Canterbury Council
are a bit "special".

Last year I lived in a 7-bedroom house on the outskirts of the city (hour's walk from uni, but the housemates and the Sky were more than worth it, plus it was a gorgeous house).

The council's rubbish collectors come once a fortnight for all the general crap, and then again the next week for the recyclable stuff. So, we would have to find room for two weeks' worth of smelly, usually kebab-based garbage for the two weeks between collections.

Seven people. Three of which are kebab-loving boys, and the rest of us usually cooking things out of packets, plus the sheer volume of junk we had in the house that kept breaking. You do the math.

After we moved in, our next door neighbour's house went up for sale. Looking back, this was not a coincidence as our house had been empty for years, it seemed, before our landlord bought it, gutted it and did it up as a student house. The garden was full of the kind of junk people drunk on the way home from the club down the road would fling over the wall. That was a hell of a lot of Coke cans, takeaway boxes, crisp packets, and some things that were unrecognizable.

After a week the neighbour popped a letter through the letterbox explaining as though to idiots the workings of the rubbish collection and saying "I hope you find this helpful and not interfering."

About two months in, Neighbour comes round. She is a shortish woman, and is screaming like a banshee about the rubbish, claiming it was us who'd caused her to lose a sale on her house as they "thought you were squatters!". Any suggestions of "why didn't you tell them we weren't, if you want to sell so bad?" were met with more hissing and spitting.

Over time, this problem got worse, and no matter how often we called the landlord (who lived in a mansion somewhere in Islington) and asked him for another bin, he refused even thought it would only have cost him £40 (and considering he was getting 7 x £300 a month from our house alone...). Housemate With Car #1 refused to have the bin bags in his car, and the rest of us had no way of getting it to the dump that Neighbour From Hell kept screaming unintelligibly about.

Eventually, the situation got much worse as the weather got warmer and Neighbour From Hell's sale fell through once, twice, three times. The rubbish got warmer as it festered in the heat and admittedly the stench was unbearable. We recycled as much as was humanly possible, but Neighbour From Hell still came round to yell and sweep our path and tell us we were disgusting more often than we would have liked.

She came round and screamed at me when I opened the door one evening, I screamed at her, three of the others went round to try and calm the demon, and then the landlord phoned to bitch at us (no, I have no clue how she got his number), I had to beg him to sort out another bin for us, we called the council numerous times and ended up with a ton more binbags instead of the wheelie bin we wanted, we begged the landlord again, and we spent most of that night being as noisy as humanly possible to irritate our lovely neighbour.

From what I can gather, when we all moved out we left her about 15 binbags to deal with, and she hadn't sold last I heard when a friend of my former housemate moved in.

Serves you right, Christina or whatever your name was.
( Maladicta, Thu 26 Jul 2007, 18:21, Reply)