Friday evening musings… how bonkers are your neighbours?

Our immediate neighbour is properly weird. He used this mountain biking forum and ‘chats’ to strangers about bikes and shit. I mean, that’s just crazy behaviour…

The house we bought in the village turned out to be the local weird neighbours house.

Everyone locally knows it by it’s previous owners rather than it’s name and after 5 years we are still hearing new stories about them. In hindsight we should have offered tours around it before renovating as it was pretty uniquely decorated and only one neighbour had seen inside the doorway.

No drama one was once a neighbour to @gixxer71109 and @spenny2k at diffrent points.

I am the odd neighbour though….

As as @binners @tthew harry_the_spider can vouch

I dont do a quiet bbq

If you had anyone living within half a mile of you, they’d definitely be complaining about the PA system of the punk band in the back garden. 😀

Next door is for sale. I’ve had two lots of lovely neighbours whilst I’ve been here. Fingers crossed for three in a row, I do not wish to be able to contribute anything more useful to this thread.

Our neighbour opposite is a pantomime dame!

Nice bloke. Don’t see much of him really, only now and again coming out the house with a wheeled suitcase off to do a week on a cruise ship or something.

Seen him on massive billboards in the town though advertising panto. It belies his quiet, self to himself nature.

Our other neighbour feeds the foxes (that come through the adjoining allotment) Must spend an absolute fortune on raw chicken etc. I like a fox , but I’ve never thought that it’s probably a good idea to be feeding them like garden birds.

One of my neighbours bullies me for using a briefcase, even though it’s the “done-thing” at work.

He also has this weird habit of parking in front of my house whenever I go out

Ours are all good except one. Bob the builder. Likes building stuff. Two big sheds on drive in front of house, large side extension that part of the upstairs projects over the fence line, massive rear extension, additional building in back garden that one or two of the kids live in, and a log burner in a clean air zone in a house without a chimney, he has this stainless steel one on the side of the house now. Usually, just before Christmas, we end up with his latest pile of rubbish opposite out house on some shared land. Hes currently ripping up the whole of the block paving at the front of his house as he won’t maintain it as its usually deep in weeks. This will also mean moving the sheds. This won’t be finished by Christmas and we’ll all be looking at another building site.

The poor lady next door to him is now housebound fallowing a fall. She used to walk everywhere, but now has all this racket.  Oh and there are gazillions of kids. They have at least five of their own and three foster kids (hence the extensions). The house was a small three bed semi like ours initially.

Our immediate neighbours are lovely – well, bar a couple of minor issues, like him being a half-deaf ex-Para who occasionally feels the need to play music so loudly that the whole street shakes – but basically friendly, helpful, kind etc. Except that thanks to the wonders of social media, we know they are bonkers, out-there conspiracy theorists, vaccine deniers, who think, for example, that the recent air traffic outage was some sort fo ploy by ‘the globalists’ to manipulate us. That the US government is orchestrating climate change events. And, of course, The Universe is constantly telling us what to do.

They follow ‘a visionary’ they discovered online who turns out to be… David Icke. And more and worse. They are quintessentially nuts. The only vaguely ‘normal’ odd behavioural trait  they have, is a bonkers territorial attitude to car parking outside their house, but as we never park there, it makes no odds to us.

On the one hand it’s an interesting insight into how perfectly normal people tumble down a conspiracy wormhole. On the other, it’s also darkly hilarious in just how mad it gets. In honesty, I’d rather have neighbours who in everyday life are perfectly lovely, but are online conspiracy nuts than the other way round.

That said, if the missus hadn’t accepted a friend request on FB, we’d have carried on living in blissful ignorance.

The rest of our neighbours are thankfully fairly normal bar the odd OAP prejudices, well apart from the guy a few doors down who converted his front garden into a pensioners’ ‘graveyard’ in protest at the winter fuel allowance thing complete with sign, mock graves and grave-stones, which was a novel surprise.

For perspective, I’m sure they view my tendency to ride around on bikes as being quite nuts as well…

They are obsessed with having their car parked directly in front of their house.

I’m sure there was some survey a while ago, maybe from an estate agent or similar, which reckoned that parking wars were the number one cause of neighbourly strife.

It’s only getting worse as cars get bigger, more people have 2+ car households and, with a lot of houses now getting EV charging and needing to be parked next to it.

