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Authors: Charlie Brooker
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pretension.
Suddenly, the concert of the decade was interrupted by a distraught middle-aged neighbour pleading with them to shut up because she had to go to work in the morning. The crowd jeeringly dismissed her, and eventually the police arrived, at which point Barat and Doherty heroically launched into a rendition of ‘Guns of Brixton’, thereby well and truly sticking it to the man.
As I watched, I found myself wishing we lived in a ruthless police state. I wanted that party broken up by stormtroopers. I wanted them to beat Barat unconscious with his stupid guitar and ram a sparking 250,000-volt Taser into Doherty’s gormless Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man face. Because it reminded me of the first time I lost it with a neighbour.
Now, this may surprise regular readers, but in ‘real life’ I’m actually pretty tolerant. Or maybe just cowardly. I don’t like open confrontation, so if my neighbours hold a party, it needs to be very loud, and very late, and very unrelenting, to make me complain about the noise. But even I have my limits. A few years ago, I lived in a flat beneath a large group of rowdy Australians. Now, it doesn’t matter that they were Australian … except it absolutely does. At night, the Australian accent becomes uniquely intrusive. It’s bony and piercing. It sounds like a violin complaining to an angle grinder. It’s not conducive to a sound night’s sleep.
Anyway, the Aussies regularly drank and jabbered and stomped around into the wee small hours. They drove my girlfriend at the time insane, but since she didn’t actually live or pay rent in my flat, she felt I should complain on her behalf. But my fear of being the boring, petty, fusty guy from downstairs who moaned about thenoise was so acute, I’d brush off her demands, saying things like, ‘They’re not bothering me,’ and ‘Let them have their fun,’ and so on and so on, like a sap.
And then one day they bought a karaoke machine. And installed it over my bedroom. And stayed up until 4 a.m. every night for a week, blasting out cover versions of ‘Rebel Yell’ and ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ through an amplifier. And downstairs, in the dark, on the fifth straight night of this, I finally discovered my breaking point. For the first time in my life, I grabbed a broom and start thrashing wildly at the ceiling, screaming and wailing, like a mad aunt trying to stop a war. And when that didn’t work, I called the police and sat boiling with dark satisfaction as I heard them arrive and start remonstrating with the despicable bastards upstairs.
That was then. This is now. And in an apparent bid to test my capacity for xenophobia, a fresh group of Australians has just moved in next door and started using their roof terrace as an occasional al fresco debating society and drinking club. Which is fine and everything, except, y’know, it’s kinda right outside my bedroom window, so when they kinda carry on late into the night, it kinda stops me from like, sleeping and stuff? But thanks to my in-built aversion to being the ‘boring fusty guy’, I said nothing for weeks, until last Wednesday, at 2.30 a. m., when I meekly popped my head out of the window and asked if they’d mind moving inside. And thankfully they did so, and were very polite and charming about it – except for one of them, a woman, whose knee-jerk reaction was to glower at me and snap, ‘We pay rent here! We’ve got a right to talk!’ as though I were the walking embodiment of an oppressive fascist regime clamping down on the flower children.
So from now on, every time I enter or leave my flat, I know she’s going to be looking at me and thinking, ‘There goes the petty uptight guy,’ or ‘I hate you,’ or ‘I pay rent here! I’ve got a right to talk!’
And I know how she feels because I once felt precisely the same about another neighbour I had, one who used to moan about my incessant talking. Not the volume of it, but the content. Forinstance, one
Suddenly, the concert of the decade was interrupted by a distraught middle-aged neighbour pleading with them to shut up because she had to go to work in the morning. The crowd jeeringly dismissed her, and eventually the police arrived, at which point Barat and Doherty heroically launched into a rendition of ‘Guns of Brixton’, thereby well and truly sticking it to the man.
As I watched, I found myself wishing we lived in a ruthless police state. I wanted that party broken up by stormtroopers. I wanted them to beat Barat unconscious with his stupid guitar and ram a sparking 250,000-volt Taser into Doherty’s gormless Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man face. Because it reminded me of the first time I lost it with a neighbour.
Now, this may surprise regular readers, but in ‘real life’ I’m actually pretty tolerant. Or maybe just cowardly. I don’t like open confrontation, so if my neighbours hold a party, it needs to be very loud, and very late, and very unrelenting, to make me complain about the noise. But even I have my limits. A few years ago, I lived in a flat beneath a large group of rowdy Australians. Now, it doesn’t matter that they were Australian … except it absolutely does. At night, the Australian accent becomes uniquely intrusive. It’s bony and piercing. It sounds like a violin complaining to an angle grinder. It’s not conducive to a sound night’s sleep.
Anyway, the Aussies regularly drank and jabbered and stomped around into the wee small hours. They drove my girlfriend at the time insane, but since she didn’t actually live or pay rent in my flat, she felt I should complain on her behalf. But my fear of being the boring, petty, fusty guy from downstairs who moaned about thenoise was so acute, I’d brush off her demands, saying things like, ‘They’re not bothering me,’ and ‘Let them have their fun,’ and so on and so on, like a sap.
And then one day they bought a karaoke machine. And installed it over my bedroom. And stayed up until 4 a.m. every night for a week, blasting out cover versions of ‘Rebel Yell’ and ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ through an amplifier. And downstairs, in the dark, on the fifth straight night of this, I finally discovered my breaking point. For the first time in my life, I grabbed a broom and start thrashing wildly at the ceiling, screaming and wailing, like a mad aunt trying to stop a war. And when that didn’t work, I called the police and sat boiling with dark satisfaction as I heard them arrive and start remonstrating with the despicable bastards upstairs.
That was then. This is now. And in an apparent bid to test my capacity for xenophobia, a fresh group of Australians has just moved in next door and started using their roof terrace as an occasional al fresco debating society and drinking club. Which is fine and everything, except, y’know, it’s kinda right outside my bedroom window, so when they kinda carry on late into the night, it kinda stops me from like, sleeping and stuff? But thanks to my in-built aversion to being the ‘boring fusty guy’, I said nothing for weeks, until last Wednesday, at 2.30 a. m., when I meekly popped my head out of the window and asked if they’d mind moving inside. And thankfully they did so, and were very polite and charming about it – except for one of them, a woman, whose knee-jerk reaction was to glower at me and snap, ‘We pay rent here! We’ve got a right to talk!’ as though I were the walking embodiment of an oppressive fascist regime clamping down on the flower children.
So from now on, every time I enter or leave my flat, I know she’s going to be looking at me and thinking, ‘There goes the petty uptight guy,’ or ‘I hate you,’ or ‘I pay rent here! I’ve got a right to talk!’
And I know how she feels because I once felt precisely the same about another neighbour I had, one who used to moan about my incessant talking. Not the volume of it, but the content. Forinstance, one
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