DID SOMEONE SAY ‘BITCH’?…
Sorry my mistake, it was ‘BREACH’!

Summer 2018…
Another summer spent avoiding my garden due to Melissa & Lyle revelling in every opportunity to get their friends/family/neighbours to gloat in their abilities to make me miserable. Each conversation was interspersed with snide & derogatory comments.
It was awful to listen to each time I ventured out to do anything & eventually got to the point where I would take the dogs over to ‘The Old Ladies’’ house next door instead of using my own garden. At least that way there was some privacy & the dogs & I could relax for a bit. That lady really was lovely, I miss her a lot!

Philippa, Melissas’ teenage daughter did as instructed when told to make lots of noise inside, or outside in the garden the few times I actually tried to sit in mine peacefully to enjoy the sun. Then also when she was told to stare at me from her back bedroom window. Not her fault, but intrusive none the less & always had the desired affect of making me hide away indoors, or simply go out in the car with the dogs for a break from all the crap at home!

Melissa had stepped up the nastiness tenfold since Davids’ diagnosis for having ‘special needs’ & I knew she meant every word of it when she said ‘’I hate that fucking bitch even more now, she was right, David has special needs, I want her dead’’.
I felt sorry for the poor lad, as it was obvious he needed some form of help to cope with his behavioural issues, but Melissa just ignored all his rages & simply let him get on with it, often sending him down to the bottom of her garden to a make shift shed that was half collapsed just above a 20foot drop with no fencing behind it where he would stomp down to armed with nails, wood, a saw & a hammer & bang the hell out of it until he had calmed down. All very disturbing to say the least.
Even the gardeners sent from Cornwall Housing were shocked to see it & took photographs as it was happening!

Melissa made no secret of her loathing for me to other villagers in Port Is It & she & Lyle had soon alienated me from almost everyone. People would rush past looking at the ground instead of saying ‘hello’ & I knew it was because they had been fed cock & bull stories to add weight to Melissas’ ever growing bubbling cauldron of hatred for me.
For my part, I accepted the situation & kept my sights firmly fixed on moving ASAP!
My friend Redge came almost daily to take the dogs out with me & ‘next door’ continued their ‘raids’ on my home every time I went out for any length of time.
It was horrid knowing my home & personal possessions were being violated & poked through by them, but there was nothing I could do about it as nobody could see them climbing over my garden fence to get in the back door with the key they stole. Well, nobody apart from the Pinders’, & they certainly weren’t going to tell me!

Every so often I would find something slightly in the wrong place, or there would be something gone. My large Buddha statue vanished, along with Eddies’ first puppy collar that I had hanging from the right hand of it. I’d had that statue for years & the puppy collar used to disguise the fact that one of the fingers was broken in half!
(As it turns out, that particular statue turned up sitting in the window of Mick Nolan’s bedroom window once I’d moved, but that’s another story!)
I missed Eddie (bear) so much, I would find myself going to call him, then remember he was gone & I knew the girls were missing his presence even though they weren’t that keen on him… they used to steal each others treats! He was a little bugger for doing that, especially when I gave them ‘Zealandia’ lamb rib bones!
I kept the last one he was chomping on, before I had to take him to the vets, for nearly two years…. I kept it wrapped in foil, unable to throw it away.

Eddie was still in the deep freeze at the vets waiting for my exchange to happen so I could bury him properly & that was eating away at me inside the longer it went on but despite everything ‘next door’ threw at me, I kept my head above water & stayed stoic. The goal was escaping from the nut jobs next door, & let me tell you, at times it took all my might not to curse the bastards with an old Irish spell.
My family is of Irish heritage on both sides… Tipperary. The Dooley’s, Callaghan’s & Gerrard’s. The only break in tradition was my grandfather on my dads’ side & he was English.

Summer holidays nearly over, the weekends flew by…
They were more stressful most of the time as Melissas’ ex husband, Wesley, often had the kids so next door could torment me All night instead of just for a few hours before the children went to bed!
It was also when they had family over for ‘drinks’ & a bit of verbal ‘knife throwing’ in my direction, often times culminating in threats of violence from Lyle once he’d had a few beers….’’ I’ll just get a shotgun & shoot the cunt’’ & ‘’ I’ll just go round there & tell her she has to fucking move out’’. Then bouts of very loud exaggerated laughter that used to run in 10 to 20 minute cycles.
Lyle used to do the same thing during the week in 15 minute cycles every time he was in the house alone when Melissa was at work. He would stop watching tv & go into the kitchen to bang all the drawers & cupboards, then smash things up against the kitchen wall before rattling pans around the cupboard & slamming the back door really hard.
It was all designed to make sure I could never relax & for the most part, it worked a treat, I rarely sat in my lounge during the day.

