George and Rosie

Rosie was our third attempt at owning a dog.

Smaller than a reasonable sized rabbit, and with a terriers fearless outlook on life, she endeared herself to just about everyone she came across. Actually she endeared herself to everyone except George.

George was a neighbour, who might have been a nice person beneath his hyper-sensitivity to all but the sound of his own tiny mind ticking over, and just as he'd taken exception to the squeaking of the litter of kelpie pups six or eight doors down the street, he had also decided that the occasional terrier sounds emanating from within our yard were something that his life would be better without.

One fine, sunny Saturday morning, sometime between morning tea and lunch time, I heard the unmistakable sounds of a Silky Terrier baling up a bearded dragon, that particular type of mid-sized lizard that occasionally visited from the bush at the rear of our property.

I bounded down the stairs to rescue the hapless, if not defenceless creature, to be greeted by George standing at the fence in his pyjamas, and speaking in a language which I at first assumed to be some kind of foreign, but quickly recognised as profane, and to make it even less comprehensible, not a verb was uttered during his whole tirade. The gist of what he was saying in words that didn't quite make sentences, was that he wasn't able to get a good day's sleep with the incessant barking happening.

Just why George wanted to get a good day's sleep after spending the previous night in repose was not a question I dared ask at the time.

It is fair to say that by the time of this incident, we'd been the subject of several reports and subsequent visits from entirely sympathetic Council Officers who had marked our place as "never to be visited again", and the entire neighbourhood had really had quite enough of George's incessant and unjustifiable complaining about anything and everything. If that hadn't been the case, I doubt that I would have been quite so impolite in my response, in which case he may not have stormed back up his stairs and thrown his living room furniture out the window in a rage, but I'm afraid I too had had enough.

"I terribly sorry George," I apologised in the most polite and level tone I could muster under the circumstances, "I'll go and start the mower so you won't be able to hear her."