Weird and Unnecessary
We had a party for all of our neighbors when we moved in. I like to barbecue, and my wife is vegetarian, so we have two grills. We invited everyone on the street, but one of our neighbors declined to attend because they’re vegetarian.
“Not to worry”, I said, “So’s my wife. We have two barbecues going, one for meat and one for veggies”. I could see them trying to find another reason. They looked down at the invite. “Oh, the 6th? We’re out of town then. Sorry”. At that point, I got the drift.
They didn’t want to come for whatever reason; they just weren’t going to tell us what it was. We’re British, after all. Then the day of the party arrived. Our garden is quite big, so everyone could fit in happily.
We had the barbecues going on the opposite side of the garden by the aforementioned neighbors’ house. It was only around 5 in the evening when we noticed the upstairs windows of their house were open. I said, “Weird, I thought they were out of town”?
As I was looking at the windows with some of the other neighbors, we saw the most unexpected sight ever—the wife with a camera, taking photos of us! We went to their house, rang the bell, and tried to tell them that they were still welcome to join us.
They gave us no answer, yet their curtains were twitching upstairs. We just shrugged and went back to the party, ignoring them. Later into the evening, the parents and kids had gone home and just a mix of older and younger neighbors was left.
I started mixing cocktails at the outside bar. Suddenly, we were met with a rather annoying surprise—a few officers walked in through the open back gate. “Someone” had lodged a complaint. It was only about nine, and noise complaints in the UK are typically not followed up until past 11.
Apparently, they made an exception for us because not only were we having the biggest party known to man, but we were “setting things on fire” and “forcing drinks onto children”.
Of course, the officers could see we were having a fairly civilized adult get-together, and they went on their merry way. We thought that would be the end of it, but we were so, so wrong. The following Monday, while we were unpacking, we had a knock on the door.
The officers returned with a bunch of photographs of the alleged “forcing drinks on a minor” and “setting fire to things”. One of the photos showed one of the neighborhood kids bringing two bottles from the fridge to me and his dad at the barbecue. They weren’t even open.
And the “setting fire to things”? Yeah. We were using a blowtorch to light my barbecue. Apparently, that was endangering their property, which was a bunch of feet away from the contained fire within my oil drum barbecue. The officers could see how the situation was blown out of proportion, thankfully.
They just needed me to make a statement explaining my side of the story, so I did. For the whole two years that we lived there, they avoided us. It was so weird and so unnecessary. Story credit: Reddit / Effityjeffity