Wesley, the ex hubby, always waited in the car for the kids to come out when he came to collect them. I was told by a lady accross the road when I first moved to Port Is It that he had left Melissa for another girl, an 18yr old, the year before we moved in next door. The lady said Melissa had ‘bricked’ his caravan window when she found out where he was living. I should have taken that as a sign of things to come; little did I know what horrors lay ahead!

My PC repair man had to come over from Helston again due to my laptop getting slower & slower & he again told me it had been accessed from an outside source & worked his magic. He again reminded me that my mini iPad was also hacked & so were my phone & the tv’s!
I didn’t worry too much about the phone as I never used it for the internet, in fact I hardly used it at all except for phone calls when I was out & rarely sent text messages as it was all too fiddly & I needed my reading glasses to see the screen properly. It was a Samsung Galaxy S2 & I’d had it since the beginning of 2011. It was still in mint condition so I was reluctant to take my pc man’s advice & get a newer model!
As for the smart tv’s being hacked…again I didn’t use them for the internet, just watching tv, so didn’t do anything about his warnings.
I’m not tecky at all so didn’t really understand what he was on about when he was telling me they had been accessed from an ‘outside source’ & ‘reconfigured’. I just left them as they were. One was in my lounge & the other was in my granddaughter’s bedroom.

A couple of weeks after the last visit from him I kept hearing next door talking about what stuff I had in my house, my tv’s, the phone, my internet provider, they mentioned my car & then Lyle said “ No, he said she won’t notice anything, it just looks like part of the furniture” … THAT made my ears prick up, as I knew they were coming into my house when I was out & wondered if that remark had anything to do with things being moved around & bits going missing?… It also made me worry about my mobility car; were they planning to damage it? Was Lyle going to start peeing over it like he did my garden plants?… I tried to put it out of my mind, but must admit to looking around my lounge to see if anything was there that shouldn’t be! They seemed completely obsessed with my entire existence & I was always the topic of conversation!

By this time my doctor of 13 years had left the surgery to take a year’s break & one of the other gp’s took his place; one that I didn’t get on with! He was incompetent & it nearly cost my granddaughter her sight in one eye due to an infection he misdiagnosed when she was a baby & he rarely listened properly to what was being said to him. The kind that types while you’re talking & then has to ask you to repeat what you said as he didn’t hear you!
The last time I’d seen my old doctor before he left the surgery I told him how much I was dreading the other one taking his place as he ‘Was an idiot!”… my old doctor tried not to laugh & said ‘’You’ll be fine, don’t worry, he’s not that bad!’’ I protested saying “But You KNOW me, you know everything about me, I don’t have to explain anything to you, you can’t leave, the other one is crap, why can’t you stay?!”
We had a bit of a giggle & he reassured me that I would be ok. I asked him to call me when his year off was over so I could transfer to his new surgery & gave him a hug!
My reservations about the ‘other one’ were right & it soon became apparent that he was indeed a total idiot!

