Only one thing is worse than noisy neighbours and that is neighbours who are almost noisy. Loud music and uproarious parties are covered by the law. Someone walking about all night in the room over your head is not.
I have been unlucky in this arena. The owner of the flat above me moved to Australia a couple of years ago and since then her property has been rented out to a succession of what I suppose the letting agent tells her are young professionals — students in their early 20s who attend the viewing claiming they are two City workers, then cram in as many friends as possible to make the rent. By the time they’re finished I’m living beneath a commune of spotty, beer-swilling layabouts who stay up all night and sleep it off during the day.
The latest lot started off enthusiastically, throwing what they no doubt assured the letting agent were young professional parties. Such an evening begins with them sitting in the kitchen giggling while playing at full blast a radio show called Mellow Magic. If you have never come across this programme it involves a smooth-voiced DJ telling you every three or four minutes to ‘relax and unwind’ while he ‘soothes away the stresses of your day’, a feat he attempts to achieve by regaling you with something called chill-out music. I have no idea why it is thus termed, because it makes me want to self-harm. Hair-out music would be more accurate.
Every now and then he takes a break from X Factor-style power ballads to read a ‘Magic love letter’ sent in by a listener. Oh, the horror. ‘Dear Danny,’ some wretched individual apparently writes, although I’m not convinced it can possibly be genuine, ‘I met my lovely husband on the internet. I knew there was something unique about him and a few weeks later he told me he was suffering from a rare form of paranoid schizophrenia that involves him being extremely violent. As you can imagine, he captured my heart. I feel like I have known him my entire life. Since we married at Dagenham register office, we’ve had our difficulties but I wouldn’t change a thing. I feel honoured to be able to devote my life to this special man. And the pre-nup we signed ensuring he gets all my money makes me love him even more. I only wish everyone could feel the love I feel. I never want it to stop.’ Etc. Anyway, the point is I hear all this not because I am insane enough to tune into such a programme but because it is spewing from the open windows upstairs. And when Mellow Magic finishes they have an unending supply of similarly infuriating mediocre hits from the Nineties to blast out of their CD player, or iPod deck, or whatever it is young people use to be annoying these days.
One night I really had had enough. I knocked on the door at 2.30 a.m. and told them they had to stop with their singalonga Nineties — ‘You’re my Wonderwaaaaaaaaaaaaall!’.
Unfortunately, I’d chosen the occasion of a birthday party so they weren’t at all pleased. After they had slammed the door they turned the music up a good ten times louder and started jumping up and down on the floor. So I phoned the noise department at the council. Never let it be said by me again — not for a while, anyway — that Lambeth Council is inefficient. When I told them my neighbours were playing Oasis at full pelt they were round straight away. They shut them up in minutes, apparently simply by standing on their doorstep with a clipboard looking left-wing and municipal.
Since when the neighbours don’t play music or party, they just wander aimlessly around their flat all night. These listless broken souls, unable to function properly without their Mellow Magic, are even more annoying.
I am woken most nights by the sound of them returning home, usually in the early hours. The girl in the bedroom above mine meanders around clomp-clomping and opening and shutting drawers before very audibly climbing into bed — creak, creak. Then all is quiet for about half an hour until she gets back up, walks backwards and forwards and starts opening and shutting drawers again. For hours. It is almost as if she thinks she will find a wormhole in her knicker collection taking her into the Mellow Magic vortex. I rang the council and told them but it seems that unless there is music there is nothing they can do.
It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to miss the Mellow Magic myself. I lie awake at night praying, ‘Please, God, just a blast of Phil Collins. Or some Simply Red. Please.’
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments