It was around midnight last Friday night that I first became aware something was going on in the street outside my house. I could hear shouting and screaming, but it was the noise of over-exuberant teenagers rather than an escalating argument. I pressed my face up against the patterned glass panel by my front door and, sure enough, I could make out about a dozen teens horsing around on the other side of the road. Most of them were clutching bottles of beer.
Like most middle-aged men in this situation, I was torn between a certain amount of sympathy and wanting to call the police. I’m not such an old fart that I’ve forgotten what it was like to be a teenager with nowhere to go on a Friday night. On the other hand, they were bound to leave behind pools of vomit and broken glass, not the sort of thing you want to be confronted with when you set off to the local park in the morning with four children on micro scooters.
There was also the possibility that this particular spot might become their regular hangout. One night was tolerable. But every Friday night in perpetuity? That was an appalling prospect.
I decided to hold fire for the time being, relying on the cold weather to disperse them. I already have a reputation on my street for being a bit of a Nazi when it comes to late-night parties.
Last year, one of my neighbours left her teenage children home alone for the weekend and, in their wisdom, they decided to advertise this fact on Facebook. I remember venturing out in my dressing gown at around 4 a.m. to tell them to turn the music down, only to be confronted with a scene out of Dawn of the Dead. Literally hundreds of drunken teens were staggering up and down the street, weaving from pavement to pavement. Occasionally, one would pause, peer round in confusion, then topple over into a hedge.
My first impulse was to call the night editor of the Daily Mail and get him to send over a photographer. This was a great page seven lead: ‘Facebook party turns leafy suburb into war zone.’ But I realised it wouldn’t be the best way to introduce myself to my neighbour, whom I still hadn’t met at this point.
Instead, I marched round to the house at 8 a.m. with a black bin liner, kept my finger on the bell until a bleary-eyed girl opened the door, then handed her the rubbish sack and told her to pick up all the broken bottles on the street. She agreed to do it, then glanced nervously at her doorstep. Following her glaze, my eyes fell upon a used condom. To give her credit, she had the decency to blush.
In the end, last week, I decided not to alert the police to the teens opposite, but it made no difference because another of my neighbours did it anyway. I only found this out the following morning went I spotted him outside his house with a bucket of soapy water. Like me, he’d been in two minds about whether to alert the authorities and had put up with the noise until 3 a.m.
It wasn’t until the girls started urinating in his driveway that he decided to pick up the phone. Apparently, the boys just unzipped their flies and started peeing where they stood, but the girls were more protective of their dignity, and the high wall dividing his house from the property next door provided them with the privacy they needed.
‘The police handled it very well,’ he said. ‘They didn’t come in mob-handed. Just a couple of bobbies in a patrol car. Told them it was probably time to be going home and they all wandered off.’
I spent the rest of the morning feeling quite benign towards the younger generation until I had to take Ludo to his swimming class and discovered my car had been broken into. The theft of the satnav was one thing, but it was the stuff they didn’t take that really got my goat.
The thieves had carefully spread out all my CDs on the passenger seat and then just left them there, as if to let me know that my taste in music was so bad that none of my CDs were worth stealing. Led Zeppelin’s debut album I can understand, but Electric Ladyland by Jimmy Hendrix? By any measure, that’s pure gold.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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