• e-mail

They say you can’t choose your neighbours — and we have all fallen foul of that particular postcode lottery in our time. Some are kind and rush to help in a crisis, but allow you peace and privacy the rest of the time. A few, however, raise tension with every encounter over the fence. Last week, a spat in Sheffield made headlines when a man cut in half a tree that overhung his driveway. That’s nothing, say six infuriated writers, who share their own tales of exasperation . . .

WHEN YOU’RE DEEMED THE WEAKEST LINK

By Simon Mills

You always knew when Anne Robinson had been for a little nip and tuck because photographers would be camped outside her front door. They’d wait and wait for the Weakest Link presenter to emerge from her home, hopefully in surgical bandages and big sunglasses.

My relationship with Anne was even closer — her smart Kensington townhouse backed onto the mews cottage where I lived with my young family for about ten years. And every single time I encountered her, she was the neighbour from hilarious.

That said, we did get off to a rather bad start.

Six infuriated writers revealed tales about the people living next to them - including Simon Mills (pictured), who said photographers camped outside in the hopes of seeing his neighbour Anne Robinson

The real trouble started when Anne decided to rent a silly-money parking space in our mews. The white-lined boxes on the cobbled back street were a tightly packed Jenga stack of Range Rovers and BMWs and, on an almost daily basis, Annie — as she became known to me — would not be able to pilot her big Mercedes from its corner position.

One day, she knocked at our door. ‘Is that your car?’ she said pointing to my lowly Subaru. I spluttered confirmation. ‘Shouldn’t a successful journalist like you be driving something better than that?’ she said, dropping effortlessly into Weakest Link humiliation-speak.

But there it was — the famous cheeky smile and the twinkle in her eye, so I smiled and obediently moved the car. ‘I think I’d better have your phone number,’ she said. I gave it to her . . . and took hers. Big mistake. Annie now seemed to think I was some sort of valet-parking attendant, always ready and available to shunt metal around at her convenience. Every time her way was blocked, no matter what time of day, my phone would trill: ‘Simon. It’s Annie. Is that your Fiat? Can you move it?’

This would happen at some rather inopportune moments. Once when I was in New Zealand: ‘Annie, I can’t. It’s three o’ clock in the morning here in Auckland.’

‘Is it? How come you are still awake then?’

And then there was the night I went out with friends on a modest West End bender. Dive bars were visited, vodka shots downed, man-nonsense talked for hours. I didn’t arrive home until the early hours.

A man in Sheffield made headlines after cutting half of his neighbour's tree (pictured)

Trying to sleep off a biblically bad hangover, I was awoken by my mobile at about 9.30am. ‘How’s your head, Simon?’ says Annie. ‘What?’ ‘Good night was it? Lots of booze?’

I laughed nervously. ‘You pocket-called me at about 2am,’ she explained triumphantly. ‘I had nothing much else to do, so I just listened to you all talking for 20 minutes. Very interesting.’

Then I swear I heard Annie wink over the phone. ‘Now, can you get dressed and move this green Mini Cooper.’

‘THE GIRLS’ WHO GAVE ME ACUTE INSOMNIA

By Esther Walker

Esther Walker (pictured) said she suffered from sleep deprivation in her final year at university because her neighbours would play the same Sade CD on loop at night 

Noisy neighbours left me psychotic in my final year at university. And I do mean psychotic — not just a bit upset.

I was at Bristol, it was 2001, and I was living in a shared house. The neighbours on one side were some students I didn’t know and two must have been newly in love because the same Sade CD was played on repeat and thudded through the paper-thin floorboards all night.

You might think Sade would be soothing, but it wasn’t. It was accompanied by endless shuffling about and what sounded like furniture being moved.

Earplugs didn’t help, nor did my entreaties to keep it down. In fact, I think my pleas made it worse.

The neighbours on the other side were non-students whose back garden was a smallholding. It was charming, with neat rows of veg and a little scarecrow.

But they also had rainbells, which tinkled noisily when it poured (seemingly all the time in the West Country). And then there were The Girls. Fluffy and brown, with a penchant for ants and beetles, The Girls were two bantam hens whose pecking and buck-buck-bucking around the garden when let out of their hutch at 6am was surprisingly loud. They loved the rain, flapping their wings and clucking in joy.

Combined with the rainbells, it was a cacophony. I started scanning the weather reports anxiously, praying for a few dry spells.

If I was kept awake until 3am by Sade, at least if it wasn’t raining I might be able to snooze through The Girls’ morning routine. Eventually, the sleep deprivation became so bad that one morning I very clearly heard Natasha Kaplinsky hiss ‘Esssstheerrrr’ at me while presenting BBC Breakfast. The same thing happened the next morning. I went straight to the doctor, who agreed that lack of sleep can do that to a person.

