Oh! But To Roll A SIX!🎲

{27-12-23} To Be Boring or Not To Be - Slice of Life - Neighbours - Confessional🍷🎧🤍

Dec 28, 2023

Turning More & More Into My Dad Everyday! Not sure if that’s a good or bad Omen! (0_o) LoL x

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Dear My Lucky Chasers!💗

The neighbours upstairs are the most considerate sounding people that I have ever lived under before. I hardly ever hear any noise from them except the odd sneeze. They have a house cat called Dexter after the Serial Killer series which is quite unsettling to say the least. It’s a young couple who own a piano, like the gym, both well dressed, slim and the girl is quite plain and beautiful looking - reminds me a bit like Kate Middleton - The Princess of Wales… with the aura of Julia Roberts though. Like when she is forever sweeping our communal doorsteps like she cares but makes a point of slamming the broom against ours so that I don’t forget to stop dropping a bit of ash from my cigarette then on occasion or maybe its an invitation for me or my partner to start and think about maybe having a go at cleaning it ourselves next time..!!

The guy looks like a younger version of the actor Hugh Grant. We jokingly nicknamed him HUGE Grant because of his big banana sized package and his penchant for walking through town in tight fitted cycling shorts (not for fun I don’t think) maybe after the gym or a run… I’ve never seen him on a bicycle but I never see anything much when I am out in town. I hardly recognise myself in shop windows most of the time let alone anyone else. I noticed him that summer when me and my partner both let on to them in the street, both of us eyeballing the ballings! It was so funny. I went bright red and my partner got quite uppity and a fraction bit red and jealous (or envious) too! Remember, these neighbours seem like a nice young couple. I have not interest in any of them in that kind of way!

They have six pack boxes of fancy wine delivered to their address and left out on the doorstep when they’re not home. We used to take their parcels in for them and they’d collect when they get home or we would knock on if we noticed their door cage had been unlocked (as we live in the city centre some property have an extra metal door gate attached to their front door) but one time, I had taken in a small flat package for them and my partner came home separately to me and accidently opened it up thinking it was one of ours. It turned out to be some Music Teacher’s Books and other teaching material.. I’m not sure what exactly as I myself never took a look. I was just the one who had to deliver the opened box to them and explain the situation without looking like a thieving cunt and feeling really guilty to boot. Impossible. I love the way the boxes stopped arriving and started landing on their doorstep instead. That didn’t say much for them trusting us.

I remember when they cooked a Christmas Dinner for our previous dying neighbour. She lived next door to us on the ground floor but was very ‘friendly’ with nearly everyone around because she was fierce and most people wouldn’t dream to turn around and walk away from an hour’s conversation with her complaining about one of us (residents not us as in me and my partner - although she did used to gossip about the things we’ve been arguing with each other about) let’s just say the walls are extremely thin in these red brick houses. I thought it was a lovely gesture of them to cook her a meal that she’d asked them for herself. After inviting them to put her up on a plate of food she then turned around and brought it round to me and him for us to eat.

She told us she didn’t like it but not to tell anyone else, as us being fat and tolerant of her too, obliged! Another strange thing about her was that she used to come round to ours with random bags of shopping asking us to pop it in our chest freezer for her. Then one day when she was close to dying my partner went around to help her do something trivial but meaningful to the pair of them and me, I was so proud of him being the preferred candidate for this task - and doing it willingly; he noticed that she had absolutely nothing in her freezer at all. It was empty. So why had she been leaving bags of frozen food around at ours for all these years (she did come to collect it too occasionally). Always asking us for spare sugar but whenever she had the odd brew at our house she refused any sugar in the drinks! She was a creature of habit and creative engagement.

I put it down to her loneliness and the harshness of her personality must have been a defence mechanism. I saw straight through it and wouldn’t let her speak to me like shit all the time, one day she moaned about us putting a cooker on the street for collection at the side of her house, she dragged it back in and told me to “fucking put it somewhere else” I told her to “fuck off its going where we’ve been told to put it and that she doesn’t own the fucking pedestrian area outside of her house, she doesn’t have windows on the wall and she should mind her own bastard business!!”. She hadn’t expected it coming from me who was always so shy, so polite, generous and kind, so meek and mild. Well, to be honest she got me on a bad day and I was sick and tired of my partner taking the piss out of me during our arguments saying that even the neighbours hate me and walk all over me! My timing was fucked man.

I feel so guilty because it had only been a couple of days before that she had first discovered she had a cancerous tumour in her womb or ‘fanny’ as she had put it to us. Again I had gone bright red. Embarrassed that now I was thinking about her fucking vagina! She didn’t mind me that much in the end as she confided in me about how always had to fend for herself as a child and fight against the cruelty of her German-Jamaican born Mother.

The people upstairs, Kate and ‘Huge’ Grant were nice enough people. They minded their own business and were always polite to our faces. Although, my partner tells me that they must hate us and were just being two faced around us. I hope he is wrong but I know it would make perfect sense. The Christmas Dinner was delicious that year. I’ll never forget how good their stem broccoli tasted after we’d not eaten for three days as we had been wasted on speed and cocaine. It was delicious!

