All that comes with it

Eric lives next door to us. He has lived in that house all his life, roughly 80 years. He was born in it, and probably intends to die in it. He worked in a local textile mill and never married. Eric is someone you might describe as a bit of a character.

His house is absolutely full to the brim of a lifetimes worth of junk. His windows are piled high with assorted boxes, bits of wood, and old pieces of furniture. He has newspaper instead of carpet and cleans his toilet with washing up liquid (“you get some good foaming”). He once told me he baffles thieves by hiding all his valuable things under a layer of rubbish; this may be so, but from what I can see it must be a pretty thick layer. He is an avid collector of just about anything you can mention, from reel to reel tapes to comic books. For an 80 year old he has a pretty eclectic taste in TV too - his favourite program is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he doesn’t like the X-Files because they never turn the lights on.

Every couple of weeks or so Kerry drives Eric to the supermarket so he can do some shopping, and I’ll give him a lift to the village now and then. Sometimes talking with Eric is a little draining, he frequently comes out with statements that are so preposterous that it’s incredibly hard not to argue with him. But Kerry and I have both learnt that there is little point in trying to change the opinion of someone his age, you just have to bite your tongue and make non committal grunting noises.

When we first moved in Eric used to regularly give us his newspapers once he had finished with them. On nearly every page he added his own comments in ballpoint pen. These never failed to baffle me in their inconsistency, one moment he was extolling rabid right wing views and the next he was coming out with statements that would be perfectly at home in the socialist worker. One of his favourite topics appeared to be “the bloody puffs at the BBC”, and many a celebrities’ picture was adorned with speech bubbles proclaiming “I am gay”. The strange thing was that these people were almost always blatantly heterosexual; he tended to leave the more openly homosexual personalities alone.

After a while the donated papers seemed to dry up and we started getting teddies that he had bought at various charity shops instead. Then, these gradually stopped coming too. I think he realised that we weren’t expecting anything in return for doing him an odd favour here and there.

Before we came to the area Lisa, our other neighbour, was engaged in a long running dispute with Eric because he insisted on encouraging a colony of rats to take up residence in his garden. He claimed they were tame and were his pets. Thankfully environmental health dealt with the problem before we moved in; otherwise our relationship with him probably wouldn’t be as cordial.

Lisa’s very good to Eric; she makes him a meal once a week and keeps an eye on his health. He avoids going to the doctors and tends to concoct dubious remedies with things he has lying around the house. We’re pretty convinced that he’s lost the sight in one of his eyes due to him rubbing various noxious substances in it in order to cure a dose of conjunctivitis. You try to tell him to go to a doctor, but he’s having none of it.

It can on occasion be irritating living next door to Eric. There was a period of time when the dogs kept going absolutely crazy every time they heard a noise outside the door; it took quite a while for us to discover that the reason was that he was regularly posting biscuits and slices of ham through our letterbox. Still, we’d certainly miss him if he were gone. He’s all right is Eric, once you get used to him.