Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Draft and save is as good a New Year’s resolution as any

Posting a letter through your neighbour’s door in anger could ruin your marriage prospects

Draft and save. That is as good a New Year’s resolution as any. Never send an email or letter in anger. Always leave it a few hours. Sleep on it if you can. You know it makes sense.

The same goes for notes through doors. I know this because I have been experiencing some intermittent next door neighbour noise. First, it was incessant dog barking. I went out of my house and peered over the wall of my neighbour’s house and, sure enough, sitting on the back of the sofa in the window was a pretty little dog barking his head off.

‘Sshhh! There, there, doggy. Don’t worry,’ I cooed at him, but he went on woofing. And so I shouted, ‘No! Be quiet! You mustn’t! Bad dog!’ He looked at me a little shocked, and stopped barking. Then as soon as I walked away he started again.

They say there are tribes in remote parts of the world who, if you put them in prison, think it is for ever and lose their minds. You think I am going to say that this is what the dog was feeling, right? No. This is how I was feeling. I am fairly primitive. If I encounter a sudden problem, my brain cannot compute that it might be resolved at some point. I immediately go to the worst case scenario — that the dog will go on barking for ever or until I have to move house, or top myself, whichever is sooner.

I raced back inside and got a scrap of paper and wrote, ‘Your dog has been barking for literally HOURS on end…’ And so on, intemperately, and signed it ‘A neighbour’. The mutt woofed like Cerberus at the gates of hell as I pushed it through the letterbox.

A few days later, I had forgotten all about the dog — who had, of course, stopped barking — when a house alarm started going off.

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