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.