A shining window casts a light on our own existence

Two people struck me particularly when we first moved to our present house five years ago.

Right next door was the neighbour from hell. The young woman liked to organise occasional parties that lasted from about 8:00 till 11:00. That’s 8:00 in the evening until 11:00 the next morning. The parties had a well-honed internal pattern: a period of singing, laughing and general good humour; then some tears; next a row; finally, a fight with sounds of broken crockery. A brief period of silence would merely be the prelude to a repeat performance.

It made for – how shall I put this? – a certain level of unnecessary stress.

The young woman had a daughter. She was as angelic in appearance as any pretty eight-year old, and as devilish in behaviour as any inhabitant of a nightmare. Her mother was never keen on clearing up the mess after her parties, so her garden was a real treasure chest of discarded bottles, cigarette packets, to say nothing of stones and sticks.

One of the daughter’s preferred games was to collect such bits of rubbish and throw them over the fence at the back of their garden into the property behind theirs and ours. It was inhabited by a man in his eighties who took great joy in his flower beds, tending them with a care that cost him some pain: he had trouble bending down and making much in the way of serious physical effort. We would see him pottering sadly around his garden, picking up the rubbish and observing with sorrow the damage done to his flowers.

This was the second figure to strike me in our new neighbourhood. He lived behind us, but he would walk slowly around from his house and up our street, painful step by painful step, to the newsagent on the corner to buy his daily copy of the Sun newspaper. Anyone who knows the Sun, flagship of Murdoch’s British print holdings, will realise that I’m using the term ‘newspaper’ loosely. It tends to lead on stories such as the drug arrest of an anorexic fading model, the jailing of a stalker for the murder of his ex-girlfriend or any scandal or whiff of scandal that might embarrass the British Labour Party.

Still, it clearly gave our neighbour some pleasure, as did the walk to buy it, so it gave us pleasure to see him do it. We’d exchange a few words when we met him, but little more than “good morning” or “what a fine day”. But he was a fixture in our new lives and we appreciated him for that.

Eventually, by dint of constantly complaining about her to anyone we could get to listen, we were able to force the departure of our neighbour from hell. I don’t like to see anyone subject to eviction, but when it comes down to a choice between the protection of her right to behave insanely, and the need to take steps to protect our own sanity, I’m afraid I didn’t hesitate. So eventually she went.

Then one day the old man with the Sun stopped walking up our street in the morning. At first we didn’t think much of it, but when days lengthened into weeks, the suspicion began to grow that we might not be seeing him again. Ever.

A lighted window saying that people pass on

Indeed, the house fell quiet and dark, with no light showing at night. Until, one evening, I saw a window lit up again. It had fairy lights hanging above it, and it shone in blue. Not at all the taste of our old neighbour; more that of a girl growing into womanhood or possibly a young woman.

Memories flowed back of the two neighbours who had gone. And it came to me that some time we too would go, but the house would stay, as would those of both our neighbours. They’d have new inhabitants who would know little or nothing at all about those who had preceded them, and care still less. Just as little as we know or care about our own predecessors.

In time, the houses themselves would vanish. The street would remain, with new houses where ours now stand. New residents in new houses in the same street.

It takes a long time for streets to go and be replaced. But who knows what the future holds? Nothing lasts forever and eventually even the street, and the town itself, will go.

But we, like our neighbours, friendly or foul, will have disappeared far sooner, leaving no trace.

The lighted outline of a single window at night had evoked a powerful sense of the transience of our existence. We strive so hard, but in the end we’re just making a hole in the water. In no time, it seems, the water flows back in and all those things that once seemed to matter so much, matter no more.

Not a particularly sad thought, though perhaps a slightly sobering one.

Polish residents, Polish police, in Britain

It’s curious to read that two Polish police are being deployed in each of London and Harlow, the latter the scene of a recent fatal attack on a Polish resident which also injured another.

Polish police join an English colleague on patrol in Harlow

The Poles have become the biggest single group of foreign-born residents in Britain. In the atmosphere of heightened xenophobia, which I assume was present but pent-up before the Brexit vote but has been released by it, Poles have become the major target of the increased wave of hate violence.

On a couple of occasions recently I’ve been accused of displaying insufficient pride in my country. I’d have no difficulty pleading guilty to the offence if I thought it was one. I have a hard time, however, thinking of patriotism, notoriously described by Samuel Johnson as the last refuge of the scoundrel, as a virtue.

