This morning someone I know on Twitter responded to new year greetings with a yawn or two, as he had been kept awake by people in his neighbourhood - yahoos, as he called them, and hadn’t slept a wink. I said that sometimes on our street in Budapest we suddenly get woken by crowds of Spanish holiday makers who for some reason decide to take a stroll down our street at anywhere between 2 & 4.30 in the morning, singing & shouting & shrieking. I keep meaning to have a bucket on the balcony, I explained, filled with compost or such like, ready to chuck at them, but I’m never well enough organised & anyway I’m much too scared.
At the mention of buckets, another Twitter friend joined the conversation She had been reminded of a summer holiday she’d spent in a peaceful old house in Maine, on the water, with some friends, a couple of whom had two boys aged about 10-12. This was her story:
“The boys, liked to yell and scream and kick balls around the quiet waterfront lawn constantly - boys will be boys - but one sunny day they were out of control outside and would not move or stop when I repeatedly - and sweetly! - asked them to. So finally I got a big bucket, filled it with water, and walked calmly over to them when they were -unusually - standing still, and tipped it all over both of them. (I was younger and stronger then). They were stunned and amazed & outraged. As were their parents. (I was pretty shocked myself!) I told them, it’s only water. It won’t hurt you. You’ll soon be dry. And I reminded them that I had tried several times to ask them nicely. Etc. After that their parents kept a closer eye on them, they became more considerate, and we all had a happy holiday together. However....not sure tipping water from above on strangers below would yield such satisfactory results. (And no, it wasn’t on my ‘bucket list’. (groan) I don’t have one. And they didn’t exist back in those more innocent days.) 💦”
This led me to remember a night years ago we spent in an old hotel in France, near the sea. In the late afternoon, a couple of flash cars with folded down convertible roofs arrived, crowded with the kind of young creatures that I had read about & at last had the chance to see in the wild - a bunch of the jeunesse dorée (you can see similar types any day, swishing about near Five Ways, Paddington, Sydney). They piled into the pretty house across the road & proceeded to make an ever increasing racket, going on right through the night until 5.45 am. Even our children, never known to go willingly to bed, were weeping & asking us to get the neighbours to stop the party by 3 am.
But the neighbours wouldn’t. We went over several times but each time they told us to rack off. The hotel owner said they came every year & were the local gentry, so there was nothing that could be done (hang on, I thought you French had a revolution). We were stumped.
But we got our revenge, which was something.
Leaving the next morning, we first stopped our car outside the house of the offenders & leaned on the horn, continuing until every last occupant of the cars that had arrived the afternoon before had emerged onto verandas or balconies, moaning, clutching their hungover heads & begging us to stop.
What is the moral of these stories, I wonder? Become a hermit perhaps, or think of others, especially after dark.
A very happy new year.
Something around forty-five years ago, I was at a gathering of distant relatives near a lake out west. After dark, those under twenty were outside by their tents, those over thirty (and perhaps under fifteen) were in the house. We who were young sat up and talked and laughed. We had no electronic devices, but in the woods voices do carry.
ReplyDeleteThe next morning I woke up to the tape of some other relatives' band playing. It sounded like a spoon down the disposal, with a vacuum sweeper for accompaniment. I know that there is only so much volume an unassisted tape player can produce, but again, there was little ambient noise to hide it.
Was it intended as punishment?
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