I love where I live. I love living on my own and being relatively close to town, but I also love the kooks in my neighbourhood. A few weeks ago Shane came to see me and he happened to look out my back window to see the downstairs neighbour’s young son battering his Luigi doll (of Mario and Luigi infamy) with a pole (!) in the garden as well as poking it continuously in a most inappropriate area. Poor Luigi, not only has he been castrated by a six year old but if the people next door have their way he’ll be deaf soon too.

The noise began a couple of months ago. The next door building is a religious centre and not a residence and a party wall between the buildings runs the length of my flat. On the other side of this wall, always past ten pm, a collection of teenage boys gather and proceed to jump, run, scream, sing, shout and bang on the walls like animals. The bangs are so loud sometimes that they send vibrations through my flat. This makes me very grumpy, but finger wagging at the wall is not exactly proactive. Enter the great British tradition of the strongly worded letter! I have joked about this quite useful tool for so long that I barely took myself seriously when I finally sat down and wrote it. I thought I was very cordial. I factually stated my case and asked that some courtesy be shown. I didn’t want it to be wishy washy but I thought they would be less inclined to do anything about it if I was a bully.

I was grateful to receive an email a couple of days later from the building secretary with an apology and a promise to tell the boys to keep the noise down. Needless to say I was ‘self-fiving’ myself that afternoon. I am glad to report that there was an improvement, but that was to be short lived. Last night I was treated to not only jumping, banging and running but repeated shouts of ‘goodnight’ and also quite a bit of singing. Thanks, but I’m not Simon Cowell, and I certainly would prefer not to hear you at 22.47. An email to the secretary followed first thing this morning stressing how the kids were not taking this seriously and since this is only a recent problem I was ‘positive a solution could be found’. This is strike 2.

Another lovely apology arrived in my inbox just now with the promise to move the noisy boys to another part of the building and place ‘calmer’ boys in the room on the other side of my wall. I would like the post-ritalin children please. Holding thumbs this will work, I don’t want to have to send in the downstairs child with his pole…