What, after all, am I supposed to feel proud about? I take pleasure in the great results won by British athletes at the Paralympics, feeling a bond with my compatriots. But pride? I didn’t contribute to their success except indirectly and at tiny scale through taxes. The achievement was theirs, not mine; to take pride in it feels terribly like claiming undeserved credit.

In any case, it’s not as though my country’s only achievements are matters of pleasure. Am I supposed also to feel pride over our forces’ involvement in Iraq? Our role in the badly-judged and ill-fated intervention in Libya? Or, looking at other areas, in Maggie Thatcher’s attempt to ban literature about homosexuality from our classrooms? David Cameron’s sustained assault on the miserly support we provide to the poor and ill? The aversion towards foreigners that inspired Brexit and the murder in Harlow?

Perhaps a small anecdote will explain why I don’t go along with these feelings.

For our first two years where we currently live, we were cursed with a neighbour from hell. She would hold all night parties five or six times a month, apparently drug-fuelled events which would run from midnight until midday, where festivities followed a constantly repeated pattern: raucous laughter and merry shouting, followed by karaoke singing at volume, followed by tearful recriminations and fighting interspersed with cursing and the noise of breaking crockery; after a brief pause, the cycle would start again with the laughter and shouting.

The police, starved of resources, would not assist. That’s in spite of one police employee telling me down the phone, one night at 2:00 am, “Oh, my God! I can hear her from here!”

It took two years to get her out of the place, but we and the neighbours on the other side eventually managed it by dint of constant complaints and phone calls to the landlord and the agent. In the meantime, she’d broken some of our belongings and stolen others, but we felt that was a small price to pay.

Since then, we’ve had a new family next door who never disturb us, for whom we accept packages and who accept packages for us, with whom we exchange friendly greetings when we meet. An extraordinary relief. A way of re-establishing our belief in the inherent decency of people.

The new neighbours are Polish. The old one was English.

Does that illustrate why I don’t go along with appeals to patriotism? And above all reject popular prejudice against Poles?

There may be a new hope for all of us in the arrival of Polish police in Britain. Just as it was a blessing to replace a foul English neighbour by likeable Polish ones, maybe we could benefit from more Polish policemen too – replacing the hopeless English ones who wouldn’t come out when we needed support against the ghastly Englishwoman next door.

In the meantime, anything that helps stop the kind of xenophobic violence that led to the Harlow murder has to be welcome.

Even if, as I suspect, the Polish police presence is just a gimmick for the moment.

Good riddance. With a little nod to UKIP, for good measure

There was a knock at the door an hour or two ago.

“We are Milena and Robert,” the couple on the doorstep told us, “we are your new neighbours.”

What could be more banal? A couple moves in. They introduce themselves. But its very banality makes the incident special for us. For they are taking over from our neighbour from hell. She left last night, and I have never felt so joyful over the presence of a removals van outside our house.

Sign of joy.
When it appeared outside the house next door

Two years we’ve had the delight of living next door to the woman I shall refer to as Kayleigh, if only because that’s her name. She was a delightful neighbour on the many occasions when she was away; alas, though she was away a lot, there were inevitably times when she’d be home, and that made her less easy to like. If we saw the lights on between a Thursday and a Saturday night, we knew we were in trouble. On one or two of those nights, she would have ‘friends’ round.

Why do I put quotation marks around the word ‘friends’? Because there was nothing particularly friendly about the way they behaved to each other. More or less from the start they’d be talking far too loudly, as though at a convention for the deaf from which hearing aids have been banned. But then as the alcohol started to kick in, to say nothing of other substances less socially acceptable, that early phase would come to resemble the pleasant calm of a busy library.

By about 3:00 in the morning, they would start sharing deepseated views about the character, temperament and behaviour of the others present. The views were, clearly, held with passion, and communicated with concision, since anything involving a verb or an adjective only seemed to require a derivative of that fine four-letter Anglo-Saxon term for the way we’re all generated.

Expressing oneself simply is an admirable stylistic aspiration, so I can only admire their talent. Although it’s also possible that simplicity was a way of life, and there really was nothing more sophisticated to be said about any of them.

By about 7:00 in the morning, the company had exhausted the entertainment to be extracted from abusing each other with increasing intensity, so things really got serious. At this point Kayleigh, who could have found employment as a fog warning siren had she been interested in having any kind of employment, would start to dominate proceedings more than ever. She would request various individuals to depart her presence, preferably on a permanent basis.

