Neighbours

This a sculpture in one of my neighbours front yards, maybe a holocaust survivor?




I’ve noticed that I’m becoming obsessed with my neighbours in the big house. Some rational explanations for this obsession may be found in the fact that all, bar my bedroom, windows provide a view directly into their backyard cabana and that their burglar alarm, which goes off regularly to alert us that they are not home, is mounted about fifteen unobstructed meters from all my living windows. Now this house, only marginally smaller than the mansion scale premises now broken into nine flats in which I live, was obviously not of adequate scale for the current occupants who were forced to blight their enjoyment of family life turning their house into a building site to achieve the afore mentioned essential cabana.

Rereading I realise that the word family could be misleading and shall attempt to elaborate. There is certainly a Mr. who I have seen several times noisily putting out the rubbish. There is also an early teen junior who I noticed once though he must be more than comfortable in his own room as I’ve not seen him again and certainly not in the cabana which has glass doors on my side providing a good view inside. Aren’t you glad you don’t live next to me? One presumes a Mrs. would be attached to such an arrangement however I have never seen anyone I could identify as such and that’s it, a very small nuclear family doing their best to occupy so much space. My heart cries out for them.

This Saturday the cabana was laid out with a long table with white cloths and at about seven some elderly ladies were wheeled in to be joined later by an extended group ranging in age down to sub teen. Had this group, eventually some twelve to fifteen party animals, been anymore agitated or raucous I would have felt bound to call an undertaker.

Now I know some of you are saying he’s just jealous and of course in a certain way your right. I’m well aware of the comfort provided by space and am thankful for my nine foot ceilings. I’m also well aware of the grandeur that vast enclosed spaces can provide in temples, cathedrals and other great public buildings. It’s my opinion that Sydney should follow the example of India’s Taj Mahal, erect purpose built opera and concert houses elsewhere, with function as there priority and re name the sails at Bennelong Urtzon’s or Keating’s tomb. I don’t care about the name, I just want the inside to reflect some of the awe and grandeur that the outside seems to promise. I bet if you hollowed it out you’d get some terrific echoes. The Echo House-use-use-se, Mmm that sounds good.

Back to the domestic scale though and I grant that I wouldn’t say no to a bit extra space but to be part of the neighbouring family trying to occupy such a vast space would be daunting if not arduous. Imagine all the dusting let alone the responsibility for furnishing and designing décor. I know I occupy one of the extremes when it comes to taking responsibility for stuff like colour schemes, some would say for any stuff at all and I wouldn’t argue, but to have fifteen or more rooms to name not counting bathrooms, well after bedroom six and sitting and dining and living and ironing and library and storage and then trying to fill all with appropriate furniture wouldn’t you be counting the occupants again and questioning the ratios.

This sort of mad spaciousness leads straight to Harvey Norman and Domain of course where one can buy all manner of temperature controlled wine cabinets, steam irons as big as motor scooters, cinema screen size plasma TVs and a great many other devices for which we space starved have yet to contemplate a need let alone find accommodation. Yes with that house you’d be a chump for every new marketing ploy, you’d have every better mouse trap even if no mice. You need to keep a clear head around marketers when they present with their glossy bling. I recall in the seventies that ear phones, cans to the professionals, were well established as a product and roused little more interest than a radio around the house. Then in the nineties along came the ipod which with its emphasis on compact portability came with a funny ear button. What a success story that was but success is ephemeral and marketers have to keep marketing and add ons are an ever present device. Now that we can’t live without our ipods they are being marketed with bulky cans and are no longer compact. I don’t care how many ways they invent to fold them, cans will always be bulky and will only travel well on ears. That said I feel confident, as do the marketers, that the relative quality and comfort (the button always felt, like a deb, to be coming out and at risk of becoming waxy don’t you think) will obscure these pitfalls in the portability stakes.

Yes I have strayed from my theme haven’t I. The only problem I can imagine the neighbours having with their ipods would have to do with the vastly increased number of places they might misplaced them. Oh no those poor folk, imagine how much longer that “Oh god! Cant find my keys” panic might last.

This one is probably a survivor of Singapore's Tiger Balm Gardens