Good Neighbours

Apparently everybody needs good neighbours, at least, that's what Barry Crocker used to sing at the beginning of every episode of the eponymous Australian soap opera. I've just lost some very good neighbours. After a couple of years they've moved to a bigger house (they have a small child) with a bigger garden. I'm going to miss them - they were genuinely nice people. Unlike some of their predecessors. The trouble is that the house next door to me, (thankfully I'm on the end of a terrace, so I only have neighbours on one side), is rented and over the past ten years or so I've had to suffer a parade of various occupants, some good, some bad and some downright appalling. The lot before my recently departed neighbours were a bunch of weirdos who never spoke to anyone, had delinquent kids and eventually did a runner one Christmas day without giving notice or a forwarding address to the landlord. They also dumped what appeared to be their entire household contents in the back alley for the dustmen to collect (which they didn't, leading to a blocked right of way and complaints to the landlord).

There was another woman before that who never spoke to anyone and had a boyfriend who would turn up drunk at four in the morning , hammering on the door and shouting to be let in. A couple of times the police had to be called to deal with him. The worst though, by a long way, were a bunch of youngish people who were there for about six months. I never quite managed to figure out how many there were as people seemed to be coming and going all the time. Indeed, I harboured the suspicion that it was some kind of up-market knocking shop. They certainly seemed to have a lot of noisy sex. I wouldn't have minded, but they didn't even seem to be very good at it - it was all over pretty quickly and the bloke's groaning when he came was frankly, laughable. Every time I hear Lily Allen singing 'Not Fair' and she gets to the bit about how 'you make that noise and apparently it's all over', I'm reminded of them. But perhaps even worse than all that grunting and groaning was their habit of playing the same bloody Killers single (the one about 'Somebody told me etc') over and over again at full volume into the early hours of the morning. One night I came home from the pub and they were playing it, so i retaliated by putting Deep Purple's 'Machine Head' album on full blast in the living room and going to bed. I had several days of peace and quiet after that incident.

One of the blokes who kept coming and going (literally, judging by the noises he made) drove a BMW roadster. One February night I was so pissed off with him that I wrote exactly what I thought of the size of the manhood of the kind of people who drive such cars in the snow on his vehicle. I figured that as he'd never seen my handwriting he'd never be able to pin it on me. They moved out shortly afterwards. All of which brings me to the latest set of neighbours who, despite having moved in last weekend, still haven't spoken to me. In fact they completely ignored me when I graciously stood aside and allowed them to pass along the terrace whilst they were carrying a freezer to their front door. Not a word of thanks. Ignorant bastards. Mind you, they hadn't got off to a good start with any of us on the terrace when they'd had most of their furniture noisily delivered at three-thirty in the morning. Quite bizarre. Surely they can only improve? I'll keep you posted.