My neighbour used to be a total nightmare about parking. Her daughter (a terrible driver anyway) would park her little car at her parents house for the day then walk to the station. Both parents would come out every morning: “back a bit!” “turn yer wheel!” “bit closer!”

It was a passive aggressive way of stating their ownership of this space, they knew that I could hear them yelling instructions cos it was only just down from my bedroom window. They’d finish the parking assistance routine by stating loudly “well it wouldn’t be so difficult if it wasn’t for that bloody car [mine] parked right there!”

next door one side is old Mrs Shantos. We call her that because she’s old and that’s her name…Anyway her sons grand kids, nephews etc are something to do with BooHoo or Pretty Little Thing – one of those anyway, and every 6 weeks or so the street outside is like a showroom as fleets of Range Rovers and Bentleys appear. They’re nice folks though. Mrs Shantos is stone deaf, I can hear her phone – it has one of those “end of the world” ringers installed, she can’t, or is ignoring it. The telly is on max volume all the time, but it’s either just prayers or the latest Bollywood.

The other side is a student rental. So far of 4 groups that have rented it, 3 have been ace, then there was Tom, Lavinia, Chelsea and Cressida (and no, I’m not making those names up) who were very much into their all night parties. I lost count of how many times I’d need to go around to theirs on Sunday morning at oh’dark thirty to tell them to stop for the night. In the summer they’d spill out to the yard, and mysdelf and out neighbours from across the road would have to go in the slum and find one of them amosgt the heaving mass of hormones to get them to stop, one time I just found the main RCD and flipped it off.

Repeated calls to the agent and then the landlord when we badgered  his details from them finally got them out half way through their lease. I made a special point of going round to knock on their door very loudly at 2pm after their their last blowout and they were all very hung over to give them the good news myself after the landlord wrote to tell me.  My neighbour apparently stood and clapped as they left being picked up by their parents. Unsurprisingly the place was a shit tip, and we saw a troop of builders and carpet layers going in for a couple of weeks after. There’s a group of very cool kids there now, the loudest they get is a sing along in the kitchen.

Current next door is completely Barmy, as in Barmy Army. They are in the West Indies watching the cricket. He works on high towers doing ropework and installations so must be a bit unhinged. Before him we had a nice but dotty old lady who never spent a penny on the place, lived in two rooms of a three storey house, but had a live in companion, a housekeeper , a gardener and a factor. She would toddle off to the races and disappear on cruises for months. She was also famously forgetful about what she had and where she left it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1185778/Jade-water-buffalo-left-bank-vault-70-years-fetches-record-4m-auction.html

Relatively boring here. Family on the next close (their back garden is close to our front garden) . Unknown number of kids. Similar ages to ours.

Every morning mum would scream at them. 0715 if we were lucky. Back door open. Effing and jeffing. Pretty much every day for a year.

Then, one day, dad must have had enough and spent about half an hour screaming at her.

House went up for sale. Now SSTC, I presume a divorce is going through. Apparently the last two families in there have also split up.

My slightly bonkers neighbours misses actually stood in the driveway waiting for her husband to return as he was 15.mins later than he was supposed to be.

So she could start having a go at him the second he pulled in to the driveway……

TBH he could have a history of er ‘playing away’ 🙂

But that pales into insignificance to another resident of the same street!!!!

Cromwell Street, Fred & Rosemary West

Living through all the media circus while also being made redundant means spring 1994 was not a high point in my life, but better than the poor souls who suffered at their hands.

Ha! I used to live in various crappy bedsits around Cromwell St. at that time. Full of mentally ill people, drug addicts and criminals. Luckily I didn’t own anything of value so I didn’t always notice when I was burgled, maybe if my coat was stolen or something. I’m pretty sure Fred and Stephen West stole my bike from outside the library since that’s what they did for kicks.

We’ve been in the same house 30 years. We’ve had a few slightly odd neighbours, but all is OK as previous post. We had an old German lady opposite, perfectly fine, but really hated another neighbours kids for some reason, and fell out with their parents. The lady was a little odd and not tolerant of kids.

The lady next door to us when we moved in didn’t like anything we did to the gardens. Bear in mind these were a new build with turf on the front and mud in the back.  We, at considerable cost, put in a quality fence at the back, she didn’t like it and wanted access through our back garden to our drive (houses are a four block terrace) – there were no rights in the housing documents, so we said no. I would cut her lawn for her, and even tend the hedge (fnar fnar) despite all her complaints. Kindness eventually won. I still keep the hedge in shape both sides, even though we’ve had a lot of neighbours (house currently rented). Never hear a peep from the single mum next door – she’s very quiet. When I sort out the hedge I’ll usually weed the block paving for her.

