Oil and troubled waters

Babeth is small, broad, noisy and belligerent.  I don't take much notice of astrological signs but she was born under the Aries moon; Belier, ram....
She is impatient and impulsive and can be a bloody nuisance to live opposite.  It must be even worse for Laurent next door.  His house shakes when she slams her door, which is every time she leaves the house to patrol the street with her binoculars, which is all the time.
She listens to 80's French music;  Halliday,  Paradis, Sardou, Bandolero, cranking the volume up as high as it will go, making her own house shake her own house as well as Laurent's.
The kids call her 'duck lady', as she nurtures an exponentially growing flock  which she feeds and counts daily.  Bernie Sanders knows the laying points along the canal, fishing out eggs and eating them, unaware of Babeth's wrath if she found out.
She is inordinately happy when she picks up a bargain at the flea market or gets a deal on apricots, coming home with stacks of full crates.  
She is fickle, throwing herself recklessly and temporarily into projects which she decries a few months later.  her friendships follow the same pattern, enthusiasm followed by vociferous and unkind dismissals, with nothing in between.   
Today she slammed her door, crossed the street and thumped on our window to tell us the canal was full of oil and there were indeed iridescent  swirls on the surface.
The water police came, the police came, the mayor with a handful of councillors came , the firemen came
Babeth indulged in an orgy of anger and indignation, inflated with adrenaline which manifested itself in a litany of hatred towards the restaurant owners ( she claimed there were  olives amongst the oil), the town council (for their ineptitude) and the whole street (for our apparent lack of interest).
She said her ducks would all die (which was probable because dead house martins were found floating in the sheeny water.)
Her ire was also directed at us because as owners of the downstream sluice we were guilty of multiple wrongs.
Her rocketing blood pressure was not enough to assuage her anger.  Her cauldron continued to boil over and was then seasoned with a shot at me for not putting flowers outside our house and at my hay fevered child for sneezing too loudly.