Love thy neighbour
Melissa Kite The curtain of my upstairs neighbours' flat has been hanging by a single hook for three weeks, and if something is not done about it soon I am going to call the police. There must be a part of Blair's legacy, a piece of legislation on a statute book in Westminster somewhere, which includes a clampdown on this sort of thing.
If the nanny state stands for anything it must stand for minimum standards of household drapery. A socialist administration so authoritarian that it can oversee the baking of cakes at village fairs can surely enforce interior decor regulations in the smarter parts of south London as a way of safeguarding property prices. In the present climate, the economy cannot withstand shocks like this.
Let's be clear. We are not talking about a badly hung curtain. We are talking about antisocial behaviour of the kind that makes the reckless cake bakers who fail to use state-approved raising agents look like model citizens.
To understand quite how desperate things are: I have been chronicling the descent of this curtain for the best part of a year. Since the current residents moved in, I have been awarding the tattered piece of velvet vast legions of space in my head. I check it every morning for movement. My mood on any given day is entirely dictated by its trajectory. Its downward journey hook by hook has overtaken the incomprehensible slowness of the queue at the dry-cleaners as the thing that triggers the most violent electrical impulses in my brain and the vein on the side of my forehead to form itself into a lightning shape.
I don't think people should be able to tor ment their neighbours in this way.
The perpetrators are girls in their early 20s. What I have come to realise is that they do not play by the rules of Blair or Brown's Britain. They care nothing for rights and responsibilities. It's as if Mr Tony had been entirely wasting his breath for ten years.
Of course there is a lot of noise, too — that goes without saying and has prompted a whole other area of social research. Have you noticed how women's feet make more noise on floorboards than men's? Well, I have. I have been studying the science of footfalls.
I have been intrigued to record that when there was a big, hulking Norwegian man called Thorvald in the bedroom above mine I could hear absolutely nothing. Now that a tiny, sparrow-like girl called Suzie has moved in, I am under a ceaseless barrage of thunderous clatter and thudding. It is possible that Thorvald never moved. Or that Suzie has bought herself a pair of specially weighted shoes from the Asbo DIY store — 'for all your neighbour-disturbing needs'.
Either that or Thorvald was doing what most men do when they are relaxing at home: shuffling. In slippers. I love men who shuffle in slippers. They are so quiet.
Suzie, on the other hand, is a multitasking young woman who runs up and down accomplishing all manner of disparate achievements in record time. Whereas Thorvald lazed in an armchair, occasionally sliding to the kitchen to crack open another can of Carlsberg, Suzie is unable to sit still for five seconds. There is a lot of internal bedroom running in the morning which I find most baffling. Personally, I have never been motivated to sprint between the knicker drawer and the wardrobe and back but she is obviously more industrious than me.
Of course, I accept that you cannot escape neighbour noise when living in a flat and I know I am not the worst afflicted. My friend Becky says the racket in her Chelsea apartment is so bad she has had to put her cat on half a beta-blocker a day for his nerves. It ought to make my problems pale into insignificance but it doesn't.
Many a night I have returned home filled with the savage injustice of the situation, ready to do battle, only to realise that I lack the courage to knock on someone's door to criticise their soft furnishings. I cannot act alone. I need primary legislation to back me up. Urgently. My building now looks like an episode of Rising Damp. From chi-chi to slum in 30 plastic hooks.
I spend a lot of time willing the final hook to give way. If the curtain were to fall completely I think it unlikely that it would ever find its way up again and I have come to believe that one curtain is better than one and a half. What I daren't let myself contemplate is the possibility that the second curtain might begin to pop its fastenings. At that point I would settle for a tabby on tranquillisers.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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