The trouble with neighbours

darragh: yeah I was going to say something... do you assume its this poor woman's ex? Sounds like she moved to get away from him and... ugh. No one was hurt I hope?

nobody hurt, though if she'd been home she wouldn't have had much chance. from what i could glean from the landlord this morning yeah it's exactly that- she's moved to get away from him, even though they've been separated for a while.

Jesus. Does she even know the place is gone yet, has she been back home? I always live in fear of coming home to a detroyed house.

i don't know- she only moved in about a week ago, i've never met her. i think she's probably made herself scarce since wednesday night, which was the last time he was seen hanging around.

Hope they catch the fucker. Ugh thats horrible.

catching him vs proving it was him. strong circumstantial evidence, certainly.

I came to post something but now I want to know the end of darraghmac's story -- mine is abt disagreement about how to resurface a path shared between several blocks and how the person involved who put in least effort to attend meetings or make their opinions known early or clearly is now very belatesly being a d!ck when the work has started, i.e. mildly tiresome stuff involving no shouting, at worst a testy exchange of emails between ppl who otherwise needn't ever interact

ok the situation has evolved a bit -- turns out the uninvolved person has been having quietly to wrangle a difficult slightly frightened old lady who demands everything to be as it always was -- not always an option when you're refashioning something used by many people, and when the crumbling and decaying aspect is the aspect everyone else wants tackled

the builder running the project did a fairly stellar job trying to calm her fears and talk her round but i suspect she will go back into her flat and alarm herself again, and keep her foot put down

i think the beef has been resolved since builders have carried on as they began (ie not dug up the section they laid down yesterday, as was being demanded)

i ended up doing a dull day's work on not enough sleep (it all blew up last night in email, and i worry even when it's not me going to be shouted at) but the completed section of path looks nice from here -- sadly the one cat who looked as if he was going to walk right across it per tradition sniffed at it gingerly and walked round on the flowerbeds

where is darraghmac, i need closure

She never came back, we moved away.

I realise this isnt great closure.

Id Google house fires in my home town but no thanks tbh

fair enough

Every now and then, the upstairs flat throw their cigs out of their window and into our garden. This can irritate the fuck out of me.

it probably irritates the dogs too

er, ha, i read that as "dogs" and not "cigs"

the resident most noisily active to get the paths resurfaced in the fierst place -- she is late middle age, quite unsteady on pins and (i suspect) has aspergers-related balance issues -- is now very vocally cross that halfway through the process the dug-up path is much worse than the path as it used to be (it will be finished in a week)

just heard her say loudly "i can't believe it" (my flat overlooks part of the path)

(i.e. this too will pass:, she is not the worst by any means and i feel for her plight, not being able to balance is p awful: i just sometimes wish "grit yr teeth and soldier on" wd occur to ppl dealing with short-lived processes THEY INITIATED, she is an intelligent person if a bit obsessive)

A bit unbalanced you might say? Sorry.

~post for "posts you didn't even for a second consider posting g to the "posts you had second thought about" thread~

lol it is all kicking off, the block that made least effort to contribute to the process and most fuss about the costs now HAAATE the result and are all angrily piling in proposing extremely expensive cosmetic changes which none of the other blocks want or will agree to

moral: (a) make yr block director turn up to meetings and represent you, (b) if you want it done a different way, do the research and legwork!

also a person and a cat have has already walked in the wet cement

I always think its a tragedy when municipal cement doesn't have graffiti or footprints in it

Especially paw prints.

Yes we asked them to tidy up the humanprint but leave the catprint.

next installment: suspended work now continuing once more, which i assume means angry complainers have been mollified, fingers x-ed this is sorted for now

probably doesn't belong on this thread (and besides i am in two minds abt it, since editing & rewrite are my meal-ticket) but blimey ppl's write-ups of meetings can be useless and unhelpful, how do you get thru adult office/professional life not being to do this competently? and yet many do! (and i am paid to tidy up after them so hey-ho, i don't actually mind this it just baffles me)

i love catprints in cement but spindly bird toe prints are my favourite, they look frail and absurd.

omg neighbour beef opened on a second front: old lady next door -- not part of blocks referred to above -- has someone in removing ivy (fair enough)

the ivy is actually growing up the wall of the recalcitrant block mentioned above (which looms over her garden) and round the side of her house on walls that overlooks my downstairs neighbour's garden -- i just heard her demanding that we and the middle block pay for its removal as a consequence

as far as i can see the roots are mostly in her garden (tbf they might also be round a corner where i can't see, in the garden of the recalcitrant block): anyway as far as i can tell from googling, the main responsibility for dealing with invasive ivy belong to the person whose land the roots are on (which seems definitively NOT to be our block) rather than ppl whose walls it is growing on (also not our block) -- though she is entirely within her rights to request access to cut it back when it's on her house, and the best access is via our garden

our blocks have serial history with this lady, she has more than once tried to get something for nothing before now in various shady instances

(meanwhile paths saga shd be over tomorrow, they have very nearly finished)

there was a huge furore outside my flat this morning - don't suppose you heard it mark? my downstairs neighbour's brother was going absolutely mental - i'd never seen the brother before, but the downstairs neighbour is fairly crazy, guy in his 50s, smokes weed all day, shouts at his wife and kids, probably violent, certainly sounds that way. for about 20 mins (and i left for work as it continued) the brother was outside the flat shouting up at my neighbour "you fucking pussyhole crackhead, come down here and i'll fucking kill you. you insult my wife, you beat your wife, you're a fat dumb cunt, i'm going to fuck you in the bum you pussyhole crackhead."

