Life was rosy in 1995. I was living in a beautiful double bay fronted flat in a Victorian house in a shady tree lined street. I loved that flat. Spent a fortune on it. Tom and me were in our tenth happy year together and life was, as I said, rosy.
Then Lil' Kim moved into the flat below us. Kim and her 5 foot high hifi speakers. At first it wasn’t so bad. She would play her music very loud while getting ready to go out so, for maybe an hour at the weekends, it wasn’t that bad. I gave her a bottle of wine when she moved in.
Then she got a boyfriend. An unemployed boyfriend. Who stayed in the flat while she went to work. And he played music all day and most of the evening. Really shouty r ‘n’ b and ragga at full volume. Like Spinal Tap, I think those speakers went to number 11.
Polite requests to turn down the music were ignored (sometimes they couldn’t hear me knocking). When I did speak to Kim she told me I should have bought a house in the middle of nowhere if I didn’t want to be bothered by loud music. She added that this was her first flat and she would basically do whatever she liked in it. Fair enough really. An Englishman’s castle and all that.
To be fair to Kim it wasn’t actually the volume that irritated me so much, it was the bass. The bass was so bassy that the plates in my kitchen cupboards would rattle. I would feel the music in my bones and my blood would boil.
This went on for a few months before I called the council environmental health team. They wrote to Kim and explained that her music was annoying her neighbours. She ignored this. They came round to my flat when Kim was blasting out TLC remixes and measured the noise levels. Get this, the volume was under the level where they could knock on her door and tell her to turn it down or court proceedings would take place. Yet the floorboards were shaking, glasses of water were dancing across the table and panes of glass were threatening to tumble out of their frames. They were powerless to help.
I became ill. Depressed. I started to spend every evening out walking my dog for 6 hours. The dog loved this but I was the most miserable I had ever been in my life. I never went to the doctor and I never took time off work but I was very very depressed. And then I found out Tom had been seeing someone else for the last 6 months and had plans to leave me. It never rains eh.
Anyway, I’m rambling now so I’ll speed up the story. I picked myself up, dusted myself down and got down to solving my problems. I couldn’t afford a hit man (but believe me, I came really close to taking out a loan to pay someone to bump that bitch off, I may even have got a two-for-one special offer and had Tom ‘cleaned away’ too). The only solution seemed to be to remove myself from the situation. So I sold the flat. Luckily to the first buyer who saw it and double luckily Kim and Shabba weren’t at home when he came to view. I loved that flat but I swore never to live in a flat again. I bought a house with 12” of brick between me and my neighbours (though I can still hear the single mum next door screaming at her kids but at least she doesn’t make the plates rattle). Tom moved to the new house with me (we were mature enough to stay best mates) but it didn’t work out with his new fella so he moved to Moscow with a new job soon after. My depression lifted quickly after moving but I don’t think I will ever fully recover from these events. I know this because last night while pottering about in the garden I could hear some very loud and very bassy reggae coming from a house two doors away and I felt that rush of panic that Kim used to cause when she popped on her cd’s. I was forced indoors where I couldn’t hear it and it stopped after half an hour anyway but it proves that I’m fucked forever when it comes to the ace of bass.