Love Thy Neighbour... who she?

He also seemed very keen on mail-order goods. Almost daily, sometimes more, a delivery van would pull up outside depositing various boxes. When the Khans took a rare holiday, and the goods were left with us, on their return we had a large pile of deliveries, from various catalogue companies; only addressed to dozens of different names at the same address, none of them Khan.

He was caught out when a catalogue deliverer was puzzled by the multiple copies, various names etc and started asking questions. A police raid followed. They found thousands of pounds worth of expensive electrical appliances unopened in the their boxes, piled in various rooms.

Turned out our Mr Khan had dreamt up some ingenious fraud, the details of which were never revealed in court in case they were copied, whereby he paid a fraction of the cost for goods, the rest paid by others unwittingly. He was sent to prison and barred from teaching. I no longer doubted he had been a University lecturer.

Upon release he set up a video store, until he got prosecuted and fined for piracy. He then went into printing using his garage, and from the sound of things, works largely at night. I do wonder what exactly he churns out.

They moved in one weekend when my parents were away. The temptation to go and introduce myself with a few friends and be like "oh yeah.......we live here.....our parents left us the house.....we keep to ourselves really, just us and the band" was strong.

I like them though because they have kids and our neighbourhood is so old and dead it's nice to hear footballs and screaming from next door. Also I like when their ball goes over the wall and I can return it pretty much instantly, because when we were small enough to play in the garden our old neighbours never fucking found our footballs and we had to call around or jump over.

two actual real professional opera singers just moved into #4: they rehearse during weekday mornings

Our neighbours are a single mum with a couple of kids who I occasionally see but they really must be deaf as they have never ever complained about Carter / Kate Bush / So Solid Crew being played at 3:00 on Saturday morning when we are drunk.

My upstairs neighbor (who I know all to well) is a complete and total freak and likes knocking on my door at 5-7pm every evening and complaining that my cigarette smoke is seeping through the ceiling and that I'm playing my music too loud. I told him to fuck off finally (after five months--I'm way too nice) and don't answer the door for him anymore. I haven't seen him in months and I'm pleased to no end.

In one house -- the New Guy, Paul. Seems friendly, talked to him briefly, don't know much about him. On the other side, Jeff, the eternal. A classic Costa Mesa "Hey, brah" type -- works on cars and motorcycles all day (it's his business), has a kid, likes his beer, no doubt. Very relaxed, though -- never had a problem with noise complaints or anything.

Mark, it is now your sworn duty to befriend them and talk up a lovely American soprano named Joei who you met this past summer.

I wonder if my parents only called me & bro Emma & James as it is difficult to make compound house names up from these?

What could be better than a house named JAMMA?

Our neighbors are an interesting crew; a posse of first-time condo owners in their 20s and 30s... except for one couple in their late 50s. There have been squabbles, but for the most part everyone gets along well.

http://www.nakedhatred.com/mulletsgalore/mulletpix/classification s/II/frolet.jpg

matt and danielle used to 'do it' to madonna (the immaculate collection), and then they'd beat eachother up to guns n roses (use your illusion II)(this was the early 90s). danielle was quite well-to- do. she had a shiny little red barina and a job. it was her parents' house. matt had no job, but he had several pieces of a motorbike that he was gradually putting together, and an impressive array of rat- tails down the back of his neck. while danielle was away at work, matt used to sit on the front porch drinking melbourne bitter with a skanky check-out chick still in her blue zip-up uniform.

one day, matt crashed the barina into a parked car on our street. conscientious danni had had the car insured, so while it was out of action at the panel beaters', the insurance company provided her with a courtesy car. matt crashed the courtesy car.

another time, i was playing out in the front yard when a furious matt, face like an enraged pitbull, stormed out of his front door with a gym bag over his shoulder, a pair of knickers hanging out of the zip. he minced out the gate and halfway up the street past the dim sim factory. danielle burst out the gate: "where are you going?!?" she cried. "away from you!" he shouted back. danielle was already clambering into the barina. "d'you wanna lift??" she called back.

