance. Would a short trip to New Zealand allow him to also buy a semi-renovated MG? I’m never sure why people expect a lowly zimble to know the answers to such questions yet they always seem to ask.

With the drain fixed, it was time to move.

Why did I move there in the first place? Well, that, I think, was too zimbly for words.