Next door were being particularly shitty & it was grating my nerves, so I went to the doctor to ask if he could help me to get something done about their behaviour as the police refused to do anything… I told him that I could hear them talking about me all the time & that all the noise & threats were seriously affecting my health. He did his usual thing of not paying attention & told me he thought a visit from the ‘home treatment team’ would help matters. I had no idea who they were, but agreed to them coming to see me thinking it would get something done finally about all the harassment from ‘next door’.
Well the ‘home treatment team’ were definitely Not what I thought they were! It turned out “Doctor Incompetant “ had misunderstood what I was telling him & decided I was ‘hearing voices through the wall’ & needed my mental health checked out!
He very obviously hadn’t bothered to check my notes at all, which contained various assessments I’d already had prior to my therapy at the women’s centre for PTSD caused by child abuse etc.! & all of those assessments said exactly the same thing….NO MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES AT ALL!
The ‘home treatment team’ consisted of a manager, an assistant & a psychiatrist who all sat in my kitchen for over an hour asking me questions about myself, my childhood etc, my perception of what was going on with my neighbours & then proceeded to announce “We don’t know why your doctor called us, there’s nothing mentally wrong with you at all. You had ptsd from abuse which you had therapy for at the women’s centre & that was the right thing to do as it isn’t a mental health issue. We’re giving you a clean bill of health & signing you off our list as such.”
Then the psychiatrist said “Your neighbours sound like they have some serious mental health issues going on that you appear to have triggered, but as for yourself, you’re fine. Good luck with your move, it was nice to meet you”.
After hearing that, I asked the manager if it would be possible to meet with her again somewhere other than my house so we could talk in private, due to the neighbours listening to everything through the paper thin walls! She agreed & we arranged to meet up for coffee with her assistant at the St. Kew Inn.
That meeting was requested so I could ask if there was any way they could help with getting the police to do something about my neighbours behaviour & very obvious mental health issues, as they had concluded that I had been the trigger for them both. Unfortunately the manager said they ‘’wouldn’t be able to help with the police & their only involvement would be if I needed help, which I clearly didn’t’’ & that she had signed me off their books. We finished our coffee’s & I thanked her for her time & went back home.

The crap from next door continued as usual & I started to spend more & more time out of the house during the day to give myself a break from it all. I was visiting friends I’d made during the group therapy sessions in Bude at the women’s centre for my PTSD & making plans for my upcoming move there via the exchange.
I’d found the perfect house with a stream at the bottom of the garden & was very excited about it, as were my friends. I had no idea at that point that the people would be backing out at the last minute!

In the meantime I had a health check at the doctors & received a phone call from the secretary with my results. She very casually said “We’ve had your test results back & you have emphysema, would you like me to make an appointment for you to come in & discuss it with the doctor?”… I was stunned into silence for a few seconds before repeating her words in my mind then saying “I have emphysema?” She replied Yes & asked again if I wanted to make an appointment to see the doctor…I declined & said I would call them back.
I sat down at the kitchen table totally shocked. I had suffered with chest problems for years & for the last few years had been on antibiotics every winter due to bronchitis. I had also had 2 bouts of bronchial pneumonia & 2 bouts of pleurisy.
I started to cry & then heard Melissa say very loudly “Good, I hope it kills her quickly”. I answered her comment with “Can’t you please just leave me alone for one day so I can take this in”, & carried on crying my eyes out for a few minutes before calling my sister to tell her. As you can imagine it sent me into an instant depression. I’d had a close friend die from it a few years previously so knew what was eventually coming & it’s not pleasant!

The neighbours decided to up the anti with the noise & sleep deprivation & the children were again encouraged to make as much noise as possible. The back door would slam repeatedly all day & Lyle stepped up the verbal abuse, especially after having a few ‘Budweisers’.. his favourite tipple.
Then, after a few weeks, I woke up to find the back window of my Ford Kuga Mobiliy car was wide open; something I could not have done as my 2 rescue chihuahuas were not recall trained & if they got out in the open they simply panicked & ran at top speed!
Something that ‘next door’ were well aware of due to constantly eavesdropping on everything that was said in my house. Lyle overheard me telling Redge about it when he asked why I was so worried about him leaving the back gate open when he was doing my gardening. Next thing I know I’m opening the back door to let the dogs out for a pee before bedtime & the back gate was wide open! The day after that occurrence Redge put another bolt on the bottom of the gate that couldn’t be reached from the outside to stop it happening again!

As for my car window being wide open…I caught sight of it from the side window outside my bathroom as I was on my way downstairs & immediately knew it was something to do with next door!
I stood staring at my car envisaging what horrors were awaiting me. Had Lyle urinated over the seats? Had my phone been stolen? I mostly kept my mobile phone inside the console compartment as I could rarely get a good signal in the house & Port Is It had no crimes to speak of & my car was in full view of every house & parked under the street lights so I didn’t have anything to worry about…or so I thought!
I stared at it for a few minutes & decided to leave looking inside it until I needed to go out later that day as I felt sure whatever I found was going to piss me off.
I did ring the motability dealership in Helston where I get my cars from though, to ask the man that always deals with me if there was any way to get into my car without the alarm going off & he said “No, no way”. I then told him that the back window was wide open & I was bracing myself for the worst once I went out to see what was waiting inside it for me!
I have known everyone in that particular garage for donkeys years, even the mechanics & they all knew my neighbours had damaged my cars from time to time & that one of Melissas’ friends (a neighbours’ daughter) had wrenched the back windscreen wiper completely off earlier in the year! She bragged about it!
The garage also knew about all the harassment issues I was having with next door & kept a log of any damages caused to my vehicles.
I told the man that I would take a look inside later that afternoon & pop in if anything was damaged when I came over to Helston to see my granddaughter.

