What’s that I hear next door?

Three months ago I left quaint cottage life to join BF in his Big House. The worst of the noise interruptions I dealt with during cottage living were the usual suspects: dogs barking, house alarms going off [I’ll never forget the time the neighbour’s alarm bleeped for a week] and fighting cats.  

In Big House, things are a little different. The dogs still bark, the alarms still bleep, and the cats still fight, but these sounds are tolerable background fluff compared to the ones that now top the list.
One set of neighbours have what we think are Rastafarian / Wiccan / Voodoo spiritual evenings around a blazing bonfire every other Sunday evening. And by evening, I mean from 3pm to 9pm … At around 4pm, the monotonous banging on a drum begins. It’s not melodic; it’s not even trance-like. It’s just pure banging! Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong … for hours!? 

The chanting in an unrecognisable language begins. We surrender our sundowners on the patio and rush around to the dividing wall with wobbly green plastic chairs, in the hope that they’ll hoist us high enough to get a peak over the wall. I can’t reach. BF reaches high enough to just get his eyes over it. I try not to snort with laughter because he looks like Wilson from Home Improvement. Eyes as wide as saucers, BF launches off the chair, stumbling toward our overgrown rose bush, trying not to laugh or burst his spleen. “They’re naked! They’re dancing around the fire with spears!” We haven’t looked over the wall since. 

At least the fire dancers sing together. On the other side of the wall lives Midnight Karaoke Performer. The strange part is that we never hear the music she shouts along to, so she’s either busting out the chorus of every song she knows every two minutes, or hopefully, she’s dancing around the house with an iPod in her ears, oblivious to the volume of her voice, or the tuneless parade we have to endure for all hours of the night. 

Just recently, while enjoying a hot bath together, BF and I stopped dead in the suds to listen, wide-eyed in horror, to “From London to Africa … London to Africaaaaaa …” 

And just when you think it’s over, out comes Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, sounding very similar to the way the girl on the Sloggi advert, which sponsors 5FM’s Gareth Cliff’s Old School song of the day, sings it [wrong]. 

But who’s worse? Naked spear-holding fire dancers, midnight karaoke singers, or the people in the middle peeking over the wall and singing along?