Monday, 25 November 2013

Oh keep the dog far hence

The Indy has a nicely restrained headline this morning: Man gets permission to bury dead wife in his garden. If this were your neighbour, would you be wondering to yourself how willing any future purchaser will be to go ahead with the conveyancing, when they find out there are moral constraints on what they can do with the garden? It’s hardly going to make the place easy to sell, is it?

Not to mention the prospect foreseen by T.S. Eliot quoting Webster –

‘oh keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to man, or with his nails he’ll dig it up again.’

And I am not going to be as tasteful as the Indy, which has respectfully resisted referring to Billy Connolly’s famous gag about the man who buried his wife with her bum above the surface so he had somewhere to park his bike.

 

25 Nov 2013 08:33:55

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Who is my neighbour? From the Royal Mail, you can choose a functional response: 'Someone who lives in the same postcode area as you. For example, in most cases if your postcode is SE25 1AA, the same postcode area would be another address where the postcode also starts with SE25.' (via this page) Or a more nuanced one: 'For the purposes of delivering items, a neighbour is considered by Royal Mail to be a person who lives within close proximity of the address on the item. They may be a next-door neighbour or someone who lives sufficiently close by. 'Our postmen and women have the flexibility to make an appropriate judgement of which neighbour to approach and indeed whether to approach a neighbour at all. In exercising that judgement they may rely on their familiarity with their walk and pointers of occupation such as previous experience, a car in the drive, or an open window.' (Why it might matter).

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