She would communicate this desire by suggesting that they go forth and procreate, if I may be permitted a euphemistic paraphrase.

Sadly, it turns out that such desire was merely a passing phase in the Kayleigh mood journey. Once most or all of her guests had gone, which would generally be between 8:00 and 9:00, she succumbed to a sense of desolation and loneliness, which she would bewail to the few who were left or, if there were none, to some unfortunate she could raise by phone. This final stage of the night’s festivities would generally continue until some time between 10:00 and midday, at which point silence would finally descend on her house.

One must, of course, be tolerant towards the customs and culture of others, even if in this instance the word ‘culture’ more aptly describes something in a Petri dish than in the great achievements of a community. But I have to confess to being bemused by Kayleigh. Those nights seemed to leave her wracked by sorrow and self-pity. I may be naïve, but it seemed to me that she wasn’t really enjoying herself all that much. Still, who am I to judge the pleasures of my neighbour?

What I could judge, of course, was the impact on ourselves as, yet again, we avoided all the inconvenience dreaming can cause. Or indeed sleeping at all. And that judgement was one that I felt was worth sharing with the police, the letting agents for the house and the landlord. Our friends on the other side of Kayleigh did the same, and by dint of keeping up the pressure, we eventually prevailed.

The turning point was no doubt Danielle’s recording of Kayleigh making it clear, in choice terms, that she didn’t wish to talk to her. Danielle got it all on her phone, which survived even Kayleigh’s throwing it into the road, providing a tribute to iPhones as well as a damning piece of evidence against the neighbour.

Hence the removals van last night, and Melina and Robert’s courtesy call today.

Poor Melina and Robert. The little front yard is already full of rubbish, partly what Kayleigh left there, partly what they’ve flung out of the house.

“The place is filthy,” they told us, as they took a brief break, still wearing their rubber gloves and knee pads. We offered them drinks (turned down, as they wanted to get on with the cleaning), and sympathy for the scale of the post-Kayleigh task.

The contact with them may have been banal. But in contrast with what came before, it was painfully welcome. A huge improvement.

Interestingly, Kayleigh is English to the core. Born here, bred here (for some value of the word “breeding”). While Melina and Robert are Polish.

Hey, UKIP: you really think it’s the immigrants that are the problem? Seems to me, we’ve got far worse difficulties with the native born. At least, with the very Kayleighs you draw on for support.

To realise you're crazy, you don't need a shrink. A boiler repairman will do.

Coming home from a refreshing holiday’s never easy. But it’s a lot less easy when you’ve been somewhere peaceful and warm, and you come back to a neighbour from hell holding yet another all-nighter, and central heating that’s on the blink.

The neighbour from hell’s going in a couple of weeks, due to be replaced by a Polish couple in their 30s or 40s. That’s a “delightful” Polish couple, no doubt, or at least I hope we’ll soon be saying so. Because the neighbour from hell is exceptional: I really thought fictional characters who use “fuck” or its derivative every other word were exaggerated, until I met her. It really is 50% of the time for her, or at any rate, it’s 50% of the words we can hear through the wall, and we hear a lot of words.

But on this occasion, the central heating problem was worse. We turned it on, and the pressure gauge shot round to the max and beyond, faster than our eyes could follow. So we turned it off, which was something of a bore, given we’d just had a twenty-degree drop in termperature.

We headed for bed and tried to sleep through next door’s revels. Eventually by about 2:00 in the morning, fatigue overpowered us. But only for an hour or so, until we were woken up again by an appalling banging sound. We leaped out of bed and tried to work out what the hell her-next-door was up to now. Within a few minutes, however, we realised that for once, it wasn’t her, it was us. 

Or rather our boiler.

I went downstairs and stood in front of it. Believe me, there are few sights quite as terrifying as a boiler, six inches from your nose, rattling and making a noise like a two-stroke engine in a mineshaft.

Well, I suppose there are more terrifying sights, such as your neighbourhood ISIS militant turning up to explain that you may have got some of your theology wrong. However, though we have a lousy neighbour, we don’t live in that kind of neighbourhood.

What made my experience particularly mind-focussing was that I had absolutely no idea what to do. There was a tap which, I knew, would increase the pressure if I turned it. But the pressure was already about six, on a scale that only went to five. Where was the tap that turned the pressure down?

I had no idea so I stood there completely useless, with just enough mechanical engineering knowledge to know that “excess pressure” is a notion that tends to be associated with “explosion”, and that’s not good for the health of the observer.

