Smudger Snippets: A Pointless Exercise
Created | Updated Dec 12, 2011
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
Pointless Exercise
During our ongoing feud we had last year with our neighbour, we had spent weeks upon weeks of filling in forms every time his dog was allowed to go on barking for hours at a time, and his television was on so loud, we couldn’t even hear our own television. My wife is terminally ill, as many of you may know already, and does not get any sleep at nights; we tend to have a nap in the afternoon. Well I should say tried to have a nap, but with the constant noise coming from next door, made that impossible. Our life at that time was almost unbearable, and we were both at our wits end. We had got our local councillor involved, along with a nice lady from victim support, who the police sent round to see us, after our front window had been smashed for the eighth time!
The whole thing started over a simple visit I made to his front door a few months earlier, to ask him politely if he could make an effort to stop his dogs' constant barking, and to turn the volume on his TV down a bit. Although he arrived at the door with a belligerent manner holding his barking dog back, he seemed to willing to help, but the fact that I had to keep asking him to repeat what he was saying, as I couldn’t hear above the dogs barking, he seemed to understand what my visit was about. Not that it did any good, as his first act, after my visit to his door, was to turn his television up louder, and allowed his dog to carry on barking. It wasn’t just us that were suffering his noise, as he used to leave his living room window open to around four inches, where his dog could bark at everyone walking or driving past his house, some of the neighbours even asked us how we could suffer it.
When I asked them about our neighbour, they told me that he has been a bully all of his life, even when he used to work at the local paper mill, in fact he was almost sacked once for bullying a workmate, and caused him actual injury. He was eventually made redundant from his job at the age of fifty nine, and had spent the past four years complaining to anyone who would listen to him. We got the impression that he was not a well liked person at all, and had no friends in the village at all, despite being a local man.
Anyway, we carried on filling in the forms and jumping through all the hoops that the council put up to us, and we were eventually rewarded being told that the council were sending their noise abatement team round to install a microphone, so that they could record all the noise for over a seven day period. This news cheered us up a great deal, as we felt we were being listened to at last, after all the months of form-filling. A member of the team phoned us up and gave us a time for when they would arrive with all their equipment, and we asked them to approach from the other side of our house, so that he would not see the van arriving. As we had mistakenly thought that they were a covert operation, and that they were there to help us, we had no idea of what was ahead of us.
The team arrived about an hour after the agreed time and to our total dismay parked their council van with Noise Abatement written all down the side of it. When they came in to our house and started setting up all their equipment, I asked them about why they parked in full view of our neighbour’s window, and his reply basically floored me. He said that the council had sent our neighbour a letter a week prior, telling him that the recording equipment was being set up in our house, and how long it would be there for, as that was part of his Civil Rights? It appears that the person causing the problem has more rights than then the people suffering from their unsocial behaviour?
So it came as no surprise to us, when we saw our neighbour take his over the road, to where one of his cousins lived, as soon as the van drove away. This cousin was the only member of his family that had any time for him, and used to take his dog in for the odd day or night, when even he got fed up with its constant barking. Of course the dog returned the following week, as soon as the van had left with the recording equipment, which of course, had nothing on it that was of any help to our case. We did however get a whole week of peace and quiet without any dog barking, well apart from his loud television, yet we have never thanked the council for their so-called help.
