Noise annoys. I felt sorry for the people in the news reports who had to thole barking mutts in the house next door.
It’s one of the few sources of noise I haven’t suffered over the years, though there is a yelping hound three doors down, rather a nice beast as it happens, but kept outdoors in all weathers.
Pet ownership should be subject to rigorous, written state examinations to determine responsibility and propensity for evil. The owners should also have to take the tests. Somebody idly buys a cat and, next thing, every house around is having its birdlife massacred and its rosebeds used as a public convenience.
Somebody casually buys a dog and, next thing, the pavement is poop-covered and the soundtrack to the evening is endless barking.
To be fair, most dog owners are responsible with poop and racket. I’ve suffered more from racket than poop over the years. Everything you could imagine: noisy music; wooden floorboards; footsteps on my forehead at 6am.
The latter was in a maindoor flat. My first night there, all seemed well until, at 6 next morning, a million jackboots marched on my head.
Turned out the staircase for the stair next door ran right over the bedroom ceiling and I was awoken as the first toiler set off for work. My whole time in that flat I’d to sleep on the fold-down sofa in the living room.
Another flat, in a decidedly dodgy area, had walls of paper. When the next door neighbour was let out of prison and played Please Release Me endlessly, I had to telephone for a constable.
The people upstairs there had their telly permanently turned to maximum volume. So I got it from all sides. But the next place was even worse.
The Yip Man down below – a huge simpleton, he used to blunder around his flat shouting “Yip!” – also played his radio at top volume through the night.
After several similar horrors, I headed north and, at first, stayed in an isles town, where I was wakened every night by the woman above saving 5p by putting her washing machine, which shook my entire flat, on “off peak”.
Later, desperately in search of peace and quiet, I lived in one of the remotest parts of the country’s remotest isles and, in the first week, salmon farmers arrived on the beach in front of the house and started rhythmically hammering on their cages.
Rhythmic hammering is also the curse of the suburbs. Every other day, tradesmen turn up and start rhythmically hammering on the nearest available surface.
Worse than that, though, was the house in an ostensibly respectable suburb where the boy next door would hold parties when his parents were away.
The racket would go on till 4am, featuring that awful, relentless doomf-doomf-doomf “music” that should be banned under legislation specifying a triple paradiddle at least once every 20 seconds.
I spent a small fortune on sound insulating one room in that house. It kinda worked. But you could still hear people speaking and sneezing through other walls.
Thankfully, I no longer have such problems. But I don’t know how long I can go on living three miles down in this cork-lined room in a disused mine. The chippie’s miles away.
