My dear friend Taexalia is having a bit of bother with dreadful noise emanating from a clumping neighbour who has installed laminate flooring in the flat above her. I really feel for her. I too had noisy neighbours in the first flat I ever shared with Meeester. But we could never complain as the noises were… sex noises. If there is a social protocol for dealing with complaining about orgasmic noises throughout the night, EVERY NIGHT, FOR WEEKS then I wish someone had told me what it was. This is not the kind of situation that you can knock on someone’s door and ask politely for the noise to be “kept down”.
The first night the noises occurred, a group of us gathered underneath my bedroom ceiling to have a good listen and a bit of a chuckle. The noises came exclusively from a throaty voiced woman but at certain points we wondered whether the tenant was illegally making walrus porn.
At the crescendo, which seemed to take about forty minutes to occur, I remember we gave them a hearty round of applause. How naive we were that first time! How could we have known then that the walrus and her special friend would make our daily lives hell on earth?
After about a month of no sleep and nights filled with clasping our hands over our ears, rocking silently in corners and praying to every deity we could think of for peace, the noises stopped. “Fantastic,” we thought, “the Howling Sex Banshee’s been dumped!”
Again, in complete naivety, we went about our lives again, once more able to concentrate at work, once more able to invite relatives round, and begin to put the fragile pieces of our psyche together again. It was actually refreshing not to have conversations interrupted by “Oooheeeeahhhhhh! Ooooh Ohhh! Ohhh!”, not to have to have the telly constantly at full volume, or have to go out to the pub every night to get peace and quiet.
The hiatus was brief. Within a couple of weeks it all started again, with a vengeance that would have made Hugh Hefner purse his lips in prudish disapproval.
We deduced after a period of time, and the careful use of Excel spreadsheets, that our sex-god neighbour must work on the rigs. The sex was definately two on/two off. We also surmised that he must be drinking some monkey gland juice or something, as he was able to perform at a quite incredible rate. We considered calling the Guinness team to come round with stop watches and clipboards.
One day, we actually bumped into them on the stairs, having never clapped eyes on them before. In our minds, our image of the couple was one of protagonists from seventies porn films. We were very, very wrong in this assumption. Our Love King was a small rakish man with a handlebar moustache and no hair; and our Excitable Howling Walrus was a Size 20 lady with bright ginger insanely curly hair and Christopher Biggins-style red rimmed glasses wearing a Barbour jacket.
Now I’m not saying that big ginger lassies with no fashion sense don’t deserve to have a fulfilling sex life, but the sight of them in the flesh put paid to any notion that one day Meeester or I might go up to their door mid sesh to ask them to “pipe down”. Neither of us wanted to be confronted with the sight of a half naked Rubinesque lady with steamed up bins and beads of sweat on her top lip coming to the door to see what the problem was. Or, heaven forbid, to be invited in. (Shudder)
So what do you do when your life is disturbed by a couple having repeated and noisy sex 3 metres from your ears from about 10 at night til 4 in the morning every night?
Turns out many people had the same problem. At the time I was comforted greatly by a phone in on Richard and Judy’s “This Morning” about noisy neighbours. Now given that the great
Richard Madley himself reads this blog, I must be careful to give an accurate depiction of his demeanour when confronted by a lady caller with exactly the same problem that Meeester and I had.
In short, Richard laughed when he was told of the woman’s dilemma. I think he might have even slapped his thighs in mirth. And the lady caller didn’t take his flippant attitude lightly. She immediately chastised Richard in no uncertain terms, “This is no laughing matter. These people are ruining my life”. Richard had to apologise and I nearly wept in the realisation that I was not alone in my suffering.
In the end we never did complain. We were too embarrassed, and frankly a little worried that they might even up it a gear for revenge for our insolence. We, instead, decided to move to a top floor flat, where the only sex noises we could hear was the occasional communion of a couple of overexcited pigeons.
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June 15, 2008. embarassment, nerve shredding, noisy neighbours, orgasmic noises, sex addict neighbours. .
