‘How I dealt with my noisy neighbour’

For a brief period in the 90s The Beano were giving away a free alarm clock when you joined The Beano Club. I was never a big fan of The Beano. I was a well behaved child and I was afraid of dogs so Dennis the Menace wasn’t an aspirational figure for me, but I knew a good deal when I saw one.

I signed up with the intention of using the alarm clock to make sure I was on time for school every day, thus ensuring that I would make better life choices than the young Mr The Menace.  I’ve definitely won that contest. I work full time in a Post Office now. What’s he got? Eternal youth and immortality? You can’t rent a small room in Bedminster with those. Loser.

When I rented my room in 2013, my landlord unwittingly provided his own version of the Beano Club’s free alarm clock deal  in the form of my elderly neighbour’s radio. Every day for the past  18 months I’ve been woken up at 6am by the “dun dun DUN” fanfare of BBC Radio Bristol. Sometimes he waits until 6.15am on a Sunday. He must party pretty hard on Saturday nights.

At first I was furious. I fantasised about calling in a noise complaint, or going round in my pyjamas and telling him off. I’d have to buy some pyjamas first though. If I went round in what I wear to bed I think the noise complaint would be the least of the police’s concerns.  I even considered calling the radio station and requesting John Cage’s 4’33” so that I could have a bit of a lie in. I doubt it’s on their playlist thought. Rihanna would have to cover it first. I bet she’d nail it too. Lil’ Wayne could do a guest minute of silence on the club version.

As time’s gone on though I’ve grown to accept it. It’s become as much a part of my morning routine as the sound of the bin lorry approaching on a Wednesday morning. Or the sound of the bin lorry driving past on a Wednesday morning. Or the sound of me dragging a pile of pizza boxes out of the kitchen and chasing the bin lorry on a Wednesday morning. It still wakes me up every day but now I can manage a sort of semi-sleep state where the radio noise bleeds into my dreams.

Sometimes I dream that I’m the artist performing the song, which means that I get to wake up feeling like a rockstar. Nothing sets you up for a day at the Post Office like being Kelly Clarkson for 5 minutes.  “I’m sorry your parcel didn’t arrive but I was busy winning American Idol.” Other times I dream that I’m the DJ.  This is great for me because being a local radio DJ is a dream of mine anyway. I think I’d be good at it too. If I was a radio DJ, I’d definitely be the sort of radio DJ who starts playing Shania Twain’s Man I Feel Like a Woman and then pauses it so that I can be the one to say “Let’s go girls”. It’s good to have aspirations.

A few weeks ago I was presented with a unique opportunity to put the situation right. I went on the BBC Radio Bristol breakfast show to talk about a comedy night I was involved in. Luckily I did the interview from work rather than from home (live from a stationery cupboard in fact). If I’d been at home I  presumably would have heard my own voice echoing back to me through the wall with a two-second delay. I probably would have sounded like Neil Armstrong on the moon. That’s one small step for a  mediocre comedian, one giant leap for mediocre comedian-kind.

Even though I wasn’t at home at the time it was still strange to think that, on the other side of town, my own voice was playing through a wall into my empty bedroom. Or was it? If a mediocre comedian does an awful job of plugging a comedy night in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does he make a sound? Now I’m wondering if I could feasibly start a comedy night in the forest. Probably not a lot of passing trade but at least there’d be less stags and hens (of the human kind anyway).

Before the interview I toyed with the idea of breaking off in the middle and shouting “Oi you at number 20, Shhhhhh”. I couldn’t bring myself to do it though. Who am I to ruin an old man’s morning? Also, if he turned his radio down I’d have to find another way to wake myself up for work. I’m pretty sure the batteries have run down on my Beano Club alarm clock and the children’s alarm clocks of today leave me cold. What’s a Ben 10 and what gives him the right to tell me when to wake up? I comforted myself with the idea that, somewhere in Bristol that morning, maybe someone else was half asleep listening to their neighbour’s radio through the wall and, for a few glorious minutes, they got to dream that they were Martin Pilgrim.

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