Islands in the Sand

Living here one learns to make allowances. Accommodations, if you will. 'Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity' is a maxim which if applied reduces choler, leeching and the risk of acute myocardial infarction.

On this, a bright, sunny Saturday morning with a refreshing nip in the air, I left home in bonhomous mood to run an errand or two. Upon my return, I found myself marooned in an island of sand. Since leaving home, a battalion of gigantic earth-moving behemoths had arrived, unbidden, kindly fenced off the approach road to my apartment block for several hundred metres in every direction and were industriously engaged in tearing up vast swathes of desert. I approached with caution, looking for the obvious entrance which  had surely been left for residents and which, in a senior moment, I must have overlooked. Locking the four-wheel drive, I circled, my emotional temperature rising. When at length I seriously considered the possibility of ramming one of the flimsy roped off fences and driving through it, it was clear to me that I was becoming homicidal. I got out of my car, wishing I had a weapon. One of the digger drivers with remarkable courage, perhaps, approached me, swathed like a mujaheddin in Ray-Bans and stood on the rope while I drove over it. His reward will be in heaven.
I have yet to discover how exactly other residents are overcoming this problem. When the great detective once wrote that 'the impossible has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks', I was sure I knew what he meant. No shit, Sherlock...