Everyone has had a wacky neighbour, be it the ageing widow with 40 cats, the old hermit who collects rubbish or the type who likes their lawn to resemble primeval forest. In my neighbourhood of De Beauvoir Town, a grid of tree-lined streets and Victorian houses in north London, eccentrics seem to live in every street.
Many have names like superheroes. There's Eagle Man, who keeps birds of prey. Not that anyone I know has ventured in - if you loiter near his ramshackle Georgian semi, the CCTV camera homes in. He'll pop out, armed with an air pistol and point out the sign: 'Keep out - birds of prey.' Burglars, no doubt, are not a problem.
Then there's Cat Woman, famed for her feline swarm: one neighbour reckons she has 200 cats. She has long since stopped complaining about the kitty litter drifting onto her property. Mice, no doubt, are never a problem.
And there's The Professor in Buckingham Road, dapper and dandy in linen suits and fedoras. Locals swear he's an architect, but you'd never know it from his near-derelict house. Windows are bandaged in corrugated iron, missing tiles expose damaged roof beams, a gate rusts on its hinges, overgrown with weed.
Yet, Cat Woman, The Professor and Eagle Man are harmless eccentrics compared with William Lyttle, 75, or Mole Man. Mr Lyttle likes to dig tunnels under his 20-room, double-fronted corner house. Well, not just his house, but under nearby roads and possibly neighbours' gardens as well.
After 45 years at home, he was temporarily evicted last week, until the council make good more than GBP100,000 (HK$1.45 million) of repairs. Mole Man, a former electrical engineer, has dug 20 metres of tunnels, many large enough to stand up in. A neighbour's wall is in danger of collapse, much like a 4.5-metre section of pavement that fell in three years ago.