matt and danielle's life together was obviously stormy. it was clear their days together were numbered. that last sunny day arrived when matt was working on the bits of motorbike in the backyard garage. as was customary, he had a cigarette hanging precariously from the corner of his mouth as he worked close to many old tins of paint, mineral turps, petrol etc. mum was watering the garden in our backyard when she heard this WHHOOOOOMMPPPHHH, and saw flames leaping up over the back fence. she trained the hose on them while dad called the fire bridage. the old garage was burnt into an ashy mound. luckily the fire didn't spread to the house, although it did char the roof of our shed a bit. that was the last straw for danielle's parents. then danielle found out about the checkout chick. they moved out about a month later.

My next-door neighbor (also a Goff, this one a girl) had a hippyish boyfriend whom I lent a lamp and a chair when I moved in because I had no room. I think he moved out a long time ago, I wonder if he took my stuff with him. She barely says hello to me so I'm not that psyched to strike up a conversation with her to find out.

As for volume level, I'm by far the loudest one in the building; only gotten one noise complaint, though.

Then again, apparently Otis, Mary's wonder dog, terrorized this family in his younger days, whenever he escaped the back lawn. Maybe Otis knows something we don't.

(this happened TWICE just now. TWICE.)

A really awesome girl named Heather used to live down the hall from me but she moved out to be replaced by a crazy guy, who came over the day he moved in to borrow toilet paper, and then asked me to come over and check his pilot light on his oven and reassure him that it was safe to have a continual flame on the stove ("Yes, jsut don't put paper on your stove!"). Just before I went on vacation I walked by his window and saw him sitting in the dark in front of his computer with the words "IT'S JUST ME" in 36 pt type on the screen. "Okay, fuck," I thought, then left the country. The day we got back he had completely fucking lost his shit, he was pacing up and down the halls, opening and closing his door, and acting like a freak. I went down and knocked on his door to see if he was on drugs and he said that he was OCD, and it had just gotten out of control, and that he was working on it. Part of this was an inability for him to throw out his trash; I'd keep seeing him standing at the bins with garbage in his hand, putting it in, walking away, turning back, getting it out, looking at it, and putting it back in, etc,,,finally taking it back to his apartment. The hallway began to really stink. He finally moved out and he'd completely trashed his place. Now two chinese guys live in his (studio) apartment and do nothing but study all day and occasionally yell at each other.

Dana, who lives two floors above me, is a musician (I guess), and only gets home at 3 in the morning. I don't know what he does with the rest of his time but I don't think he works. He's lived there forever so his rent low, and he always gets a roommate so his rent is really miniscule. The guy who lives there now has taken to singing fucking Perfect Circle songs at the top of his fucking lungs. He started into "Judith" at 1:00 AM IN THE FUCKING MORNING the other night. I stormed up there and almost kicked the door down and left a note threatening to kill him. He shut up.

No one lives across from me and the guy who lives right upstairs is afraid of me for some reason. So I can be as loud as I want.

Oh how I want to move.

The village is very small - only about 50 houses, I would guess - and we pretty much all know each other. There's lot of socialising together down t'pub, and other thriving community activities such as a tennis club, football club, cricket club, keep fit and yoga classes at the village hall in the evenings (followed by more socialising down t'pub). We used to be in the same Oxford Mail quiz league that MarkH is in, but we didn't take it very seriously and after we'd been thrashed by Bicester Civil Service a few times, we stopped bothering to scrape a team together. We have a "Dangerous Sports Club" comprising about 10 couples - so far all we've done is go hot air ballooning, but we've booked a skiing holiday together for next March. Fun stuff.

There's an annual barbecue/ceilidh up at the village hall which is lots of drunken fun. There's also a village open day in which strangers get to come stamping through your herbacious borders, and sit in your garden drinking tea. This is to raise money for the church.

My nearest neighbours on the west side are a young married couple with four young daughters. They moved in five years ago, and we became friends almost at once (in fact I'd say that Kate is now one of my best friends); neighbours on the east side are a kindly elderly couple who look after my cats whenever I'm away on holiday.

Many of us have keys to each other's houses. It's nice here :)