We are the horribly annoying nuisances of an arguing couple. We used to ‘bring the house down’ with our arguments and kickings off and loud music and all sorts of domestic disturbances yet over the years we have settled into a more sporadic routine or maybe one or two loud arguments per week sometimes let and recently mostly more than. It’s my partner who is so very loud. I am soft spoken but boy can I shout loud too. I sound like a fucking truck driving fifty-a-day Marge Simpson when I try and match his level of loudness.

It’s hilarious and hurts my throat so much. My thyroid is fucked and I am a heavy smoker of 10g tobacco per day. My voice breaks. I lose it halfway through making a banging comeback remark so it always loses its punch. They have a piano upstairs and sometimes it starts to play through the walls as we are shouting at one another. I used to cringe a bit about the piano sounds, felt like it was such a cheesy instrument and how boring it must be to play the piano, that was until the girl starting going through a phase of playing a really girl’s girl’s barbie girl’s type POP song that sounded like a five year old singing to a backing track more suitable to belting out lullabies on a baby’s mobile above a crib! That was horrible and well more worthy of cringe than any blood piano. I often wonder how the fuck they got a full size piano up those stairs.. I can’t remember how I found out it is full size, probably our previous neighbour no doubt. I miss her voice sometimes and we enjoyed the same style of reggae as one another. We used to sit and chat over the low chicken wire makeshift fence in our back gardens.

I swear she was fit and healthier than me and at least 15 years ahead of me in age. She had a body built like a racehorse. Six pack and muscles and not a day in her life was spent working out or at the gym. She said she had good genetics with black and German (her own words). She used to sunbathe in bikinis in the summer and I would burn up under the hot sun for more than two reasons.

It was hot!
She was hot and I couldn’t stop looking!
She was hot and I couldn’t stop wanting my partner to stop looking!
I was covered from top to toe in heavy black clothes sweating like a black bin bag at the dump.
Feeling more like a full hog dripping fat from my body like turning over on a spitroast.

The couple upstairs apparently enjoy a little carnage on occasion and I imagine them getting very giddy when tipsy on all their wine and cheese. I don’t know if they eat cheese or not but they are very middle class and respectable to the human eye - in our modest view we are of the opinion that they are a bit like the swat kids were at primary school. Not cool enough to be geeky, just innocently intelligent and wholesome and weird. They have friends over and you hear small amounts of pattering feet, so small that I wouldn’t even notice if my partner doesn’t point it out to me.

“That’s them dickheads running around their house like a bunch of kids again!”. It’s so very harmless and cute and pleasant and a guilty pleasure of mine is that I envy them for their ability to have joy and fun times and pleasure like younger young people used to back in the 80’s. Then they remind me of times when I would choose to swat it up with a girl who was like them. Good and well mannered, well behaved, innocent in thought, never swore, smoked, said anything about sex, in fact you’d consider her angelic and not even think about any of those things when around her. Obviously, I had to break up in a bit and bend the rules slightly by introducing her to better music! She liked Charlotte Church type classical shite. We would compromise and she’d listen to Robert Miles Children with me instead.

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-4:06

My partner tells me that he hears the neighbours upstairs running around like that at the weekends all the time and he moans about their piano playing most Sunday mornings too. He hears them laughing and getting all excited over playing cards, hide and seek and probably board games too. They were pretty quiet over the Christmas while I was alone here with Lola but then again like I say, I hardly notice anyone making any noises or sounds unless it's banging and then I do shit myself a bit. I hate knocking sounds or bangs and thuds and things.

I enjoy it if I hear music or laughter travelling through the walls and ceilings. It makes me feel safe as long as there’s no shouting or arguing like what we do. If I hear loud talking or shouting I do shit myself. I get scared and terrified, especially when at home alone. So, I was thinking about how come at home when we have these huge and awful arguments and fights and disagreements and anger and evil atmospheres between us and he is loud and shouting and making many a bang or knocking sound with things, why am I never too frightened? It’s because I am playing the hand I’ve been dealt and to the best of my abilities trying to win back the love I desperately need from my partner while he is desperately trying to win the argument and we both want to control the game in favour of ourselves. It’s all so very competitive here! ha! We’d be shit at playing effectively at old Monopoly!

I hate to say all these things because I am afraid to be turning into the exact same prudish, judgemental boring cunt as my Dad did. I used to think his joy from silence and a digital fire burning on the TV in dim lights with the curtains drawn and the cat on his shoulder …was fucking insanely boring. How could he! And… jigsaws half finished for five years set out on the marble coffee table, a deck of cards and dominoes down by his feet and old board games like monopoly and scrabble with worn out pieces amongst his arsenal of things to do with us ‘kids’.. again ! fucking boring..! And.. them upstairs probably living their best lives, like dad did, doing the same thing.. I don’t think boring is a bad thing if you have the best companions to do it with. I’d be happy to be boring if I had the least boring person I know to love and be with. You know who you are but I don’t know myself!

“ONLY BORING PEOPLE GET BORED” - CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I’d love to live a boring but happy and innocent and drama free life with good music playing in the background…. Fuck! Every time now when I hear a Mexican wave of giggles and laughter coming from upstairs, I smile and sigh (and if he’s here, my partner rolls his eyes) while I sit and think inside my reverie that I wish I was them. I wish I had that kind of contentment. That life. I wish I had the peace and quiet enjoyment with the love of a dog and the love of my life beside me so I can giggle and squeal and feel excitement just by rolling a six!