And then eventually the terrible row stopped. The needle started to dip a little. That was enough to satisfy me, but Danielle insisted that we actually needed to do something. So we engaged in the bracing activity, in the small hours, of bleeding a radiator or two. And the pressure did indeed fall a little further.

The next morning we called the repairman, but he couldn’t call for a couple of days. So we had two cold days, washing up in water boiled on the stove, and blessing the fact that we had a shower separate from the central heating.

Boiler repairman at work.
A challenge to one's sanity?
It was worse for us: ours had bushy beard.

This morning the serviceman showed up, turned the boiler on, watched it a few minutes and announced:

“It’s working fine.”

And he looked at me suspiciously.

I explained to him what had happened in the small hours of Sunday morning.

“No,” he said, “it couldn’t happen.”

Danielle took over from me.

“At first it made this noise. Brrrrrr-brrrrrr-brrrrr. Then it began to rattle. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Then the noise really started. Banga-banga-banga-banga.”

It all sounded perfectly convincing to me. That was exactly how it was. How could anyone deny such eloquence?

“No,” he said, “it can’t happen.”

We were both dumbstruck.

He started to speak more slowly. It felt as though he was trying to choose small words.

“The boiler was off. When it’s off it can’t make that noise. It can’t make any noise.”

He smiled. Indulgently. To make sure we knew he was humouring us.

Logic likes to express its principles in the most pretentious terms. All I could think of as he was talking was a phrase I learned years ago, and which has never stood me in good stead. Or any kind of stead.

“From the phenomenon to the potential is a valid inference.”

I wasn’t sure he was ready for a notion expressed in quite those terms. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure he was ready to be told “if it happens, it’s a fair bet that it can happen.”

He was denying that it had happened at all. And you can’t argue about facts, can you? They either happen or they don’t happen. I was saying it had, he was saying it hadn’t. I was saying he had no idea what he was talking about; he was saying we were crazy.

Which left us at an impasse.

And then I suddenly realised.

I might be crazy, but I was a crazy man who had warmth. And hot water. Could even have a bath. At last.

Besides, I was a crazy man whose neighbour from hell was about to be evicted and replaced by a Polish couple.

No doubt a delightful Polish couple.

Things were on the mend. Who needed to prove a point?

“Thanks so much,” I told the repairman, with my most charming smile. And I can do charm. “So sorry to have wasted your time.”

Because I’m not so crazy as not to know when to leave well alone.

Hell is other people. Or how one woman's music became another's noise pollution.

Spare a thought for Laia Martín, a promising young pianist from Catalonia, now facing charges that could land not just her but her parents in gaol for seven and a half years. 

Why? Because she practises the piano.

Yes, that’s right. You’d expect a budding concert pianist to have to play rather a lot. And when her parents bought her a piano and encouraged (I suppose the prosecution would say ‘incited’) her to play it, they thought they were behaving as devoted parents should.

Sadly, they were living next door to a woman called Sonia Bosom, clearly someone with a lot to get off her chest.

She sued for noise pollution and physical impairment. She’s moved away, which strikes me as sensible, but in the meantime the matter had been picked up as one for criminal charges. It’s true that Martín practices for eight hours a day, but that’s pretty much what I’d expect from a professional musician (particularly a soloist). She also keeps it to daytime only. 

All of which makes me feel that in asking for a seven and a half year sentence, the prosecutor who’s taken up the case is being just a tad excessive.

Noise pollution.
Seriously? Noise pollution?

And, believe me, my wife and I have plenty of experience of noise pollution. Our neighbour goes in for it less often than she used to, but when she lets herself go, we certainly know about it. First she starts off apparently enjoying herself. She and her friends laugh a lot; then the music comes on; and next it’s Karaoke, an invention, it seems to me, with only one purpose: however awful you may feel professional singers are, you’ll go back to them with alacrity once you’ve heard the amateurs.

Hard though it is to believe, things actually deteriorate after the Karaoke. That’s when the mood turns rough. Voices are raised but no longer in joy. Epithets are exchanged, accompanied by encouragements to engage in procreative activity. Elsewhere. 

Doors are opened and doors are slammed as various people are included or excluded from groups. In the latter case, they usually protest at a length that belies their words, that they care very little about their fate, in speeches generously larded with further procreative allusions.

As a general rule, there are tears, occasionally blows, sometimes even the sound of crockery being broken.

We think of her as our neighbour from Hell.

