When we put the house on the market, my environmentally conscious neighbours disappeared on a holiday so long I asked another neighbour where they had gone.

‘On a cruise,’ she said, but I thought that unlikely, because these people have a book on climate change on a shelf near their front window, so how on earth could they have gone on a ship for a month, churning out more carbon than the entire village put together?

They can’t have done, obviously. But in any case, they were gone a month and when they came back they seemed very happy, wherever they had been.

The long vacation certainly had an air of celebration about it, which I thought might pertain to me moving on, because we don’t see eye to eye.

When the For Sale sign came down after the house didn’t sell, I felt almost apologetic, especially if they had spent a lot of money going somewhere exotic to celebrate my departure.

I see it from their point of view. They are two deeply principled left-wing vegans. I am a right-of-centre blabbermouth living with a builder who drives a big old dirty pick-up truck. He often says that if you could come up with the worst possible nightmare neighbours for each other it would this particular combination.

They are concerned about sustainability and the planet, we don’t tend to worry about carbon emissions because we’re too hard-up to go on holiday. They are the sort of people who get things done by being pillars of the community. I am the sort of person who complains about what’s being done, while the builder b’s response to every petty torment is to throw a load of builder’s rubbish in our front garden.

It all rather came to a head over the issue of the streetlamp outside my house, which two years ago was changed from a soft yellow bulb to an LED – and that shines in our front living room and bedroom windows so harshly it feels like we are living in a crime scene.

I applied to have it shielded and eventually, after I threatened to jump out of the window through lack of sleep, a regulation shield, translucent, was fitted to one side of the lamp so that it still lit the access road.

But the good lady vegan, mindful of all sorts of important concerns that I had ignored, demanded they unshield it. This lamp is not shining in her window and it’s not a problem to her, you see. Plus, as she made clear, it is needed at maximum glare on both sides for safety reasons.

She warned in an open letter published on the parish website that the light must remain unshielded on both sides because when the fair visited there were ‘showmencaravans’ (all one word) that were ‘somewhat scary’. Futhermore, ‘travellers make unauthorised stays on the common’, and ‘part of the common is known to be a dogging location’. There is lighting by the loos where this goes on, as a matter of fact, and it hasn’t stopped it. But never mind, a light shining in my bedroom window hundreds of yards away will help, in her view.

Now, I would prefer that those who stand for equality, diversity and inclusion spell out precisely why it would be scary to encounter fairground people, or adventurers by the public toilets at night, but they never seem to.

It baffles me, because I hear the publicly stated positions of the left, and then I read the comments of my left-leaning neighbours when it comes to issues they say are impacting on them, and there is this strange dichotomy.

But leaving that aside, she and I went at this row like nobody’s business, me demanding the shield be put back, she demanding it remain out.

And the council responded by doing one thing, then another, back and forth, until so many men had climbed into so many cherry pickers that you would think someone in authority would work out that the taxpayer doesn’t deserve this.

The streetlamp has been shielded at my request and unshielded at her request so many times that the contractors openly admit they dread coming here.

This time, a nice man with a Brummie accent arrived to unshield, because we’ve had shielding for a month and it’s her turn to get what she wants.

The guy came and wearily climbed into his cherry picker, and the builder b, who was out the front fixing my old Volvo, got chatting with him.

The guy did what he had been ordered to do in order to let almost all the light into my bedroom again.

Then he climbed down and nodded towards my house, and the neighbour’s house, and said: ‘We’re scared to death of both of them.’