adults playing childish wars
First the adult stuff, before I get to the childish part: my parents bought a new house last year, its garden slopes down a little and downhill lives their somewhat unfriendly neighbour. When the house was constructed 20 years ago, a pipe was installed wich diverts our rain water to the (then bare) land downhill. It's a plastic tube with a diameter of roughly 15 cm and it ends where the slope increases to a 45° angle on the land of mr. Friendly. Right behind it, an old oak tree (on his land), behind that, his swimming pool.
Please note that this setup for a water system is very commom in the region, and meant to avoid inundating lower land with mudslides and enabling the lower person to collect the rain water for irrigation purposes. Also, our pipe was there before his house or his pool were built. The oak also rather liked the abundant water supply in the otherwise rather dry region.

This set-up is however what started the childisg war between mr. Friendly and my father.
Mr. Friendly comes round to our house (to welcome us to the neighbourhoud, we fools tought at first), but quickly demands we remove the pipe, as he fears it will undermine his oak, which will then fall onto his swimming pool, which would be a disaster since his grandchild is coming to visit and might at the time be swimming in it and be killed by the falling tree.

And argument ensued in which my father tried to convince the low living creature that century old oaks do not tend to fall over overnight because of a little water; that the situation has been as it is from long before he purchased the house and seemed to have been unproblematic during all that time; and finally that it was after all mr. Friendly's tree. If he was so concerned about harm it could do, he would simply cut it down. (upon which he was kicked in the leg under the table by my mother, who didn't want the tree to unblock their sight on the lowlife's house.)

However, no reason was to be found, upon which my father exclaimed the now immortal line: "Fine. If you want to act so childish, I'll give you what you want and cut the pipe. But if you ever set one step in my garden again I'll set loose the dogs."

Que an hourlong search with our sixth sense to locate the pipe, 3 hours of digging it up, one of cutting it and two more to distract it to a spot in our garden where we could use the water anyway.

...and finally: 10 minutes of carefully placing the cut off end of the pipe at 20 cm of the border between mr. Friendly and our garden, at such an angle it seems to be purposedly placed there to direct its muddy waters all over his garden gnomes. We so hope he's going to call the police to it, only to be able to say "this piece of rubble? Must've forgotten to clean it up. Did he really call you guys up for that?"
(Poezestrepe, Sat 19 Sep 2009, 15:04, Reply)