I imagine, however, that Ms Bosom and the Martíns feel exactly the same way about each other. Ms Bosom must have regarded the hours of piano as hellish; Laia and her parents must feel the same about the prospect of being gaoled for their devotion to music.

Which I suppose only goes to prove the truth of Sartre’s idea that hell is other people. The Spanish case seems to confirm it. So does our neighbour.

Fortunately, however, in my experience other people also provide the means to get as about as close to heaven as we’re ever likely to be. The existence of friends consoles us for the persecutions of the hellish other people of Sartre’s vision.

Right now, I hope Laia Martín and her family can find some friends of their own, in high places if at all possible, because they really, really need them.

Brothers and neighbours

It was good to see my brother at the weekend, over from Paris with my sister-out-law, Danielle.

It feels like a good omen that she has the same name as my wife of thirty years. Good basis for an excellent relationship, I feel; certainly my Danielle has proved to have just the qualities I need to support me most the time and knock me into line some of the time.

Unfortunately our guest Danielle had her visit slightly spoiled on Saturday night by our neighbour from hell. She chose to have another of her all-night parties, starting with gaiety and Karaoke, and degenerating as the night gave way to the small hours into recrimination, anger and fighting. Par for the course for us, unfortunately, but a bit of a shock for our visitor.

The following morning the father of our neighbour’s child (as opposed to her present partner) turned up and had trouble getting any response to his repeated knocking on the door. He therefore resorted to his usual technique of yelling through the letterbox. My brother, unused to this endearing pattern of behaviour, opened our door to find out what was happening.

This being a family-oriented blog, I have subtly disguised some of the words in my record of the conversation, to avoid giving offence to more sensitive readers.

‘What the fudge do you want?’ said the shouter. ‘Shut the fudging door.’

My brother is completely unfazed by scintillating banter of this kind, and simply quipped back in kind.

‘I’ll shut the fudging door when I fudging feel like it.’

To everyone’s surprise, his interlocutor reacted with a beaming smile.

‘I like it,’ he said, ‘like your attitude.’

He all but offered his hand, perhaps put off at the last moment by my brother’s obvious disinclination to shake it.

Later that same day, Sunday, we travelled to see an old and recently-widowed friend. The visit went well, and in the course of it she told us about her new neighbours, millionaires from one of those sectors that do so much to bring joy into all our lives, such as financial services.

They had bought the house next door for the equivalent of about a quarter of a century’s income for anyone on normal earnings, and then spent a colossal amount more on major re-building. They would often clear off while the work was being done, and at one point the builders called on our friend.

‘Could we have some water?’ they asked. 

She assumed they must be wanting to brew up some tea or something, so she connected their hose to her tap, only mildly irritated by the fact that the neighbours had clearly turned their own water supply off before they left.

The following day she heard a cement mixer chugging away. She looked out of the window and saw the men using her water to mix their cement.

She disconnected the hose and offered it back to them.

‘But... how are we supposed to work without water?’ they asked.

Our friend gave them a polite reply because that’s her style. It’s a pity my brother wasn’t around; I suspect he would have said, ‘how the fudge is that my problem?’

Feed me, feed me! Who cares who's paying?

The neighbours did come round to apologise profusely, in time. They offered to pay for the water they’d taken. They also offered to pay for the damage the builders did to our friend’s fence, and to her electricity supply which they somehow managed to cut off. No payment and no repair work has been forthcoming so far.

It seems that a delightful insouciance towards to the concerns and comfort of others is not limited to a single class. Our neighbour, drifting along somewhere on the marginal fringes at the bottom of society, or our friend’s neighbours lording it over us from the top, share exactly the same indifference to the inconvenience they inflict on others.

Which is a sort of comfort, when you think about it. Wouldn’t it have been depressing to discover that only the poor behaved badly? It’s much more reassuring to confirm, as if confirmation were needed, that arrant selfishness exists across all social boundaries. That accounts for much of the behaviour of government, for example: it’s made up of people who accurately reflect the society they ostensibly lead, or at least its lowest common denominator.

Come to think of it, that also helps explain quite a lot of the puzzling awfulness one so often meets out there.

Neighbours from hell: the soap opera

After a hard day’s work, it can be quite relaxing to slump on the sofa and watch a soap, particularly if it’s written with wit and acted with talent.

It’s quite another matter to be caught up living in one starring our neighbour.

I’ll call her Hailey. That’s because I think it’s her name, though I’m not sure: she’s never felt it necessary to introduce herself though we’ve lived side by side for the best part of a year. Sometimes the worst part.

