Dateline United Kingdom…
One thing was certain: the man in the hat with a bulbous nose seen walking up the driveway at 4am wasn’t Santa Claus. After all, Christmas was still nine months away.
And what he left behind was a message distinctly lacking in seasonal goodwill: black paint daubed over three suburban homes causing £600 worth of damage. The finger of suspicion did, however, point towards the victims’ neighbour Vic Moszczynski, a 51-year-old former firefighter, who was embroiled in a long-running feud with them over the 22,000 fairy lights with which he festooned his mansion in upmarket Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire.
His Yuletide extravaganza had so annoyed them that, after enduring 18 years of his yo-ho-ho antics, they could take no more and protested to the council and police about the disruption it caused to their lives when coachloads of visitors turned up to admire it.
They complained their lives were being made a misery by people shouting, and that petty crime in the road had soared because of the influx of visitors. Some even claimed they were forced to take sleeping pills to blank out the disturbances.
As a result, Mr Moszczynski, whose lights have raised £55,000 for charity, had a court injunction served on him last year forcing him to scale down his decorations to 300 lights, four 7ft tall inflatable cartoon characters, eight 30-ft strips of rope lighting and two light moulds in the ground in his front garden. (read the rest here)
