Yes, the stripy house is an eyesore. But it’s hardly a neighbour from hell

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/26/stripy-house-eyesore-neighbour-paint

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In a tremendously swanky area of Kensington, Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring, a property developer, painted the front of her house in garish red-and-white stripes, enraging her neighbours. Now the high court in London is allowing her to keep it that way. And, lucky her – she only uses the house for storage, so she doesn’t have to face her infuriated neighbours, day in, day out.

I feel sorry for them. The house looks wildly incongruous, the street must now be fizzing with hatred, and they can’t even have a shout at Lisle-Mainwaring, because she probably isn’t around, and pent-up rage does no one any good. But although the title “property developer” sickens me, and I think she’s wrecked the loveliness and harmony of the street, as difficult neighbours go, she is fairly mild.

I speak from bitter experience. A few years ago I had some violent and rather terrifying neighbours above me, on the first floor of the house. They had ferocious fights late at night, crashing, banging and shrieking, until I feared for my ceiling. And they refused to pay the landlady. Occasionally I would come across the woman, tearful, wrecked and weeping, at the front gate or at the side of the house, or trying to kick her own front door in. The top-floor neighbour and I often asked them to shut up, but it was risky. I was sworn at, chased down the stairs and got my own door battered, so we took it in turns to call the police.

They came, but the neighbours stayed on, fought on, and stuck a large dildo in their front window. And it wasn’t only fight nights that were upsetting, because I found myself expecting a fight every night, which turned me into a sleepless nervous wreck. It took the poor landlady and us seven months to get rid of them.

But we were far from alone. A 2016 report from Co-op Insurance found that one in five Brits has been involved in a neighbour dispute, almost half of these disputes are still unresolved, and London and Birmingham have by far the highest number of nuisance neighbours, while Milton Keynes is most harmonious.

That sounds about right. A quick survey of my friends shows that most of them have had ghastly neighbour problems. Arthur lives in sheltered accommodation above a neighbour who’s convinced he has a secret, screaming woman living in his flat. The neighbour has complained and raged for years about the phantom screaming woman. It’s taken Arthur years to convince the housing association that she isn’t there; but the neighbour still is, complaining away.

Another friend has had a raging, violent drunk for a neighbour, bad for his mind and his blood pressure. My friend Mavis’s neighbour throws food on the pavement around a tree for the birdies, which hordes of rats adore. Could Mavis get the woman to throw her food in the correct bin by asking and explaining politely? No she could not. She must grin and bear it. And if it isn’t rats, noise, violence and paranoia, we’ve had basement- and extension-building, enormous trees, boundary squabbles and feeding the pigeons until the whole stairwell is knee-deep in stinky droppings.

Of course the best thing to do is to talk politely and calmly to your neighbours and try to sort things out early on, before the boiling rage, hatred, threats of violence and your own version of Trump v Kim Jong-un sets in, but if it was that easy, we wouldn’t have any frightful neighbour disputes at all.

So can I recommend that you gather some allies – friends and neighbours – for support and a calming effect. United we stand. Form or join a community group. Never go it alone. If I have someone with whom I can share my rage, temper and loathing,I find that it tends to diminish. It is always helpful to let rip, as long as it’s not at the neighbour.

Then, if that doesn’t work, there’s always the police, your MP, the Citizens Advice Bureau and your local crime and disorder reduction partnership representative, who are probably all tremendously busy, overworked and exhausted. Don’t forget to keep a diary of the whole ghastly palaver and pray that if you ever buy a home, the sellers tell you the truth about the neighbours. But they probably won’t because nuisance neighbours can reduce the value of a house by tens of thousands of pounds, on top of wrecking your mental and physical health.

So there is no easy answer to this one, but I suspect that Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring’s neighbours should be counting their blessings, and rejoicing that they only have to look at red and white stripes.