Next door were unusually quiet, which made me think the worst about what I would find in the car, so I left it as late as possible to go over to Helston.
When I did go out to the car I found to my delight that there was no obvious damage & the seats were dry & didn’t smell of pee! My phone was still in the car & so was my purse.
I put the dogs in their bed on the front seat & drove over to see my granddaughter in Helston, stopping at the local Sainsbury’s garage there for petrol & to put washer fluid in. That is when I saw evidence that the car had been accessed by someone other than me…
There was a Full handprint on the top of the fuse box which is situated at the back of the engine compartment on the passenger side. My car was fairly new & it had not had it’s first service at that point & Nobody is permitted to touch Anything under the bonnet until then. Not even the garage staff. There are strict rules with motability vehicles that must be adhered to. I was under strict orders not to touch anything at all except the washer fluid lid to top it up & that is situated at the front of the engine on the drivers side so is nowhere near the fuse box!
I took several close up photographs of the hand print & took the car straight to the garage to show them. It was noted for my files & they confirmed that the hand print did not belong to Any of the staff or mechanics there. I later stopped at Bodmin police station to report it. I knew nothing would be done, but reported it anyway.

Straight after that I noticed the onboard computer started playing up & had to drive over to Helston to get it reset. Twice!
I didn’t think anything of it at that point, or indeed, about the fact that my phone was sending any text messages I sent 3 times instead of just the once. It would be a few weeks before I found that the text messages that were being sent 3 times were not all going to the recipient I was sending them to, as confirmed by my friend Paul in Helston. I had sent him a message telling him what time I was arriving for lunch & when I got there I apologised for the duplicate text messages & explained that my phone, for some reason, was sending out my messages 3 times instead of just the once. He checked his phone for my messages & only found One… he then went back through his phone to check for other messages from me & we found that each time he had only received them once, not 3 times. I checked with other people & they all confirmed the same thing.
Only the first one was going to the person I was sending the messages to. The other times they were obviously going to other phones! I rarely send texts due to it being so fiddly & needing my reading glasses so I always have hundreds of them left over each month from my allowance of 500.
I checked my phone provider records & my suspicions were correct…my text message usage had gone up threefold since my car was ‘accessed’… & the back window had been left open.
My spare key for the car was kept in the kitchen drawer next to the back door. Doubtless the readers of this blog will come to the same very obvious conclusion that I did… ‘next door’ had taken the key on one of their illegal visits into my home whilst I was out & fiddled with the car overnight before putting the key back the next day when I went out.
It made sense now why the onboard computer had been playing up & needed to be reset twice by the garage in Helston!
I still had no idea why they had been in the engine compartment though & nobody had checked inside the fuse box as we weren’t allowed to touch anything in the engine compartment until the car had it’s first service & that wasn’t due until 2019. Also, the car wasn’t acting up at all apart from it needing the onboard computer reset twice, so I thought no more of it. I had the photo’s of the handprint & so did the garage & if anything else happened I could refer the police to those.
I did mention it to “the old lady’ on the other side of me though & she said she’d keep her eyes open for any movement in the early hours if she got up to pee, as did I, but we never saw anything else. I just thought maybe they had wanted to have a nose in my car as well as my home!

The next occurrence was the couple in Bude letting me down with the house exchange at the last minute & that really pissed me off. I was dreading another Christmas living next door to the neighbours from hell.
Me & Helen (name changed for legal purposes), the other swapper that wanted my house, did frantic searches for a suitable property for me over a few weeks. My neighbours were audibly happy that my swap had fallen through & could be heard taking the piss… ‘’Oh, it’s my dream house’’ etc. etc. which made me even more determined to get out of there as quickly as I could. Depression was looming & I hated the fact that they seemed to think they had the right to trespass on my property whenever they felt like it. I even caught them clambering back over the fence on one occasion when I had to turn around & drive back home to grab something I had forgotten. They were laughing their heads off & seemed to revel in it. Bastards!

