Rita, Sue and Bob Too

Now I’m on a roll. I’ll admit to having a short fuse when it comes to noisy neighbours, but that’s only because I’ve lived next door to more than one. Noise disturbance and nuisance come in many forms.

There are the neighbours who can’t talk to each other without shouting and screaming, those who play loud music at unsocial hours, households for who drunken festivities are a normal outdoor activity, constant and repetitive door slamming, computer games without headphones on (explosions and gun fire) and my all-time favourite deliberate harassment such as banging on walls and screaming and shouting abuse.

And it’s not just the music, apparently some people haven’t worked out that the benefit of using mobile phones to communicate over long distances is that you don’t have to shout!  Especially between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. because believe it or not, not everyone wants to hear you arguing with your boyfriend about something unintelligible after midnight when they have to get up for work in the morning.

I particularly look forward enjoying those pleasant spring mornings or afternoons when I can turn my attention to tidying up my front yard, which admittedly at the moment is in a dreadful state, perhaps with the radio on; volume at an acceptable volume level of course. The sun will be shining. The one bird that lives in South Leeds will be chirruping from an overgrown gutter or a crap filled bin yard not far away and I’ll be waiting for the inevitable.

Because if you are a young tracksuit wearing male of questionable employment status or a cut price Colleen Rooney, these first glimpses of sunshine and temperate weather must mean that it’s time for hard core techno to be blasted out across the whole street!

It also means that once it’s warm and dry enough, you can stand outside your house all night smoking fags, taking drugs and binge drinking whilst blasting out yet more shitty music and debating the important issues of the day such as “What is your f**king problem?”, “I’m f**king wankered I am!” and the age old question “What the f**k are you looking at?”, as always at top volume. And why not if you don’t have to get up for work then why should you be concerned about anyone else getting a decent night’s sleep?

I have variously enjoyed being shouted at for the appalling affront of daring to be annoyed at a diminutive, staggeringly intoxicated, shifty eyed, fat-tongued teenager banging at my door at two in the morning and shouting “uuunnggghhhh opuuuuuuuun uuuuup uuunnggghhh”; I mean he just got the wrong door - how DARE I be angry at being woken in the middle of the night during the week!?

Also there was the time that I’ve had to listen to private conversations being shouted drunkenly to the drivers of various boy racer cars with blacked out windows (the most gangsta look for a three door Peugeot I find). Oh sorry, not the ONE time but ALL the times which are as always enhanced by the ubiquitous techno beat being blasted out of the car stereo with window shaking bass. What is it about stupid people and volume control; why can’t they just keep it sociable? It’s staggering how many people air their dirty laundry in the middle of the road at top volume and then look at you as though you’re the one aggravating them.

In a community with a steady population that was invested in the community, the people and the property you have the opportunity to build relationships with your neighbours or at the very least you might support each other to tackle problem neighbours. However despite quite a few of the properties in my street being privately owned, I doubt that many residents are owner occupiers. The population in my street seems to be very transient, in particular in houses that are next to one of the problem houses.

The residents of this house might be compared to the fabulously glamorous cast of any series of Skins, that is if the cast of Skins shopped at Primani, got drunk in Yate’s Wine Lodge on Bacardi Breezers and Wkd Blue and ate Pop Tarts for breakfast; their cheap stilettos are often heard clattering up and down the street on a Sunday evening like a 21^st Century “Rita, Sue and Bob Too”, without the incisive comedy and pathos.

We’re trying with a community group, but not too many regular members are attending, and why would you if you only rent???? I certainly didn’t. But that’s for another post. Anyway I meant to write about the people I lived near when I lived in London, who believe it or not proved to be even more entertaining than my current neighbours in South Leeds, but I’ll save that for another post.

Thanks for reading.

Greetings Pop Pickers

Greetings pop pickers

Hello again here’s a post about noise abatement and nuisance neighbours.

A lot of the time where I live is pretty quiet, but when South Leeds wants to party they turn it up to 11.

By far the majority of people on my street are quiet and keep themselves to themselves. Ok we don’t really mix a great deal but I don’t think we upset each other either.

A couple of years ago I became very familiar with the out of hours noise abatement team from Leeds City Council due to a couple of particularly noisy neighbours.

There were two households that contributed to mine, and I would have thought everyone else’s misery by generally being what I like to call a ‘bunch of bastards’.

In back to back terraces the sound proofing is pretty thin so you can hear an awful lot of what’s going on either side and at the back of you; particularly as every room in your house touches a room in someone else’s. You can hear vacuum cleaners, computer games, chatting, laughing, shouting, music, telly, people walking up stairs, snoring, giggling in the bath and alarms going off in the morning.

