MODERN LIVING = OLD-FASHIONED SELFISHNESS?

I am not sure when I first started noticing the noise my upstairs neighbour makes simply existing in his flat over my head, but I know that I literally live for when he goes out, and could willingly scream and break every window in the house whenever he returns.

From crashing through his door after a night at the pub, to slapping about, pacing up and down in his flip-flops burbling on the 'phone, every noise he makes seems to transmit through the ceiling and into my brain like a jack hammer.

He does seem to have some very bizarre routines. I mean, what do you do when you come home from work? I make myself a cup of tea, sit down, put my feet up, and switch on the news. Every time he arrives home, he seems to experience an urgent need to rearrange his furniture. Items are dragged, objects are dropped on the floor, and when he's finally satisfied with arrangements, a soft drumming begins somewhere near the wainscotting, rather like a rabbit's warning, thumping on the floor in urgent, repeated bursts. 

A little more to the right, mate...

I have often wondered if I am just being oversensitive. After all, he's perfectly affable, and we always enjoy a friendly conversation whenever we happen upon each other in the street. Indeed, following a wheedling and Englishly apologetic note from me, he's even managed to start walking on his stairs as opposed to thundering up and down, using them as gym equipment and making my pictures rattle against the walls, but still the random, almighty thumps continue. So startling can these actually be, that if they were to be played as disembodied audio on one of those 'name this sound' contests on daytime television, my money would be on "Greg Rutherford practising long-jump".

Yet still I question myself. Like Macbeth, pacing the battlements at Glamis, I soliloquise: "How is 't with me when every noise appals me…?"

But I know it's not just me. In fact, the man that my Facebook friends now know only as 'The Cockwomble' is seemingly some sort of a legend in our quiet little close. Early on in my tenancy, a neighbour collared me and asked me how I was "coping" living underneath this guy, and told me she was sorry for me. This same neighbour told me how one night, when she had arrived home from a rare evening out (she is a mother of two small children), and had been sitting in her car telephoning a friend to let them know she was home safe, she had looked up to see him, curtains wide, running… RUNNING across his floor (my ceiling), back and forth, and touching each wall as if in training for something.

Probably his next shag… because every time love calls, and call it does, frequently (I counted no less than three new 'girlfriends' in the space of as many months last year), I get to hear him on the job as well. For hours on end. No quickies for him. Inevitably desensitised by 5 or so pints down the pub before he staggers back here with his latest, on and on it will go - with relentless monotony.

I am obliged to hear as his partners start off enthusiastically enough; panting, squealing, and oink-oink-oinking overhead, then eventually falling silent as he continues to hammer away at the same tedious pace for an hour at a time (I've often found myself wondering if they've died). Then he'll thump to the bathroom to hose himself down, before going back into the bedroom to give them another hour's worth. Ear-plugs help...

This, I keep telling myself (with less and less conviction), is simply 'living with other people', and I find myself wondering if creeping age is the reason that I can simply somehow, no longer tolerate it. Pills don't help...

And yet, I was born and raised in London. For the first 33 years of my life there, I lived in a mansion flat on a busy road. The main arterial to the north as it happens. The difference, I suspect, has something to do with construction. The flat in which I grew up had been built in 1880, had solid walls, and had withstood the Blitz. Just a few cracks in the ceilings bore testament to this, but there was no question they needed 'fixing'. Nothing was going to come down. One gets the impression with the sort of late 1990s build in which I now live, that all it would take would be one good gale and the roof would be off. No wonder I can even hear 'CW' honking into a hankie blowing his nose every morning.

Knowing how thin the walls and ceilings are here, I creep about, mindful at all times of not clattering my dishes in the sink, or vacuuming at odd hours. You'd think Chummy upstairs would do the same and perhaps think twice about thumping around as much as he does.

But he doesn't think about it. Seems nobody does any more. When did we all get so utterly self-centred? I remember a time when it was the height of rudeness even to talk too loudly in public lest someone else be forced to overhear your conversation. Now people walk around shouting into mobile 'phones, blasting music out of their cars, and yelling in the street at all hours, and nobody dares say a thing - because people are literally terrified of each other. We're afraid of violent repercussions for requesting peace. 

Nope, not quite... just need to drag it across the floor one more time to be sure...

I remember when going to the cinema was a treat for all the family, and the worst irritation you could expect would be someone making a racket with their bag of Opal Fruits and rabbiting loudly about the plot to their companions. Such inadvertent oafs could easily be prevailed upon with a tap on the shoulder from your dad with an authorative finger to his lips.

Now, in our entitled world, we've got people blathering into their 'phones right the way through the movie, and threatening anyone who says a word about it with physical violence. If it's a gang of them out for a good time, they’ll be waiting for you outside. They're entitled to enjoy themselves, see…

I seem to remember watching a programme about Spike Milligan, that lovely fragile man who made so many of us laugh when we were kids with his funny voices and his many 'characters', in which he revealed that other people's thoughtless noise jangled his nerves so much that he actually checked himself into an asylum just to get a little respite.

I have a feeling it won't be long before I book my place too…

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2017