All my beighbours are lovely.

****…. Its me isn’t it.

Our current neighbours are fantastic.

However, when we rented we had a succession of awful neighbours. The 3 friends who partied like it was 1999 every Friday and Saturday night, the husband who used to come home drunk from the club on a Friday night and knock 7 bells out of his long suffering wife.

The gold medal goes to the divorced taxi driver father of 2. He used to have his girls every other Tuesday night and Saturday – we knew this because there was always screaming and crying without fail. When they weren’t visiting he used to sing – Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree and Nessun Dorma on repeat for hours…. he was not vocally talented

The highlight of a family trip to visit our cousins in Trowbridge was to gaze out of their bedroom window at their neighbours pyramid. It was truly impressive,  taking up most of the lawn and several metres high. Made of plywood and painted silver it had a small door in the side. The owners were heavily into ‘pyramid power’ any slight illness and they would sleep in the pyramid to harness its healing power. Also, they would only drink water that had been stored in the pyramid for at least 24 hours.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power

well apart from the guy a few doors down who converted his front garden into a pensioners’ ‘graveyard’ in protest at the winter fuel allowance thing complete with sign, mock graves and grave-stones, which was a novel surprise.

haha thats fantastic, pic please!

cant compete with some of these, we just have a transvestite next to us who has his own youtube channel for people to follow his antics.  probably makes a packet from that.  practices his golf swing and mows the lawn nude in his back garden which has caught me out a couple of times when ive had to nip round the back of the gazebo for a bit of maintenance work 😀

lovely bloke, rides a bike too (not naked) so who knows, he may be on here.

used to come home drunk from the club on a Friday night and knock 7 bells out of his long suffering wife.

Hmmmm yes. We lived in a shithole hellhole flat for a while that was one of four flats that formed half of a huge semi detached house. The other half was similarly  split and part was a halfway house.

Anyway, one particular night the screams, shouting and sobs from next door got too much so I eventually phoned the police.  They were **** useless. They kept demanding to know the postcode of the house next door. I kept telling them I didn’t know and it seemed rude to go around and ask. In the end I gave them my address and postcode with detailed instructions not to come to my flat under any circumstances, but the one next door.

Cue a knock on the door ten minutes later and four **** coppers turning up and discussing the issues very loudly.  Me trying to get them to piss quietly off and speak instead to the behemoth ex con next door who was beating up his missus.

So they went next door, then returned to me to tell me he had denied it, etc etc

“Will you just **** off and not make it quite so obvious that I’m the one that grassed “

Left my house to go to work one morning, loads of police and road taped off. Pootled past on my motorbike to see neighbour on the roof of the terrace street chucking roofing tiles at the police and trying to pull chiminy pots off to chuck at them….

And with that. The thread has peaked.

I have spoken about my odd neighbour on here before…

He collects old 80s Ford Sierras, not nice Cosworth ones, but bog standard ones. Currently he has 5 in front of his house and one on a neighbour’s drive. They all have Guernsey number plates too (we’re in Devon!)

He feeds the local seagulls – puts out paper plates of food on the lawn for them. He is also known for feeding (and basically stealing) peoples cats. He will feed them and they end up living in his garden and house. He renames them, but doesn’t bother to give them any vet care, etc. when ill, so we have had to deal with ill and dying cats coming into our garden.

He tried it in with my old cat, we found him in a box in his kitchen. I lost my shit with him and he hasn’t spoken to me for 4 years now. Just blanks me.

He also has a serious Amazon/eBay addiction, with a constant stream of deliveries every day of the week. His house is piled high in every room with boxes of shite.

I suspect he’s in his late 70s early 80s, and though he has some obvious MH issues, I’m afraid I won’t be particularly sad when he shuffles off this mortal coil.

Neighbour on one side is a painter and decorator, and thus, has decorated most of our house. Neighbour the other side is a functioning alcoholic, who regularly has blazing rows with herself. On the plus slide, you will never miss bin day, as the evening before, she deposits a week’s worth of cans and bottles into the recycling/rubbish bin. This takes at least 10 minutes. We also know when she’s mortal drunk as The Stranglers’ Golden Brown will waft through the walls!

