A woman who noticed her furniture in her neighbour’s garden dealt with the issue in the ‘most British way’ possible.
Better still, she hilariously filmed her dilemma for TikTok:
Sometimes it feels hard to maintain a good relationship with neighbours – one that’s friendly enough while also maintaining those all-important boundaries.
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Ideally, we don’t want loud music booming through the walls at 3am or young kids pelting footballs into your garden and scaring the living daylights out of you while you sunbathe.
We don’t even have to be BFFs: all we ask for is the odd polite ‘Hello’ in the morning and an agreement that you’re happy to take one another’s parcels in if needed.
But Lia Hatzakis, 29, was faced with a particularly bizarre predicament when she realised some of her garden furniture had gone missing.
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She noticed recently acquired garden table set was incomplete after two chairs mysteriously went AWOL, initially thinking they’d been accidentally broken by builders and removed to get rid of the evidence.
But her ‘jaw dropped’ when she says she spotted her neighbour sitting on the chairs, with their gardens separated by a fence.
Hatzakis, a YouTuber from near Warwick, sent her partner Achillea Kyriakou, 35, to retrieve the chairs via a shared alleyway.
However, not long after, she noticed they’d gone missing again.
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At this point, she decided to film her hilariously awkward problem for a TikTok video, which went viral last summer.
"I looked in the garden and the guy was just sat on it!" she said.
In the footage, Hatzakis asked her neighbour for the chairs back, saying politely: "Hiya, excuse me, I noticed that my garden furniture is there, could I have it back?"
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The local doesn’t put up any sort of a fight, and promptly agrees.
The video showed the man claiming someone else had taken the furniture, telling Hatzakis: "I woke up one morning and they were just there."
After getting the chairs back, Hatzakis decided to just give him the benefit of the doubt.
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After her video went viral, she said she’d had plenty of people commenting on the polite interaction.
She added: "There were loads of Americans watching the video saying 'this is the most British reaction I've ever seen to asking for furniture back.'"