Neighbourly concern

After nearly a year of this, I’ve finally cracked.

I’d like to offer a few well-placed words of advice to any­one who is con­tem­plat­ing buy­ing a flat in a Victorian/Edwardian con­ver­sion — after all, such prop­er­ties are very com­mon across the UK, espe­cially in Lon­don — with a view to rip­ping out the internal walls and rebuild­ing them as part of some fool­ishly grand vis­ion to rearrange the entire layout.

Don’t.

The ori­ginal archi­tects of these con­ver­sions weren’t stu­pid. Although their con­ser­vat­ive approach to design inev­it­ably meant that such flats ten­ded to end up with quite sim­ilar lay­outs (as I can con­firm, hav­ing seen the insides of many such places), they were built like that for a num­ber of very good reas­ons — one of which is our nat­ural desire, as human beings, to main­tain a sense of pri­vacy within the four walls that we call home.

It’s become clear, how­ever, that when the three flats next door were redeveloped — a pro­cess which took nearly a whole year and reg­u­larly kept me enter­tained with the sound of heavy machinery and ham­mer­ing that began at 8.00am sharp every morn­ing — the archi­tects decided not to abide by such com­mon­sense rules.

And so, for the past eleven or twelve months, whenever I’ve sat at my desk in my bed­room, or at one end of my living-room, I’ve been able to hear the unmis­take­able sounds of the neigh­bours in the adjoin­ing flat using their bath­room. I can tell you, for instance, that the man of the house seems to rel­ish mak­ing a par­tic­u­larly resound­ing and drawn-out spit­ting noise when empty­ing his mouth of tooth­paste after brush­ing his teeth. Occa­sion­ally, he also like to assert his man­hood by burp­ing loudly. Oh, and he sings Bob Mar­ley — and noth­ing but Bob Mar­ley, I can assure you — whilst scrub­bing him­self in the shower. No Woman No Cry and Three Little Birds are par­tic­u­lar favourites.

I was never much of a Mar­ley fan, but I have a copy of his Legend hits col­lec­tion some­where. Haven’t listened to it in almost a year. Can’t ima­gine why.

Obvi­ously, this is intensely irrit­at­ing, but surely it’s just part of the claus­tro­phobic nature of Lon­don life to be irrit­ated by the racket the people next door are mak­ing, isn’t it? We learn to accept it as part of the price of liv­ing in our over­crowded cap­ital city. Maybe. How­ever, I’m now begin­ning to think that famili­ar­ity has per­haps made me rather blasé about these par­tic­u­lar instances of subtle but very embar­rass­ing noise pollution.

Earlier this even­ing, I was vis­ited by a close friend who wanted some advice on a rather del­ic­ate emo­tional mat­ter, As she poured out her heart to me, I didn’t feel the need to com­ment when the dis­tinct­ive sounds of my neighbour’s ablu­tions drif­ted through the walls, invad­ing the silent pauses in our con­ver­sa­tion. My friend, how­ever, found it rather more dif­fi­cult to ignore.

“Am I ima­gin­ing things, or can I hear someone singing Bob Mar­ley songs really badly?”

And that’s why bath­rooms in Vic­torian con­ver­sions are nor­mally placed against the outer wall of the prop­erty. Because you don’t really want com­plete strangers over­hear­ing the most intim­ate details of your per­sonal hygiene routine, do you?

Aside: While we’re on the sub­ject of neigh­bours, I’d just like to sug­gest to the people who have recently moved in upstairs that, firstly, leav­ing your sofa on the land­ing imme­di­ately out­side my front door for three weeks because you can’t fit it up the nar­row stairs to your flat is not only incred­ibly annoy­ing, but may also con­sti­tute a fire haz­ard — par­tic­u­larly if, in a fit of anger, I were to ‘acci­dent­ally’ place three lighted matches down the back of the cush­ions. And secondly, although I appre­ci­ate that you prob­ably have a great deal of DIY to do in your new abode, com­men­cing a two-hour bout of floor­board ham­mer­ing at 11.00pm at night is not likely to greatly endear you to me.