I suspect he’s in his late 70s early 80s, and though he has some obvious MH issues, I’m afraid I won’t be particularly sad when he shuffles off this mortal coil.

They’re usually the people that just go on and on. Clinging onto some semblance of life with no logic as to how they achieve this.

We had an elderly “aunt” (one of those women you just call “aunt”, I think she was actually a cousin of my grandfather) and she lived alone in a bungalow maybe half a mile up the road from my grandparents. Alone, except for about 6 cats, only half of which actually belonged to her, the remainder belonged to various neighbours. They were everywhere, they’d jump onto the kitchen worktop and lick the butter as she was spreading it on her toast. She basically survived on tea and toast and half a bottle of sherry a day.

When she died (aged about a hundred and eleventy nine) we discovered that the neighbours all referred to her as Mad Old Cat Lady. The house needed a full strip and fumigate, there was cat shit, cat piss and cat hair on and in every surface in the house. The furniture had to be burnt.

supernova

Ha! I used to live in various crappy bedsits around Cromwell St. at that time. Full of mentally ill people, drug addicts and criminals. Luckily I didn’t own anything of value so I didn’t always notice when I was burgled, maybe if my coat was stolen or something. I’m pretty sure Fred and Stephen West stole my bike from outside the library since that’s what they did for kicks.

@supernova were you there when we also had the local arsonist, remember the end house on Wellington St getting torched along with various cars over a 6 month period. I owned the 1st,2nd & 3rd floors of No 6 Cromwell St, it was all I could afford in 1988 and when I finally sold it in 1996 I lost a 1/3 of its original purchase price despite doing it up and spending £1000’s on it 🙁

@MrOvershoot I always thought it was such a shame those streets had become rundown, the houses around there must have been great homes at one time. I liked the ones with the wrought iron steps down Arthur Street. My Father in Law was the senior partner of the doctor’s surgery on Cromwell Street. He was fascinated by the original doctor Walter Hadwen who was a very interesting character.

Attached neighbour is lovely, retired school teacher. We have a good neighbour relationship.  On the other side they are, erm, a little eccentric shall we say.  When we moved in, she had a full sized shipping container on the drive which she went to great pains to tell us was just for storing art materials as she was an art teacher.  What it actually was, was extra storage for the house as she’s a hoarder.  We’ve had police and fire brigade round more than once asking if we’ve seen her as they couldn’t get any response after concerns were raised (she’s fine!).

She has a house somewhere else and basically shuttles crap from one house to the other, depending on what crap she wants in the main residence.  During COVID she acquired a man friend who is as bonkers as she is, found him in our garden one day looking very distressed – he’d lost his cat (he walks it on a lead).  He also pops up randomly on the other side of the wall, I’ll be chopping a bush or something like that and his head pops up with a cheery hello – nothing too odd about that bar the fact he’s had to climb up about 15 feet to get there! 8⁠-⁠)

I saw Fat White Family on one of their early tours, I think it was an NME multi-band thing. Was stood near them before they went on stage and was struck by what a filthy looking bunch of urchins they were. Sod living in the same town as that lot, let alone next door!

My current ones are ok, before them their mother lived in the house, she was out in the garden one day after my lady friend had visited and gave me a right telling off about our noisy sex! I mean, yeah my lady did used to scream quite a bit ?

A few decades before me and the then wife lived in a semi next a right bizarre bunch. Dad had one arm, son was called Arnie by the locals, but was just fat and a bit simple, but the daughter, my lordy, permanently hunched over , always looked like a drowned rat. Came in our house once, can’t remember why and started coming on to me in front of the wife. man she was odd. Some freak got her pregnant a while later.. I wonder how little Courtney is doing now… Arnie and the dad used to bet on the horses and Sunday mornings could here them yelling at the tv cheering on some horse or other. I banged on the wall once and could hear Arnie saying he was gonna come roynd a beat me up . Hilarious ?

Then there was the postperson who lived on the back of our first house, used to have the radio alarm set for 3am, whether she was there or not. I went round once, she wasn’t there, so I opened the electric cabinet and turned her power off.

I’m in an end terrace so only have one neighbour who is quiet, we occasionally have a chat over the fence. Two old blokes moaning about the state of the world type of thing.  I have forbidden him from dying or moving away .

I lived across the hall from a call girl for a few years. She was a good neighbour, out in the evenings and home in the day and was happy to take in any parcels that were delivered to me.