I admire people with a lively taste for music, particularly if that includes performance. Sadly, it’s less easy if the performance mode of choice is karaoke and the choice is made some time after midnight. And the performance only stops when the serious partying starts. And the partying stops at 10:00.

I don’t know what Hailey and her friends are on, but it must be potent stuff. Not even when I was her age could I have kept going that long unaided, and at that intensity. Impressive.

She doesn’t just sing. She and her friends enjoy lively conversation too. The subject matter, and we can tell because they’re not bashfully discreet about the tones in which they discuss this engrossing theme, seems to be procreation. At least, they do seem to keep telling each other to go forth and multiply. They also like to emphasise their statements, and it’s wonderful to need only one word to do that. That's what I call economy. So whether they’re declaring someone else’s statement to be true (occasionally), offensive (rather more often) or rubbish (the most common case), it’s always the ‘fucking’ variety of that attribute.

Fortunately, the overnight partying doesn’t happen that often – once a week or fortnight – but when it does, it’s certainly memorable. Particularly when we’re working the following day.

Hailey lives with her five-year old daughter. Quite often, a boyfriend (not the father of the daughter) comes round and they tell each other home truths – emphatically – and occasionally fling crockery at each other. At other times, the father of the daughter (not a boyfriend) comes round to take her out or drop her back. With both men, she talks a lot about fucking, to the point that I wish she’d get on and do some, if only because it might tire her out and shut her up.

We’ve met the little girl a few times too. She likes to stick her head over the back fence and chat with us if we’re in the garden. Why, she even apologised to us for her mother’s noisiness, which made her seem quite charming. Then, however, we noticed her throwing stones at a neighbour’s greenhouse, and reaching with a stick into our garden to beat cabbages or lettuces, not a treatment calculated to help them flourish. It occurred to me that I was witnessing a curious form of inheritance, entirely independent of genetics: an essentially pleasant girl rapidly turning into a pest as exasperating as her mother.

Not hard to understand why. Her father brought her home yesterday. They were chatting away happily until Hailey emerged.

’Have you got some money for my mother?’ she asked.

’Oh, shit, I forgot.’

I could hear this all through the open window through which I was enjoying our glorious weather. Or had been.

’Well, are you going to have the money in the morning?’

I wasn’t really listening, but it was as though the conversation was happening in my living room. I concluded that her ex-boyfriend still had some kind of debt to her mother and was having trouble paying it off.

’Sorry, I can’t, I won’t have the time.’

And that’s when we got the explosion. No build up, no increasingly intense warning signs, just a sudden vitriolic outburst.

’Oh, for fuck’s sake, you’re fucking hopeless,’ Hailey screamed and there was a yelp from the little girl, ‘you’ve no fucking idea, you’re a useless fuck.’

He still wasn’t saying anything, even though the last bit was obviously wrong: the little girl was there to prove it.

’Just fuck off, will you just fuck off, I don’t want you anywhere near the fucking place any more.’

There was another little protest from the girl, ignored by the mother, but then one from the father, which wasn’t.

’Just fucking shutup. Just fucking fuck off. And never fucking come back.’

And there I heard a most odd noise, like the sound of an open hand on flesh. Was she slapping him round the face? I’ll never know because, though I moved over to the window, too curious about the living soap opera to ignore it any longer, she was already moving back to the house, little girl clutched by the hand, while he had run several steps down the street.

She hadn’t finished admonishing him though.

’Just fucking clear off. You make all this fucking noise in front of the neighbours. Outside my fucking house.’

That did seem unfair. He’d barely said a word. But he made up for it once she’d closed the door and he was relatively safe from further attack. He addressed a few choice apothegms at the house.

’You’ve always been a fucking bitch,’ he wittily informed her. Though he may have said ‘witch’. I hope so: we have a female dog who is infinitely superior to Hailey.

A fascinating experience all round. But the most fascinating aspect of all is that this is Luton, the home town of the anti-immigrant English Defence League. I’ve heard their supporters many times, and funnily enough they express themselves with exactly the same mastery of language, charm in expression and delicacy in accent as our neighbour and her entourage.

The EDL in Luton.
They expect us to prefer them as neighbours?

So here’s my question to them: what makes you think people like you are preferable to a few quietly spoken, courteous and hardworking arrivals from the Indian subcontinent or Eastern Europe? 

What on earth could give you that idea?