After two years, people have finally moved in next door. I have tried, really tried, not to curtain-twitch, but you know how it is. I got overexcited last week spending 20 minutes on a bench with my stepfather comparing the crumb-foraging techniques of two pigeons, so you will understand that I have not greeted this development with serene detachment. My husband and I have started standing by the back door, just casually. We haven’t spotted the new neighbours, but have logged a bike, car and new blinds (it’s been quite the week). I hope they haven’t spotted us: two pasty-faced ghouls, fogging up the window with our heavy breathing. One day our son came home and caught us peering; since he got back to school, he seems more disgusted than ever by our weird little lives, understandably.
“Maybe we should go and introduce ourselves?” my husband wonders. “No!” I hiss. “We’re not American. Shall I put a note through the door about the neighbourhood WhatsApp?”
My nosiness masks a primal unease at the idea of living next door to people again. My past neighbour relationships have been fraught with mainly unexpressed resentments. Did it start with the chap who improvised jazz saxophone over Dido tracks, screaming his appreciation at particularly choice “grooves”? Or with the large, posh family, each of whom played a different brass instrument? No, I remember buying earplugs as a supposedly carefree 19-year-old at university to dim the stereo sex noises from my landing-mates. I am a career noise-zealot – my desire for a life of monastic silence and pathological curiosity about other people are basically irreconcilable.
But everyone I know is being driven mad by their neighbours at the moment. One friend even had a festive, advent-style countdown to her loathed ones moving out. We live in an age and a country of high-density living, more intimately acquainted than we would like with next door’s habits at the best of times – and the past year has definitely not been the best of times. Fully appreciating, for the first time, the thinness of our walls, or the depth of our neighbours’ commitment to vacuuming or karaoke, DIY or Joe Wicks, successive lockdowns have pushed previously cordial relationships to breaking point. Of course, there have been lovely acts of local solidarity and kindness, a strengthened sense of community, but mediators have also reported a dramatic increase in their neighbour-related caseload. We are social animals, but in our own burrows we would rather not be reminded of the mating, eating, excreting and play of the other animals around us.
Pandemic aside, it’s neither a new, nor a particularly British phenomenon. I felt a deep sense of fellow feeling reading that in Japan, a crowdsourced guide to neighbours and their noise transgressions has exploded in popularity recently (“Terribly loquacious and noisy,” is one comment highlighted in the New York Times report on the site. “I glared for a long time but they didn’t stop.”) It’s the same feeling I got reading Proust’s letters to his neighbour, a Mrs Williams. They are full of noise complaints – exquisitely polite and delicately phrased, but complaints nonetheless. “A series of light taps on the parquet above me”, carpet beating conducted with “extreme violence”, and painters starting work at 7am all penetrated the peace of Proust’s cork-lined room.
No one is tapping on the parquet next door. So far, our new neighbours have been perfectly silent, like barefoot Carthusians. Over the past week, I have, however, clocked with mounting unease my son’s 6.30am departure with a bone-shaking door slam and the fact that our confused elderly dog spends a good proportion of most days barking at nothing. I have noted how loudly our robot hoover lurches around, bumping into things like a messy drunk, and realised the high notes I have no business attempting during online choir practice resonate horribly. We have even set off the fire alarm twice. Are we, in fact, the bad neighbours? Sometimes you think you’re Proust but, it turns out, you’re actually Mrs Williams.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
