Australian daytime TV tells us that everybody needs good neighbours. ”Naai-burrs,” goes the ditty, ”Ivry-bawdy nades good naaaaaiii-burrs.” And they’re right. Who wouldn’t want to live just a blackjack-infested lawn and splintering picket-fence away from Kylie Minogue? Granted, she was still just Leedle Coily back in her soap days, and not yet an internationally famous rabbit-toothed bottom, but still.
Unfortunately, good neighbours are hard to find. Of course, there are sporadic reports of people who have managed to move in next door to an ivy-covered abbey whose inhabitants have taken a vow of silence, and whose devotions manifest in the compulsive baking and distribution of chocolate cake. But most of us must face a reality of Great Danes barking like howitzers, predawn weed-eating extravaganzas and pre-teen shrieking competitions.
To be fair, they’re not oblivious, these neighbours. Often they pop a note through the letter box — ”Hi mandi and sandi are having there 10th birthday pordy tonight and there will be shrieking from about 7pm until Thursday thanks mandi and sandi’s mom tandi” — and Tandi has gone to great pains to explain why the howitzer barks.
”He barks when he’s scared.” So far it appears he is afraid of postmen, pedestrians, his kennel, the affections of his owners, daylight, moonlight, and wind.
Pity the Greeks, then, having to live next door to the Middle East. For 5 000 years they’ve tended their shabby-genteel home as it is gradually overrun with honeysuckle, ruminating every few years that they should sort out their television reception and do something about the moles blistering the lawn. And every weekend for those 5 000 years they’ve considered phoning the police about the racket coming from the rusted shack and adjoining flyblown outhouse next door.
Of course, long ago they used to visit, and that nice Israelite, that Paul fellow, used to send postcards quite a lot; but his correspondence tailed off about 2 000 years ago, and after- dinner chats about philosophy soon became strained when it transpired that the Middle Easterners had only ever known and practised one philosophy: tribal self-righteousness, backed up by killing, which was known as ”smiting”.
So imagine the agonies of embarrassment, the long-suppressed blanches at past faux pas, when Iranian judo champion Arash Miresmaeili refused to fight an Israeli opponent in Athens last week.
Most hosts would have welcomed such pacifism — judo in the living room invariably ends in recriminations about broken vases — but to the Athenians, and indeed the rest of the Olympic village, this was par for the course from the malcontent goat-herds next door.
Iran, you see, doesn’t recognise Israel’s right to exist, and bans its citizens from any contact with Israelis. It also doesn’t recognise very much after the 15th century, but that’s another story. Miresmaeili is now the golden boy of the Iranian revolution, having stuffed his face with kebabs to be overweight at the weigh-in and thus be disqualified. Somehow acts of conscience don’t seem quite as impressive when the defiant one has gravy trickling down his chin, and has, through sustained gluttony, compelled an administrative body to effect his protest for him.
But Iranian President Mohammad Khatami is tickled pink. Miresmaeili, he told a news agency, is a hero whose protest ”will be recorded in the history of Iranian glories”, a history that will now extend to almost two sides of a sheet of foolscap.
Of course, there’s a difference between being a dope like Miresmaeili and his president, and doping. In fact the only possible explanation for why the Greeks didn’t tell the lardy judoka to pack up and get on the next bus to Tehran is because they are busily refraining from throwing stones. After all, they’ve been polishing the glasshouse for eight years.
And it takes time to create a masterpiece of watertight fiction like that offered as an explanation for Kostas Kenderis and Katerina Thanou missing a doping test. The couple, it seems, were speeding along on a motorbike, a Balkan James Dean with his Doris Day clutching tight, when they were pranged, probably by a Turkish Cypriot terrorist. Then a Samaritan arrived and drove them 25km to hospital, where they lay in untested splendour.
So far, the Grecian fuzz haven’t been able to find the wreck, the Samaritan, or, most crucially, witnesses. And, as the pair watches the games from sidelines, they must be ruing that missing ingredient. Where’s a nosy neighbour, peering over a picket fence, when you need one?