it was pretty insane - at one point some people tried to reason with the brother, i heard a posh voice say something that included "civilised human beings" in it which basically felt like racism to me. i did for a second think about advising the brother to maybe leave it, given someone was surely bound to call the police.

was a strange morning, knowing what i do of the neighbour, i'm inclined to believe the brother had legitimate grievance, and the ferocity of his anger suggested a long frustration with having such a c*** for a brother. i suggested to my flatmate i go down and pay the brother £20 then let him into the building to do his worst.

yes i did! just as a noise in the distance though, till i realised it had been going on for a LOOOONG time -- can't see that bit of the road from my flat so i went up on the roof to rubberneck, just as the shouting guy got into his car and drove off, laughing in a kind of loudly despairing way :(

laughing in a kind of loudly despairing way

hmm, board description or screen name?

given someone was surely bound to call the police

not i think just for shouting, even prolonged shouting -- there's quite a lot of that (which is why it didn't really register immediately with me)… ppl often yell up and down the passage, coming from or going into the square: the sound bounces right up into my front rooms (which is why i work at the back, where it sounds much further off), and i think most hearing it just shrug and wait for it to move on

(changing demographic may have bearing on this) (haha ie YOU)

haha - this went on for ages though and it was EXTREMELY loud and aggressive - like people were visibly distressed walking past - it was about a half hour of it. i feel like people are okay with indiscriminate street shouting, or even a few minutes of violent verbal barracking, but this was like deep obscenity and profanity over and over and over for 30 mins at about 0830.

A DISGRACE.

We've just moved into a new building and I'm trying to systematically talk to everyone in the surrounding flats and it appears that we have a very low bar to clear because everyone fucking hated the woman who lived there before us.

of the 32 flats in the blocks there are now maybe three whose occupants have lived here longer than me, i realised to my mild distress recently (26 years in november) (and 15 of those an ilxor)

Under 100 posts? I'm a bit surprised this thread isn't one of the top 25 longest threads on ILE.

I've had numerous others on the go over the years

paths update: project completed!

except that one of the other blocks has piped up saying that a small element outside their front door has been completely forgotten (which is true! i had forgotten abt it and so had the contractor -- so they are arguing it out over the phone, i don't think it's a big deal)

however one of the other blocks just gave me a bottle of champagne for all the work i did getting this to happen so i am fairly pro-neighbours currently :)

sometimes a bit of appreciation goes a long way. congratulations on your success.

ok i think the project is complete, all beefs squared all debts paid X[

^ Sounds like a Radiohead lyric.

buy yourself another bottle of champagne (assuming the first is already consumed)

I'm a bit surprised this thread isn't one of the top 25 longest threads on ILE.

Theres a couple other neighbours gripe threads is probably why.

also several dedicated to a long-running soap opera

I live in a pretty placid neighborhood, except for the house directly across from mine. The daughter of the woman who lives there seems to be getting kicked out and taken back in over and over. Sometimes she shows up and bangs on the door and the mother calls the police on her. A couple of times she's parked her car in the driveway and cops have shown up, taken pictures of the car and left.

I was coming home from a walk with baby stroller and the daughter was yelling at a dude. The dude crossed the street to get away from her and she threw a glass candle at him. It shattered all over the place and pieces of glass hit the baby stroller. Dude jumps in his car. Daughter yells at him "I'm the mother of your child and you put your hands on me?" Dude drives off yelling, "Crazy b---"

:O

Did you do anything about it? I would have called the cops on her for the candle thing, esp if it came close to hitting you or your child.

Didn't call the cops. I was going to be the only one with the baby for the next 8 hours so I didn't want to be talking to police etc. Also, it seemed like maybe some domestic violence occurring and I didn't want to add to the misery.

I wouldn't think twice about calling the cops on someone who was so out of control they were throwing things at people in the street, regardless of what they may have been through themselves. But I understand the impulse to not involve yourself in something when you're the only person watching your kid.

Ugh. Junkies are using the landing/roof area outside our flat to shoot up. Found a syringe and a load of mail they'd rifled through up on the roof after my wife told me she heard suspicious noises coming from up there while I was on the way hoe from work. Also found somebody's debit card that's brand new. It's not the first time we've found weird stuff up there, there's been discarded clothing and beer cans and stuff left up there before. My guess is there's a dealer in the building and they go up there to shoot up after they score, because if they lived in the building why wouldn't they just shoot up in their own flat? I called the non-emergency police number and reported it, but I doubt they'll do anything. Felt a bit weird doing it I've never called the police before.

These bastards are there all the time now. We've chased them away at least 5 times but they just come back half an hour later. We've called the police every day and they finally sent some out last night. They made some concerned noises about how disgusting it is to have bloody hankies and needles strewn across the stairs but it's a matter for the building management company. The building management company say it's a matter for the police.

My wife is not handling this well, they are there at all times of the day sometimes we get woken up at 4am by the door slamming. Now we've got no help from anybody she's talking about buying some pepper spray and trying to get rid of them that way. The police say not to confront them but wtf are we supposed to do if nobody will do anything??

Fuck.

My wife just messaged me they're there now and she's called the police again. Our agent says it's not their problem.

Is there any way we can get out of a 6 month contract due to this? I'm guessing no.