Most of these noises are pretty normal, and as you’re moving about your own house, you don’t really notice it and most likely contribute to it, in fact I’d probably miss the day to day stuff if it wasn’t there; it’s just the sound of ordinary people going about their lives.

I should also point out that I’m not averse to a party, in fact I’ve thrown a few of my own (and been at a few where the neighbours have called the police to get us to be quiet in my younger days), however never night after night at the same house.  Everyone’s entitled to throw a party now and again. It’s the persistent offenders that really cause the problems.

A big gripe with persistent offenders would be about the quality of the music played at full volume. Why do you never hear Tchaikovsky, Bowie, Joni Mitchell or Roxy Music blaring out from their stereos? It’s always something excruciating like Scooter or some other dreadful techno crap, either that or Country and Western.

I like a bit of C&W by the way, but it’s not the good stuff that gets blasted out, oh no! Apparently if you’re an anti social drunk with volume control issues the good stuff isn’t what you want to listen to over and over again at 2 a.m., you want to listen to Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart, and you want everybody else in a 500 metre radius to listen to it with you!

Also why is there never a selection of tunes, no it’s too much like hard work to drag yourself up off your booze addled backside and change the CD. Simply put Billy Ray on repeat, preferably just the one song for hours and hours and hours . . . . . . at full volume. Or pull your car up outside your pre pubescent girlfriend’s house and play your shitty techno at full blast in the street. Everybody loves that.

In one spectacularly disturbing incident a persistent offender, previously reported to and witnessed by the Noise Abatement team, selected a series of appropriate karaoke tunes over which to shout racist epithets and threats at full volume from midnight to 2.a.m.

Now I’m not a racist socially incompetent loser so I’m not sure I’d have picked the same play list, however let’s have a guess at what aural treats bombarded my delicate ears that evening; a touch of Screwdriver perhaps? No?

What about some thrash metal or hardcore rap, no?  Some Wagner perhaps? No, not Wagner either.

You’re right of course, the perfect accompaniment to an evening of racist ranting is yes, you guessed it, ‘Lucky’ by Britney Spears; a simple tale of one starlet’s struggle to find comfort in the harsh realities of showbiz.

Then what to follow? Yes it’s an obvious choice; Leanne Rimes’ ‘Can’t fight the moonlight’, that well known right wing anthem. It’s even better if you know all the words and can sing along in a drunken slurry fashion (but not in tune), those cheeky racist drunks and their karaoke machines.

This was a fairly typical occurrence, at least twice a week for months and months and months. And as if the random music choices and racist shouting weren’t enough it was often accompanied by door slamming and wall banging. And sometimes if I was lucky the music would come to an unexpected halt when their CD player got stuck on one note, at full volume, for 20 minutes at a time – imagine that if you can. Like I said earlier, bastards!

However all of this torture did abruptly come to an end when they set fire to the house and were re-housed.  Shame that.

Thanks for reading.

Somewhere nice to live.

Somewhere nice to live.

Ok so it’s all been a bit negative of late, but not everything in south Leeds is horrible. Last year I volunteered at the Beeston Festival and had a fantastic day.

A few of us from the community group sat on a stall to encourage young people to draw some art work that could go on the gable ends of the houses waiting for demolition; a project that was to hopefully be funded by charity, a local housing association and maybe the Local Authority. The idea is that as well as seeing the empty houses passersby (good and bad) also see some uplifting art that explains that this is regeneration in action and not general neglect.

The day was sunny and I got nicely sunburned. The Festival is great, loads of stalls, music, entertainment and activities and some amazing food on offer.

I had a great day and it was good to spend the day with some of the people that really helped to support the local community, sadly many are redundant now. Short term funding financed many community outreach workers but this funding was one of the first things to be slashed once the recession began. (Ok not meaning to be negative, but this does seem to be the case)

The afternoon was spent talking to local residents and getting local kids to produce some artwork that they might want to see on a gable end of a local house. We got some first-class designs and it really highlighted that children all really just want the same things: somewhere nice to live, somewhere safe to play and somewhere nice to relax. It’s not a lot to ask for really.

Sadly my understanding is that our request for funding was turned down so there won’t be any gable end art, but I’ll definitely be baking a cake or two for the festival this year (I’m a pretty mean baker even if I do say so myself) and hope to have as much fun there as I did last time.

Regretfully I don’t think I can show individual pictures but here’s a few of the more colourful creations.

Demolition continued.

So it's still going on, more houses have been demolished and the dust is killer :-)