Neighbourhood Watch in Spixworth

Tweet

We've lived in our current house for over 20 years and have made friends with several of the neighbours who have also been around for a while. Our immediate next door neighbours are always giving us fruit and veg from their garden and likewise I give them herbs as well as any dog food samples I get from doing surveys online. They have a King Charles Spaniel called Poppy. On the other side of the road we have a lovely retired couple and we always look out for each other and often take in parcels for them. And then opposite our house we had a older family. Mum and Dad owned the house and their adult son lived with them. Sadly both the parents died but Gareth and his sister decided they'd keep the house and rent it out. I know from experience that it can be a real pain in the posterior as I used to evict tenants who didn't pay their rent but, a few months ago, we were pleasantly surprised to see a smart young lady turn up. However, we were annoyed to find that she wouldn't park her car in her driveway but preferred to park it on a pavement outside the house, thereby blocking it for pedestrians but we just let it go as our road isn't particularly busy. About a week ago we saw her and a man loading furniture into a van. She certainly hadn't moved in with cabinets, fridges and washing machines but she was definitely moving them out. I noticed all of this going on while I was gardening at the front of my house and I was startled with I heard Adam's voice from the bedroom window above me. At the same time as I heard him cuss a little, I heard something drop into my flowerbed behind my Fuchsia. I asked him what he'd dropped and he said 'nothing'. However, he came downstairs, rummaged around in the Fuchsia and then disappeared back up to the bedroom. When he came down for dinner he told me that he'd used his small video camera to record the number plate of her car and the van that the furniture was loaded into. He'd dropped the camera into the Fuchsia and obviously couldn't tell me what it was as the tenants would have known what he was up to. Yesterday, Gareth turned up at the property and I could see he was weeding the garden so I popped out to offer him our 'brown bin' which we get from the local council for a fee and into which we can put our garden rubbish. It's then taken away to a council compost heap. He said that he wasn't pleased with his ex tenant. She'd 'done a bunk' and had left the house in a mess. She'd stolen the fridge and the washing machine and somehow had broken the toilet which he'd fitted just before he'd rented it out in the Spring. She'd cracked some paving slabs outside the front door and he said he couldn't understand how she'd done it. I told him that she'd parked her visitors' cars on there but had actually parked her own car on the public footpath. He told me that it was a condition of the tenancy agreement that vehicles should always be parked on the drive. So not such a nice lady after all! He said he wasn't entirely sure where she'd gone but thought he may be able to find a forwarding address so I told him that Adam had videoed her moving out. So Gareth now has the registration numbers of her vehicle and the vehicle of the man who helped her move. Hopefully he'll he able to track her down. So thanks to Adam's vigilance, we may have helped catch a criminal!!