I wish to end my neighbour's wheelie bins

His entire existence is a nuisance, but I'm not sure outside of fascism I can effectively act on that.

ANC headphones saved me the past two years to be honest. Worth their weight in gold.

As long as I get a bit of the chianti that’s fair I suppose.

What’s that rag Gary ? Oh no.

Because they moved in at the start of a global pandemic and brought all the rats from the nearby town centre with them as we went in lockdown with the mess they made near my back gate, also that was about a year into me grieving an ex I still loved who died and I wasnt the most friendly person at the time.

I'm sorry to say the domestic abuse and crying animals I hear most days doesnt really make me more friendly since then.

As lazy as this sounds, this is actually an unusually good council.

The vast majority of councils, and particularly the poorer ones, in London now take an attitude of "We had budget cuts so we no longer do anything about noise at all, no matter how bad or blatantly illegal". Hackney council gave exactly zero fucks about a guy illegally running a bandsaw literally all day and night for several weeks, for example (well, they sent a guy out eventually, he heard it, was like "Wow, that's awful but I can't instantly work out exactly where it's coming from so nothing I can do!").

We've had a few shitty neighbours, sadly no doubt will have more. I'll spare us the boring ones, but we had one particularly weird group (family seems the wrong word).

Half the year they lived in the house, half they used it as an AirBnB, but they seemed to do it like 2 months on, 2 months off.

Everytime before they used it as an AirBnB they did incredibly obnoxious stuff like using some kind of stone-buffing tool (I didn't know that even existed before then!) at 11pm at night. Why not in the day when they could actually see what they were doing? Fuck knows, but it was reliable.

They systematically stole six little brown council compost bins (including ours, twice) and were using them as bins inside their house - like normal bins - we could see in through a couple of their windows. They even stole one after I painted our house number on it. In retrospect I should probably have called the old bill on them but it was so weird I didn't even think about it.

They were incredibly averse to using their own bins. It was totally bizarre. I'd see one of the women sneak out at like 6.30am sometimes and be shoving stuff into our or our other neighbour's bins (which was definitely not a confusion issue, she actively walked past their bins and kept walking). One time I was taking out the trash early and I caught her trying to shove a massive helium canister in there, like really huge. She saw me see her, and just ran like hell back into their house, really bombed it, leaving it half-out of the rubbish bin. I took it out (surprisingly light) and put it in their bin which was, completely unsurprisingly, totally empty, almost pristine. despite it being bin day. It was always amazing to open the recycling and see it almost entirely filled with their wine bottles, too.

Their AirBnB guests were actually a lot better behaved than the people who sometimes lived there, so I was pleased when I realized the main people weren't there. They actually put stuff in the right bins for starters.

The people who lived there were one middle-aged (50-ish) man and 3-4 women, one 40-ish, the rest younger (20s) and clearly not related to him or her (and often somewhat skimpily dressed). I have no idea what was going on in there, because at most one of them was the au pair/nanny. There would be bizarre arguments frequently, sadly/fortunately I couldn't hear most of them, but what I did hear was like some kind of sketch comedy, with the stereotyped "ineffectual lazy self-pitying thick man" and "nagging angry woman" in it.

They loved to have parties (it wasn't the AirBnB people because the people who lived there were pretty distinctive), and they had literally the worst taste in music I've ever come across. Like, it was astonishingly bad. Imagine all the very worst ballad-y dross of the later '80s and early and mid '90s, Chris de Burgh, Simply Red, Michael Bolton, all that sort of thing. Not just like, the hits, but like godawful b-sides, I swear to god the theme of one of the parties had to be "The Worst of Simply Red". It wasn't even "So bad it's good" stuff, it like was like they'd carefully curated the very worst music (of a certain broad genre) from that era and were going to groove to it with their 40-something and 50-something mates (I was still a 30-something back then!). Said parties of course always went on until 4-5am (usually on a Sunday too, so it was Monday morning). It was so bad that sometimes they'd mix in a tune you used to think was kind of okay, in isolation, and you'd see it was part of this universe of totally shit music, and it would be ruined (Baker Street, for example, which was never great and always overplayed, but my god, hearing in that context condemned it utterly).

There were also two primary-school-age kids, who frequently got in screaming fights with the middle-aged man and he lost the fights (?!?). Like he literally got outwitted by what must be an eight-year-old at one point. This is a upper-middle-class dude with a ton of money. For a while they also got in fights with the middle-aged woman, but she screamed at them so much, and made such incredible hear-them-down-the-street bellowed threats (at the kids, really nasty stuff) that one of my other neighbours called the cops on them, and the cops actually came, and she stopped doing it after that.

I honestly would have paid to see a documentary on these people. Or a sitcom based on them.

Long before the ear plug revelation, I was living in a flat while I finished of uni. Some blokes moved in upstairs and they decided to put their living room directly above my bedroom. Queue loud shite music when they rolled back home from whatever meat market they were at in town. Fortunately this was a time in my life when I’d often get home myself after they’d packed it in for the morning. Sadly, it could also mean waking up in the early evening with a pounding hangover/comedown. That was invariably the days they were still at it

Anyway, one time I’d had enough, went upstairs, banged on the door. It soon flew open and I quickly found myself being literally throttled. No matter how much I loathed Oasis I wisely decided not to press the issue.

A few weeks later I went back up one afternoon. Same guy came out, apologized for his earlier behavior, would I like to come in and do some blow?

Things were ok for the remainder of their stay after that.

lexw that's amazing. Nowt as queer as folk and all that.

You could be my neighbour! Though I'd love "constant noise, mess and endless streams of skips" - mine is ghost town most of the time. So yeah, be sympathetic. There is a global shortage on building products such that building work is delayed somewhat. Add covid delays onto that and you have a 6 month build turning in 2 years!! On the positive, he's increasing value to your house (by proxy) and if he does a good enough job, as has been said, you've got a builder on tap.

Enjoy!

That's actually brilliant. Not just for her TV but the other neighbours and walking around the streets pointing it through windows

Just come in from speaking to my neighbour. They put up a big gazebo in their front garden for Halloween and then left it there. Today, nature decided it had enough of the eyesore and threw it into my garden (over an 8' hedge). Just missed my window and luckily my car wasn't parked where it normally is. Her gazebo is a write off funnily enough and she needs to repair my guttering (which it did hit).

My cats-who were sleeping on the windowsill when it happened-thought it was Apocolypse and are still too frightened to go back in the living room. We have some claw marks in our table now from when they scarpered at Mach 1.

On the plus side, the neighbour has agreed to repair the gutter and she was apologetic rather than arguing the toss like last time I went around. I did say that I know we have our differences and that neither of us are perfect, but we are literally stuck with each other and she acknowledge that and that they were not perfect. I said next time she is stuck and can't do something (hurt her arm apparently and that's why the gazebo was still up) then let me know as I have half a clue around a tool box.

I also looked in their windows (they were out when this happened) as I was putting the gazebo skeleton to rest and I'm apparently living next door to one of those people who are the "before" on the cleaning shows. Obviously they have a fuck off big TV though.

Worth noting that while sometimes this is just people being slovenly, especially with younger people, sometimes it is a sign of mental and physical ill-health, especially with older people. Big TVs are cheap as chips and often there because the people need to distract themselves from how shit their lives feel.

That said I question whether people willing to slap up a gazebo for Halloween fall into this category and rather seem more likely to be just lazy and/or should be spending money on a cleaner rather than ridiculous giant decorations (which surely cannot have been cheap).

I now feel better about my small tv.