A singing couple have moved in next door... Now what do I do?

In London, to survive, you have to pretend that you don’t live next door to people, but sometimes that’s impossible, writes Christine Manby

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

It feels as though there’s been a real shift in the atmosphere on my street this week. The builders are gone and the birds are back in the holm oak behind my house. If only my 15-year-old self might have known that one day I would be the kind of woman who writes Facebook posts about the return of the swifts and finds herself transported by the sound of a blackbird’s song. It fair makes my heart sing.

It’s not only birds and hearts that have been singing around here. I have new neighbours. They haven’t introduced themselves but I saw them moving in. They’re a straight couple, around my age, no children and no pets. Apart from what I could gather from brief glimpses as they directed the unloading of their furniture, the only other thing I know about them is that they like a good old sing-song.

I was writing a new press release for #Yne, the root-based non-alcoholic beverage that should be the basis of all your summer cocktails, when I first heard a snatch of “Three Little Maids from The Mikado”. I hadn’t heard that song for so many years, I thought I must have imagined it.

Back in the late Eighties, my school put on an annual musical with the boys’ school on the other side of town. It was always cause for great excitement. When I was 15, the musical was Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The object of my affections, who was in the lower sixth at the boys’ school, played the romantic hero. Blessed as I was with the singing voice of a sheep with a sore throat, I did not get to play opposite him but adored him from afar in the chorus. It took me hours to get ready for each rehearsal, customising my school uniform by rolling my A-line skirt into a mini and back-combing my hair with talc for extra volume. Given that there was no other way to get close to my hero, I did not miss a single choir practice, and thus knew my Gilbert and Sullivan better than I knew the Diet Of Worms or the French past perfect, knowledge of either of which would arguably have been more useful in my GSCE year.

Isn’t it funny how songs stick? And telephone numbers, too. Who over the age of 45 doesn’t still remember the telephone number of their family home, their best friend’s family home and the home number of their first crush? Today’s teenagers will never know the simple pleasure of looking up the parents of someone they fancy in a phone book and committing their number and address to heart.

Anyway, back to the new people next door. I wasn’t imagining it. They were singing Gilbert and Sullivan, harmonising with great aplomb. Having not yet properly met them, I began to wonder if they were actually professional musicians, warming up for a return to the West End? Though who would attempt to put on The Mikado in the West End now? Keen amateurs then, more likely. Very keen.

The only way to live in London without losing your mind is by pretending that nobody else is living in the city alongside you. The more densely packed your postcode is, the more important this survival strategy becomes. On the Tube I quickly learnt to keep my eyes on my book or my phone, even if I was standing closer to a stranger than I might expect to get to a romantic prospect on a third date. Likewise, I learnt to pretend I couldn’t see or hear our neighbours, unless expressly invited to do so. City living depends on maintaining a fourth wall.

My house is in the middle of a terrace of two-up, two-downs. The houses were thrown up at the end of the 19th century. The walls are not thick and if, as is still the fashion despite the scorn of Carrie Symonds, you strip out your carpets and have minimal John Lewis furniture, then sound carries. My new neighbours obviously did not know quite how much.

I tried to ignore it. I got my ear defenders out again. I tried a white noise app. I tried to be pleased that they were at least tuneful. But then they moved from Gilbert and Sullivan to Coldplay, leaving me with a “Yellow” earworm that threatened my mental health. I suppose at least they weren’t trying out the new Coldplay single. You’re not the only person who just can’t take it, Chris Martin.

What to do? Should I pop round, knock on the door and ask them to stop singing – it wasn’t as though they were playing death metal – or should I try to draw their attention to the fact that I could hear them in some other way? Should I cough? I coughed. I coughed loud enough to warrant having a red cross painted on my front door. It made no difference.

As I got ready for bed, they were back on the Gilbert and Sullivan. As I was putting on the night cream that makes no difference to my wrinkles but may be giving me spots, they got round to “Three Little Maids” again and, as if suddenly transported back to the school hall in 1988, I absent-mindedly joined in with the chorus.

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“Three little maids from schooooooooool!”

Next door, the singing stopped dead.

Very quietly, I climbed beneath my duvet. I should have been relieved that I didn’t have to listen to any more Gilbert and Sullivan that night, but instead I felt worse. Now that they knew that I could hear them, the silence from my neighbours’ house was pregnant with meaning. I had broken the fourth wall. How on earth would I face them in the street now? The only thing to do was put my house on the market and move to the west coast of Wales.