There's
a family lives downstairs from me; after seven years, I'm still not 100% sure how many of them are. The dad and mum are from Pakistan, while their son (and possibly a daughter) was born here.

The son was always a miserable fucker. When I first moved in, he would stand outside the flats smoking fags and listening to his walkman, and would generally ignore any attempts at communication. He moved to Dublin in about 2000, but came back within a year, having lost his banking job.

Since then he's gone noisily and spectacularly insane. The standout moments came, I think, last summer. His mum and dad went to Pakistan for a while and left him to his own devices. This wasn't such a great idea. He used to start his day with a blast of the first fifteen seconds of "This Charming Man" at insane volumes. Then he'd follow it with... ANOTHER blast of the first fifteen seconds of "This Charming Man". And again and again and again and again.

If I banged on my floor he'd usually stop, for a while. But there was never more than an hour without that bloody jangly guitar arse ripping through the floor... I eventually started giving as good as I got - better, in fact, I think, as I tended to answer his Smiths with terrifying and unpleasant industrial noise like Lustmord and Der Blutharsch.

I would also hear him screaming at a - clearly imaginary - "black bastard" and slamming doors, kicking chairs around etc etc. This all peaked when he lobbed a pile of crockery through his closed kitchen window. When the rest of the block heard it we all thought someone was breaking in, but a quick look downstairs sort-of reassured us. There were bits of broken plate everywhere, mainly behind the protective bars his dad had recently had fitted... This would have been mid-summer, but he left it until November to get it fixed.

There's still banging and crashing and "black bastarding" going on, and lately whenever he spots me, he scuttles off to the other side of the road, muttering barely-comprehensible racist imprecations under his breath. I'm sort of wondering whether he's turning properly dangerous...

edit - oh and during the Liverpool/AC Milan championship match earlier this year, when Milan were up two goals, he took to the streets in his heavy winter parka and walked up and down the middle of the road screaming "AC MILAN! COME ON YOU AC MILAAAAAAN!"

(And Soho IS largely run by Maltese ponces.)
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Thu 25 Aug 2005, 16:46, Reply)