The search for another house went on & eventually one was advertised on ‘homeswapper’ just 12 miles up the road from Port Is It. Not where I wanted to be, but at least it was out of Port Is It & away from next door, so I contacted them to see if they would be interested in doing a 3 way swap with Helen & I?
As luck would have it they said they were interested in Helens house on the outskirts of Truro, so we set up a viewing.
Their house was in B————(name omitted for legal purposes ) & although I didn’t like the house itself, the back garden was cute & I was desperate to get away from next door so I said I would take it if they liked Helens house near Truro. They did, & the arrangements were made with the respective housing associations to get the paperwork sorted. The house in B———-(name omitted for legal purposes ) was with a different housing association, Live West, so we wanted to get things done as quickly as possible & hopefully before Christmas!

My daily routines continued & next door did their best to make sure I never got to relax. I would sit down at around the same time every evening to put the tv on, 6pm, to watch the news & have a few glasses of wine with my dinner. I was also ‘’comfort eating’’ my way up to a size 28 every night & getting more depressed by the day. A vicious circle I had been in & out of for years with the PTSD & although my therapy for it had gone really well, I was now piling on the pounds due to depression. Something that my neighbours constantly commented on whenever they got the chance. I was referred to as ‘’The Fat Cunt’’. & their neighbours next to them, the Pinders also joined in.
Eventually I just avoided everyone in the village apart from ‘the old lady’ next door to me & the ‘young woman’ who lived down the road whom Lyle had pinned up against the wall with her dog after he mounted the pavement to do so. He saw her talking to me on his way down to the Spar shop for his beer rations & got pissed off that she was still talking to me!

All I wanted to do was get out of Port Is It as quickly as possible to escape all the abuse & bury my dog Eddie, who was still at the vets in Wadeford in the freezer, which was crippling me.

A few weeks passed & the exchange was agreed between the relevant housing associations. It couldn’t come quick enough for me!
My days were spent mostly in the company of Redge, who took care of my gardening & walked the dogs with me & my evenings were spent snacking in front of the tv, guzzling glasses of wine to dull the misery & downing diazepam tablets just before bed. I even started smoking pot at times just before bed to help me sleep due to all the noise from next door.
It helped!
One evening I sat down on the sofa as usual with my dinner & a glass of wine to watch the news & the next thing I know it’s 3.15am, my dinner is on the floor & the glass of wine I was taking a slurp from was laying on the sofa next to me & my dressing gown was covered in its contents. I had no idea why, as I was wide awake when I sat down to watch the news & eat my dinner & hadn’t taken any diazepam since the night before when I went to bed. I cleaned up & went up to bed.

I noticed 2 huge sore lumps behind both my earlobes the next morning when I got up which were irritating me so when Redge came round to see me in the afternoon I asked him to take a look as it seemed strange to have them on both ears at the same time & it’s not a place one would normally get spots. Something I had never suffered with.
Redge said they were just big red lumps with no heads on them & to leave them alone! He then pointed out that my right eye was badly bloodshot on one part of it & asked if I had knocked it?… I hadn’t, & neither had I noticed it being bloodshot when I washed my face & brushed my teeth. I hadn’t put any mascara on so didn’t pay much attention to my eyes that morning & when I looked in the mirror it was indeed bloodshot quite badly, concentrated in one spot just next to my iris. I thought no more of it & tried to stop scratching behind my earlobes!

That night I sat down to watch the news with my dinner & poured myself a glass of wine from the box that was perched on the side table, & the same thing happened … started to watch tv with my dinner & a glass of wine, next thing I know it’s around 3am in the morning!
Twice I’d woken up with my dinner on the floor, my wine all over me & the glass resting on the sofa! Hadn’t taken any diazepam Or smoked any pot!
Bugger me if it didn’t happen the next night too! Again, no diazepam taken or pot smoked!
I’d Just had a glass of wine whilst doing my dinner, exactly the same as the previous evenings, then sat down to watch the 6pm news whilst eating it with another glass of wine, as It turned out it was the last glass of wine in the box & also it was the last time that happened…

Whatever was going on wouldn’t become apparent until a few months later when I’d moved house. Then things would become all too frighteningly clear.

My neighbours did indeed have some ‘’very serious mental health issues going on’’, as specified by the home treatment team! & Nothing could prepare me for what was about to come.