Inpursuitof

You can have all the surveys done and all the late-night drives around the local area that you like, but the one unknown quantity when you move house will always be the neighbours. They can make or break your stay in a house and no amount of period features will make it better.

We have two sets of remarkable neighbours. Downstairs are, thankfully, deaf as the father from ‘Friday Night Dinner’. Given that the band rehearse in our spare bedroom and my girlfriend has penchant for surround sound (even on Family Guy), this can only be an amazing thing. Or so we thought, until we realised that what we’d originally taken for a rough patch in their marriage was actually just them having a conversation. Everything is done at 10 decibels above normal level, and I can only assume that their telephone ringer is spliced onto a loudspeaker. The icing on the cake was when we were having a bit of together time, only to be interrupted by ‘You have a message from 0…7…8…4…6…3…’

The others are a little less great. Last Sunday we were flagged down outside our house by a dumpy older lady charging up the road. As she drew up to us she hissed ‘you use your bedroom as a dressing room, don’t you?’ Erm, yes, yes we do, like everybody else. ‘You’re not very private people.’ I think you’ll find we are. ‘You (complete with Pointy Finger at my girlfriend) wear a black bra!’ Again, yes. What’s the problem? ‘We can see into your bedroom from our kitchen and my husband won’t do the washing up!’ Oh. She was so confrontational and embarrassing that the only manageable response was a mumbled apology. We stumbled away and slowly all the things we should have said dawned. There’s no way that you can see into our house without actively trying. We’re naked for all over five minutes in the morning and five at night, and very rarely is any of that in front of the window. Your husband shouldn’t be looking. IT’S OUR HOUSE AND WE CAN GET CHANGED IN IT. The crowning glory was the morning after we stuck a small note in the window saying ‘Stop looking’. We woke up to their blinds shut and a note in their window that said, in caps, ‘GET NETS’… We didn’t.

1) Ros, after she cut my hair

2) £2.70 to a homeless guy after I bought a Big Issue

3) A chap on Oxford Street who saw me with my trousers rolled and see-through-pale legs