Bloody neighbours

Why are people so thick?

Not sufficient with having building noise five and a half days a week, we have the O'Bumpkins next door, breezed in on the last RyanAir flight, playing bloody country and western music, wouldya believe it, in the garden on a Sunday afternoon.

Bloody short-term tenants, here today and gone tomorrow, no investment in the area, no sense that this a very densely populated area. And now that the bloody tenants at the back have departed with their paraffin-fuelled barbecues of rancid meat, no one else sits in their back garden imposing their tastes on others.

Both houses rented by avaricious capitalists determined to make a fast buck at everyone else's expense; sod the people who live in the area year in year out and give their time and energy to making it a nice place to live

Comments

[Helen Flack]

I know how you feel! Here in deepest chav land ( Essex) we have these problems all the time. My next door neighbours installed a hot tub in the garden about 20 feet from my bedroom window. They have a habbit of holding raucous, drunken parties in it usually getting into full swing about midnight and lassting until 2 am. Really great when I have to get up at 4.30 in the morning to go to work! Why are people so inconsiderate about imposing their noise on everyone else?

[Gert]

It's an interesting question. I think benignly I would say we have different tolerance levels of different things. Even with all the windows open, traffic noise and aeroplanes and children playing (I live near a Primary School), absolutely don't bother me. But I know there are massive campaigns againt aircraft noise and I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of people hating children playing.

More malignly, I think many people don't stop to consider the consequences of their actions on their neighbours and also the context. Where I live is a sleepy residential enclave, largely couples (some with children) and elderly people. So when the houses are let out to sharers, they don't understand the way of life. I think many of them come from rural areas or from leafy suburbs with big gardens where one's actions don't impact so much on one's neighbours, or from gardenless estates where you put up with communal noise or escape to a park/common. I think too many people have been brought up to believe that the world revolves around them.

I don't know how it works where you live but I know that my council has a noise patrol. Sadly, it operates overnight, and on weekdays during office hours, but not on Sunday afternoons when a lot of the noise nuisance actually occurs.

I said to Jimmy in a loud voice that being that I own my house and have done for ten years I will not tolerate people who move in and live like peasants walking all over me with scant regard to the law, and I shall be onto Lambeth noise in the morning, and the peasants/arseholes will find out that when I walk all over people I do within the law and within the system, and it will be a shock when they get hit with a thousand pound fine, an ASBO and their equipment confiscated. Within moments it was turned off. You should check out your council website, under 'noise' or 'pollution'.

It is an absolute principle of English law that everyone is entitled to a peaceful sunday...

[Helen Flack]

I think you are right about people believing the world revolves around them. I think there has been a fundamental shift in attuitudes. I was brought up ( dragged some might say) by a good, solid working class family with their roots in the East End of London where everyone lived in a tight packed community. I was not allowed to do anything that might impinge on anyone else without being made to think that I should think of others before myself. Now it seems the attitude is ' sod anyone else it's my RIGHT to do what I want even if others don't like it'.
Very sad really. We seem to have got a good notion of our rights today but the notion of personal responsibility is disappearing fast. OK rant over. Hope you've had a bit more peace!

[Strangeblueghost]

I know what you mean about short term rentals, but it's easy to forget what it was like when we were renting. The rental sector needs to exist, unless we all live with our parents until we can afford a mortgage (more and more common in London and not very healthy for personal development IMO). Country and Western would drive me round the bend, though!

[Gert]

Part of the problem with affording mortgages is the inflatory impact on the market of buy-to-letters pricing ordinary people out.

Don't misunderstand me, our next-but-one neighbours have been renting for a couple of years now and they are exemplary neighbours and very nice people. A couple, married or equivalent.

The problem with house-sharers is that they tend to invite gardenless friends around, and they are all in at different times. Having no need to be part of the community they are insensitive to there being a community. They are of an age group that are unaware of the needs of the very old and very young, can't imagine a youngish healthy-looking person being debilitated, and assume that everyone stays up beyond midnight, and so on. Perhaps there are quiet considerate sharers locally; by definition I won't have noticed them...! Simple fact is that in ten and a half years in this house, all the noise has come from house-shares of twenty-somethings.

[Paul]

Our neighbors, who've lived in their house for decades (we've been here nigh on 11 years), have taken to spending EARLY weekend mornings doing yard-trimming work with power tools. This past Sunday, for example, the husband had the weed-whacker out at 7:30 a.m. That's the third Sunday in a row. By nine he was finished and off to the golf course, I imagine. We're not sure how to aproach them (or even if ...) as they're solid right-wing, flag-waving Bush supporters while we're the opposite in pretty much every way. Can't we all just get along? I'm open to suggestions...

[PostPunkUnkle]

I don't know whether your property has a party wall, but don't let them get laminate floors!

[Rob]

Try educating them: the instant there's a pause in the C&W hit them with Act 1 Scene 3 of Walkure. If you have previously buried a suitable implement in a tree in your garden (a pair of shears would do) you can heighten the effect.

If it doesn't educate them, they may move out to avoid the bloody blade-brandishing nutter next door. Result!

[Gert]

Rob, do you mean the bit where Siegmund pulls the Pump Action Water Pistol from the cannabis plant of life?