KING OF THE YARD

I want to kidnap my neighbour's cat.

The neighbor lives in the apartment block opposite and is your ordinary, middle-aged guy. He's average height and was probably of average weight once, but with the man boobs and beer gut that come with age, it's gone pear-shaped.

He’s completely bald – by bad luck or choice, I’m not sure – and being unemployed, is always casually dressed; shorts and a wife beater in summer, track pants in winter. He has an ordinary Australian accent and a friendly grin for the neighbourhood kids who he banters with while watering “his” plants; the garden is common property but he is often out there radiating a commanding sense of ownership. It keeps him active, and despite the beer and the cigarettes, he seems to enjoy excellent health.

Yep, he’s just an average Aussie bloke.

Except for all the yelling.

Last week he yelled at length at a council worker who was trying to whipper-snip the nature strip.

He yells at passing pedestrians.
"YOU'RE A BAD MOTHER!" – taking issue with the way a woman crossed the street with her babies.

To which I heard her reply,
"I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK," then, showing she did indeed care what he thinks,
"I'M A GOOD MOTHER!"

"YOU'RE A BAD MOTHER!" he just shouted back.

He yelled at my upstairs neighbour for a full five minutes because her smoke alarm had malfunctioned and beeped non-stop for the last eight hours, ruining his day.

Earlier I'd found him in our stairwell, barefoot as usual, trying to track down the noise.
"It's driving me so crazy," he told me (loudly), "I've had to start drinking."
It was 1 pm.

Then there was the power blackout. When my neighbour's electricity was finally restored after more than 24 hours he came out into the night to shout his euphoria.

"HOORAY! IT'S BACK! WE'VE GOT POWER! WOO HOO!! " he yellled, over and over. Then, needing to shout some more, he crossed the street to harass – I mean, thank – the technicians (still at work outside my building) in person.

"YOUSE GUYS ARE HEROS! THANK-YOU! YOU'RE THE BEST!" etc, etc, on and on and on.

The gloating was particularly galling for us on the other side of the road still without electricity. The technicians were still trying to work on that, which was not easy - on account of all the yelling.

But most of all he yells at his cat, or "my little daughter" as I overheard him describe her recently.

"NOOO-OH! NOOOO-OH! SHEBA!! SHEBA! NO, SHEBA, NO!"

He's an utter control freak whenever he lets her outside to poo and play. The minute a whisker gets past the boundary of the front fence he's on her case like a kelpie mustering a wayward sheep.

The yelling – or reign of terror as I saw it – started about a year ago when Sheba first arrived. I felt so sorry for that tiny kitten that I formulated a plan to befriend her then sneak her back to my house where no one would ever yell at or bully her again.

But the plan failed first time I tried to make friends. She sniffed my hand, scrunched up her stripy little face and ran straight back to the safety of my neighbour. He was embarrassed when I told him I could hear him shouting at her from my apartment.

"I'm just terrified she'll run out in the street and get run over," he explained. Loudly.

Anyway, I live right across the road. He'd have found out, inevitably.

And then I'm pretty sure he'd have done more than just yell at me.

Flag-waving... Shudder.

The apartment block opposite me is situated on a busy corner, with only an outward facing front yard. The residents seem to enjoy the publicness of their garden and love public displays of festivity. At Christmas their strobing fairy lights and animated santa were so bright they lit up my living room.

So, on Australia Day I looked out my window and saw the horror. Flag-Waving Patriotism, out loud and proud. A giant Australian flag tied to each corner fence. Little Australian flags festooned all over their front garden.

I had to quickly look away.

There were probably about thirty news articles in the paper that day on the topic of our controversial flag: Opinions on what it should look like; its history; what it means or doesn't mean; how, contrary to popular opinion, the Anzacs were not at all "fightingfor our flag" because our current flag was not finally decided upon and adopted until 1954.

I think my disapproval of flag-waving patriotism might have reared up when I visited the USA not long after September 11. The stars and stripes flew from every pole, was strung up in every window. Out in the suburbs and rural areas people had erected flagpoles in their front yards – sometimes unfeasibly enormous ones – and it struck me as something unseen in Australia. At the time I was glad we Aussies weren't like that. It seemed somehow – um... racist. The flag said to me "We are American, we are the best. You are other, you suck."

So when the flag-waving trend crept into Australia, my heart sank. There should be nothing wrong with being proud of the country you live in, but in a world already so polarised it feels even more polarising to be brandishing banners that define your tribe, that separate 'us' from 'others'.

If I had a flag it would be the flag of planet earth, for my tribe: the Human beings.

Oh, and the animals and plants too. And the microbes, and...

Okay, The Union Flag of all earthly life-forms.

Fat chance. Can you imagine getting everyone on earth to agree on the design?