We’re fairly lucky, despite living in a bit of the country that used to make regular appearances on Road wars, our neighbours are nice and we try and help each other out when needed.

However… Attached neighbour is a diy nightmare. He’s always drilling holes in something, actually suspect the whole family is deaf now. They’re lovely but can’t do anything quietly regardless of the time of day.

Opposite are all retired. And pretty much every time we go out or come back, they are at their windows (3 houses) watching. Maybe they don’t realise leaving the light on means they are visible behind the net curtains or they don’t care. It’s like an audience as I reverse park onto the drive. Maybe they’ve got bets on me reversing into something? Or they suspect me of some crime or other.

Not neighbours, but the actual people we bought our house from were not normal.

He moved out (the day we moved in) using 2 sheep trailers. He then left so much stuff at the front and never came back to take it away. He filled the green bin with wood shavings, it was so heavy I couldn’t move it. His office was in the attic and he’d been using a landline that for some reason BT had never charged him for. The boiler was condemned and we couldn’t use it. The whole house had been a diy disaster with dangerous wiring and plumbing not fit for purpose. His 2 daughters both had the same name one from the new wife and one from a  previous marriage. On first viewing the house, his Mrs. wouldn’t let me in at the appointed time, when I finally got through the door she was eating her evening meal with wet clothes hung over every radiator and a small child in bed (I was told not to go in that room).

When we eventually moved in, our new neighbours said the family were bonkers and drove them mad with all the noise and weekend projects. Unfortunately it took us 6 months to move in for them to move out and in that time we saw the family quite a bit.

Just one more thing, 4/5 months after they moved out, I received a ‘screwfix order’ of 5 really large boxes in the previous owners name, one box was so big it contained a radiator. It took a while to convince the van driver ‘not’ to unload all of the boxes after he plonked at least 2 on the front path.

Moved into a new build house in 2011. Met the guy who had made an offer on the next door house whilst we were in the process of buying and had some concerns, but just assumed he was a middle aged IT bloke with a BMW M3. Turned out he would regularly treat himself to a high class prostitute on a Saturday night and the pimp would sit on the driveway with their engine running in the early hours.

At some point he settled down to married life and decided to rent the house and buy another property. One of his ‘school mates’ rented the house, who after a few months brought over a Thai bride and her Son to live with him. On new years eve they had some sort of domestic and he attempted to run her over in his Mercedes SUV on the driveway, before driving off. She came to our door dripping in blood like something from a horror film. We drove her to A&E and spent NYE sitting with her in A&E and looking after the boy. Bloke then vanished leaving Thai bride in the house for a few months until debt collectors started calling- hadn’t paid a single bill since day 1. Finally IT bloke sold the house in 2022 and we now have very boring fantastic neighbours. There is NOTHING worse than bad neighbours.

anagallis_arvensis
Full Member
Left my house to go to work one morning, loads of police and road taped off. Pootled past on my motorbike to see neighbour on the roof of the terrace street chucking roofing tiles at the police and trying to pull chiminy pots off to chuck at them….

I think you need to accept that calling Strangeways your house is likely a sign of institutionalisation and “your trip to work” a pretty brazen escape attempt to be honest.

Properly bonkers. But also wonderful people.

I moved to get away from awful neighbours. The couple that bought my old house converted it into an HMO, and given my old neighbour was obsessive about parking, the simple fact that there are now five cars instead of just one fighting for space makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

We’ve never had any bad neighbours – well the satanist primary school teacher was a bit odd- but the wife’s best friend lived in Abergavenny and years ago we were out with them and they said that they were moving and had got a great deal on a house “on the Crescent”… “a deal, what not  next to Mad Evans”… oh dear .. they lasted 6months

Mad Evans was a really nasty horrible women. She got jailed in the end for harassment. She used to be in the local news loads and the BBC reported her death. The “Abergavenny ASBO dies”.

Our immediate neighbours are lovely, but also utterly insane. Shortly after moving in we went on holiday.  It was Easter and we’d had some snow, so I’d left my show shovel and big brush in front of the front door.  This clearly disrupted her OCD as a couple of days later she came over and quietly moved it to be out of her line of site.

Last summer we again went on holiday. This time she came over and weeded the entire block paving section of our drive. Looks really nice, but I never asked for her to do it. It’s not  a small space either at 8mx15m. I’ve recently cottoned on to the fact they go through about 2 bottles of wine a day. I’m not sure whether  the wine brought on the insanity or allows it to fade away into the background.