Monday, 26 October 2009

Am I the neighbour people tell horror stories about?

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and talking about the various crazy neighbours we have all had over the years. We relived the hilarity of a drunken Boy Wonder deciding to talk to the people we occasionally saw naked (and saw us naked, let's not forget the really awkward part!) when he saw them in the pub, and discussed the merits of living next door to a drug dealer (very good neighbours - strange smell in their daughter's bedroom!). We were talking about shared gardens and I told the story of when we lived in the top flat of a converted house with no access to the garden. It was summer ball season and I had gone to one while the Boy Wonder was playing at another, so I had come in at around 6am, absolutely knackered. Outside, parading along the fence in the downstairs garden was a wailing cat, so I opened the window to shout at it, which had no impact but was at least easy to do. Once I had exhausted my enthusiasm for shouting, I decided to go for something with a little more impact and after a little spirited rooting around in the drawers I came across some old party poppers. 'These will do the job' I thought to myself, and so I was terribly disappointed when the earsplitting noise I had anticipated was a little damp squibbish and failed to arouse any response from the bloody cat. So not only was I not asleep and slightly drunk, but I was becoming increasingly convinced that the cat was deliberately mocking me, so I decided that I would try appealing to a different sense and formulated a plan to throw dried pasta at it in the hope of startling it off its perch on the fence, or at least breaking its concentration and forcing it to re-evaluate its choices of hobby. In a similar fashion to the party popper, I could envisage all this taking place within the space of around two minutes with me landing a few choice shots and putting the whole thing behind me. What actually happened was that I discovered how difficult it is to accurately throw pasta across a 10m garden at a 45 degree angle from a sash window at a small, moving target - very. One last attempt I thought, and stamping back to the bedroom I decided to revisit my original plan of startling the damn thing with a loud noise, and the option which presented itself to me was a good hard slam of the large sash window in the bedroom which at least faced the garden fence. I gave it a whack, the glass cracked and the cat's basic position of 'Fuck You human!' was established. Once I had had some sleep, I realised that not only was the window now broken (I accidentally made this less of a problem, on which more later) but our downstairs neighbours now had a garden full of dried pasta and party streamers. This is exactly the kind of thing you read on websites 'I came home one day to find my garden looked as though a group of impatient Italians had been partying in it - WTF?' or find out from your friends about their neighbours. Having said that, it's done now, and out current neighbours have won all the prizes going for inappropriate behaviour, so I feel sure they have no tales to tell of our exploits which wouldn't be met with disbelief or outright hilarity!