"YOU'LL never guess what they've gone and done now," says my friend, in tones as breathless as they are exasperated.

Ooh, I'm not sure, I reply.

Have they, perhaps, introduced ID cards from next week? Made adultery compulsory? Put surveillance devices in boxes of Ready Brek?

"No, silly, not them," she says. "THEM! The neighbours! They've only gone and painted the garage door GREEN!"

Ah, my friend's neighbours. The problem, it seems, is not that their garage door is green, but that their front door, in common with those of the other houses in the street, is dark brown.

My friend, who lives directly opposite the Green Door, is left wondering, not what is behind it, but how she can ever look out of her front window without being offended.

It's surprising what can make people uncomfortable in their own homes.

One of the most mild-mannered people I know is driven into a frenzy by the fact that there is a caravan parked in a drive just up the road from her.

I could understand the problem if the caravan were travelling directly in front of her car and she faced a 50-mile drive without a passing place. But it's a perfectly respectable caravan.

She can't even see it from her house, but she knows it's there, with a Caravan Club sticker on it, what's more. It's apparently enough to bring on acid indigestion.

Our village is looking particularly festive at the minute, with plenty of fairy lights, trees and Santa Stop Here signs dotted about the place.

I think it looks nice and cheerful, and the neighbours all seem to agree, but it's not the season of goodwill for every community that likes to put on a show.

In Redcar, for example, a similar display has got a poison-pen letter-writer sharpening his quill.

"You are a detached house," the anonymous Bah Humbug merchant is meant to have written to the people behind one of the light displays. "I would have thought that you would have shown more taste. This is not a council estate."

A Santa ascending with a sack to the roof of another house attracted particular scorn from the man with green ink. "What is that climbing your wall?" the householders were asked. "A slug would have looked in better taste."

God bless us, every one.

I'm not immune, I must confess. What really gets up my nose is when someone turns a perfectly decent lawn into gravel or hard standing.

Granted, it's not fair or reasonable, especially if you have nowhere else to park your car; but there it is, I can't bear it.

What exactly is it that so enrages us? Is it a snobbery thing, or is it some weird sense of artistic order that makes us offended at anything that stands out from the crowd?

It's the sort of mentality that guides some planning rules and regulations, so you can't have an outside electricity meter in the enclosed back garden of your home because it stands in a protected area, but you can put up another block of identikit flats if you make sure the roofing matches the rest of the street.

What chance would Shambles have stood of evolving in the modern world? Fire regulations aside, I'm sure that if the planners didn't object about the intensity of the development, the neighbours would have had something to say about being overlooked.

And have you seen the state of those walls?

Didn't anyone have a spirit level?

Updated: 11:17 Wednesday, December 22, 2004