Skip to main content

I had my neighbour for dinner

My neighbour scares me a little.

I’ve been generally lucky with housemates but I’ve had my share of odd neighbours. There were those fellow university students who would regularly trash their flat and kick down doors during drinking binges. My flat’s front door somehow escaped destruction but doors left and to the right of mine would hang crazily on their hinges or disappear completely come Sunday morning.

There was also the neighbour who jumped across from his window ledge onto mine (and we were three floors up) and banged on the window asking for marijuana at two o’clock in the morning.

There was one that would turn up at our door asking for antiseptic cream. He looked like he had been in a fight and lost. On good days he would barely speak to us because as he later confessed, his girlfriend was a very jealous woman. When the girlfriend was away, he would try to hit on my friend, whose boyfriend lived in the same building as us.

Then there was one who kept having fainting spells one summer, even tumbling down a flight of stairs once. I thought the guy had stopped breathing in my arms when we rushed him to hospital. It turned out that all the fainting was due to the fact that he had stopped eating because his girlfriend had dumped him.

I guess there was always some sort of chemical motivation or chemical inspiration to all those neighbours’ behaviours. Now this current neighbour, I think is rather sinister.

Take his house for example. He doesn’t have curtains. A sign of laziness perhaps, or exhibitionist tendencies or a disregard for aesthetics but that’s not the odd thing. He covers his windows and the sliding glass doors with newspapers. All of them. And they’re not the hastily put up, I’ll take it off when I get curtains type thing but ones that have been painstakingly arranged and taped so not a single ray of light can get in.

It was not easily noticed initially because all the houses here have darkened glass so you can’t see into the houses unless the lights are on and I’m not exactly a busybody. But it’s been nearly half a year now and those newspapers look like they are there to stay.

Just think how it looks like from the inside. I wonder if he’s got bodies stashed in the freezer or something.

Comments

Maryam said…
Ewwwwwwwww! I wish the folks would move back to PJ!
Kere said…
You would scream if you saw the old family home now. The new owners have chopped down all the trees and bricked up the balcony. Monstrous!
Anonymous said…
I thought mom picked green loving owners of the house. What about our lovely timber columns on the balcony??? NOOOOO

It's up to you to rescue our family
Kere said…
I save the family every day.

Popular posts from this blog

You gotta stay sharp

This week I celebrated my 28th birthday. This week I was accidentally stabbed with a needle contaminated with the blood of a patient with Hepatitis B. It was all going so well, I thought. The patient had already been screened for HIV and venereal disease and she was in the clear. What are the chances that she would be positive for Hepatitis B? Well, 100% as it turned out. I wasn't terribly upset at first. It was a small nick that didn't bleed much, though it surprised me enough that I yelled in the operating theatre. Everybody froze when they realised what had happened. My colleague felt bad for accidentally stabbing me with the suture needle. As I pointed out, it was an accident. I was double-gloved and we were all following the correct procedures, so it was unfortunate that I got a needlestick injury. What pissed me off was the attitude of the staff when I was trying to get all the various forms filled out and sent off to the correct persons. Their primary concern seemed to b...

The goat

So, there we were - three women in their late twenties, lounging on a faux-leather sofa having a nice post-prandial banter with a bunch of friends. Usually it would be just the three of us - me, Si and Em - talking about life, work and relationships - having that Bridget Jones moment which we thought would never come to us, because 'oh no, we're so above that!' But tonight was a farewell party for a friend who was off to Australia for a newer, better job in a newer, better place than sorry-ass England, and the talk frequently turned to career paths, professional exams, work-life balance etc. Cat was talking about a friend who works in computers who did not go to university because she thought it was a waste of time. Instead she plunged straight into work and gained experience and skills on the job. She is only a year older than me but she has been so successful that she has two homes in London and one in San Francisco where she now works from home and makes shedloads of mon...

January's list

Music I have been listening to a lot of Pentatonix lately. I stumbled upon them on You Tube (where else?) a couple of years ago when their Evolution of Music video was making the rounds. I enjoyed it, thought they were pretty talented and that was the end of it. They popped up on my recommended list a few months ago, along with their performances when they were on The Sing Off...and I've been hooked. My playlist has been mainly Pentatonix for the past 3 months or so. Some of their songs are a miss for me, but overall they are a really talented, unique bunch, and there is no doubt that they will go far. Because of a Pentatonix cover of a song by Belgian artist Stromae, I've discovered other artists and music that have been a regular on my playlist. 1) La La Latch (Sam Smith/Disclosure/Naughty Boy mashup) - Pentatonix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsVeQnBmp70 2) Black Is The Colour of My True Love's Hair - Peter Hollens & Avi Kaplan https://www.youtube.com/wa...