It’s 5:15am in the morning, and I was last asleep about four hours ago. The reasons I was last asleep four hours ago are two floors up and one apartment across – their party has wound down now, in no small part due to me pounding on their front door for the second time at 1am. The first time had been at about 11:30pm – which is probably a bit on the hair-trigger side on my part, but I’ve been bombarded by noisy neighbours all week and my tolerance levels are low.
So when they woke me up at 1am I wasn’t in a charitable, “oh never mind, they’re enjoying themselves” mood. The sequence of events went something like:
- I hammer on the door three times
- they come to look through the spyhole, decide it’s trouble, lock the door from the inside and walk away
- I hammer on the door again
- the music goes off temporarily
- the music goes back on, if anything marginally louder
- I hammer on the door again
- someone inside decides that I’m not going to do away, and the door is answered
It was answered by a large and extremely pissed South African who initially decided that the correct approach to the situation was to feel aggrieved that his door had been battered upon, but then changed tack and tried bonhomie – presumably after my thousand-watt-shrivel-up-and-die-expression got through the alcohol fog. It was a bit of an unnerving confrontation – I’d got about 3 or 4 inches on him vertically, but he had about 30 pounds on me. The only thing behind me was a waist-high handrail and a fifty-foot drop to the water feature in the atrium, and behind him was a flat-full of equally-pissed South Africans. Fortunately my body language obviously said “trained killer” and he backed down fairly quickly – the music went off, although there wasn’t much chance of me getting back to sleep once the post-argument adrenalin kicked in.
So since then I’ve been sat up tweaking the blog template and watching the early morning passers-by wandering past – where are people going at 5:15am on a Sunday morning? And the passers-by are wandering pas and wondering why that strange bloke is sat typing at a laptop at 5:15am on a Sunday morning…
