Nine Years, Four Solicitors, and a Folder on His Computer Called VAN

The next nine years are, in summary, as follows.

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The hedge.

Colin planted a line of laurel along the boundary in the autumn of the first year. He maintains it was because the new fence was lower than the old one and the garden felt overlooked.

It was also, in fairness, planted with some intent, and it went up faster than anybody expected, and by the third year it was taking the light off Tony’s patio from about four in the afternoon in summer.

Tony raised it, in writing.

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The shed.

In 2018 Tony put up a shed. A good one, eight by six, concrete base.

He put it eight centimetres from the fence, on ground Colin considered to be his by the terms of the original complaint, and which Tony maintained was his to put a shed on.

Colin wrote a letter. Tony did not reply to the letter. Colin wrote a second letter referring to the first letter.

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The solicitors.

Two letters from Colin’s, in 2019 and 2021.

Two from Tony’s, both in 2021, the second of which used the phrase “vexatious” and which Colin has never entirely got over.

Between them the four letters cost something in the region of two thousand two hundred pounds and established precisely nothing, because the thing they were arguing about was not recorded anywhere, which neither solicitor said out loud in a letter because it would have ended the correspondence.

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The van.

For about fourteen months in 2022 and 2023, Tony reversed his van onto the shared drive at an angle.

Not a blocking angle. That was the whole art of it. It was an angle that made it just difficult for Colin to get the car out — a three-point turn instead of a straight reverse, every time, for fourteen months.

Colin took a photograph of it every single time. Two hundred and twelve photographs in total, each one with the date and time, in a folder on his computer called VAN.

He has since described the folder as “the maddest thing I have ever done”, and says the part he finds hardest to explain is not that he took the photographs. It is that he never once used them. He never sent a single one to anybody. They were not evidence. They were just a thing he did, at the end of the drive, before going in, two hundred and twelve times.

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The bonfire.

In the autumn of 2023 there was an incident with a bonfire.

Neither of them will discuss it. Shona will not discuss it. Deb, when asked, says only, “That was a bad week for everybody,” and changes the subject.

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That is nine years.

It sounds, written down like that, like a lot of activity. It was not. That is the thing Colin says people get wrong about disputes like this.

“Nine years and I could list you about eleven actual events,” he says. “The rest of it is just being aware of somebody. All the time. Every time you go out the back. Every time you hear a car. You’re never not slightly braced.”

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He estimates he thought about the fence every day for nine years.

Not for long. Perhaps four seconds, on the way past with the bin. But every day.

He has worked out, in a low moment, that this is roughly three and a half hours a year, which is about thirty-one hours across the whole thing: the better part of a working week spent thinking about eleven centimetres of grass.

“And he’ll have done the same,” Colin says. “That’s the bit. He’ll have done exactly the same thing, from his side, about my hedge.”

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Their wives, it should be said, continued to speak to each other the entire time.

Not in front of the men. Never in front of the men.

But Deb and Shona had a standing arrangement on a Wednesday — coffee, town, ten till about twelve — that had been going since before the storm and which neither of them ever raised at home, and which survived all nine years without a single interruption, including the fortnight of the solicitors’ letters and including the week of the bonfire.

Neither husband knew.

That is not quite true. Both husbands knew, in the way you know a thing you have decided not to establish.