I graduated, went back home and got some shut-eye in the end, and no-one has talked to me out of the telly since.

I won’t be buying pet chickens any time soon, though. And I still can’t listen to Sade.

SHE CALLED POLICE AND DROVE ME OUT OF MY HOUSE

By Lucy Cavendish

Lucy Cavendish (pictured) said she had visits from a police officer after her neighbours in a small Cotswolds town complained about her parking 

The small Cotswolds town we moved to seemed utterly perfect. Until we moved in.

Within about 48 hours, I received the first complaint. Apparently I’d parked my car in the ‘wrong’ place. I struggled to understand this. It was a public road, I’d parked in a vacant space. But the neighbour opposite told me everyone in the street had an unspoken agreement as to whose space was whose. ‘Woe betide you, if you take someone’s space,’ she said.

I thought she was joking. Until, a night later, a young copper arrived and told me an unnamed neighbour had, yet again, complained about my parking.

‘Is this an offence?’ I asked him. He looked embarrassed. ‘No,’ he said. He then told me he’d come round to smooth things out.

It seemed a bit ridiculous until different complaints kept coming — ranging from the children making too much noise in the garden to the dogs barking.

Once, a lady three doors down accused my teeny-tiny cat of dislodging her roof tiles. She said she had instructed her solicitor to inform me I would need to pay for a whole new roof.

Then my son had his tenth birthday party. We’d gone to the park to play football then come back for tea in the garden.

Within five minutes the cat-roof-woman came round and complained about the noise.

‘Would you rather we didn’t breathe?’ I asked as I watched my poor son burst into tears.

In the end it all got too much. The young policeman came back again and murmured about noise. The parking moaning continued. I started hyperventilating every time my children dared go outside to play.

There was nothing I could do about the wandering cat, bar keep her indoors, which felt unfair.

In the end, I moved out. I lasted just eight months. As I drove out of town, I breathed a massive sigh of relief. I have never been back.

EVEN WHEN I LIVED LIKE A NUN SHE WOULD MOAN

By Kate Spicer

Kate Spicer (pictured) said one of her old neighbours was caught watching her get undressed, while another frequently made noise complaints

One of my old neighbours was caught watching me on night vision binoculars as I undressed at night. It was creepy and criminal but he is not my worst-ever neighbour. The peeping Tom is still not as grim as Mary.

Mary, who was about 65, lived below me for five years. At first, she was friendly and invited me into her tidy trinket-filled lair below to fill me in on how awful all the other neighbours were.

Then the complaining began.

I’d have a small gathering of maybe four people and she’d turn up at the door weeping about the music and chatter that she could hear.

At first I’d apologise. Then I gave up the ‘I’m so sorry’ charade because Mary complained so much that an apology lost all meaning.

I had people over less, but I was still going out a lot. Torn-off bits of A4 paper appeared under my door, wondering why (underlined) I had to take the stairs so noisily (underlined).

I lived always thinking of the inevitable trauma my movement would cause Mary below.

I was living like a hermit, until I’d throw caution to the wind and, say, ring a friend for a fun chat. She’d bang on the ceiling with a broom because my laughter was too loud.

Had I sat in silent meditation all day, avoiding even crunchy foods, I am sure she’d have found something to complain about.

In fact, she did. In the year before she moved out, her near-permanent complaint was the volume and frequency of my typing. More than once, she came upstairs and said, ‘Your typing is killing me.’

Perhaps I was the nightmare neighbour, and she the good, quiet citizen. But what made Mary so awful was her devotion to moaning, her dedication to sharing her abject misery.

That’s the worst thing about having a nightmare neighbour, it’s like being forced to live inside their unhappy heads.

HE USED TO HANG AROUND MY SHARED STUDENT FLAT

By Flora Gill

Flora Gill (pictured) said her worst neighbour was a man in his early 40s, who would hang around their flat in the hopes that one of them would be drunk 

You might think that the worst neighbours are the screaming family to your right or the tap-dancing couple above you, but in my experience, it’s the one who wants to be your friend.

I’m simple in what I want from a neighbour — a typical London attitude. I don’t want them to bake for me or become a part of the family. I want us to be strangers who will sign for each other’s packages.

Which is why during university I had the worst neighbour, Ben, who lived next door.

To this day I still can’t decide whether his actions were creepy or tragic — in his early 40s, was he trying to hang around a flat of 19-year-old girls in the hope one of us got so drunk we thought ‘Sod it, it’s the world’s shortest walk of shame’, or was he just genuinely looking for mates?

What I do know is that it was very annoying.

Ben would turn up with feeble excuses whenever we were about to go out for the night — reminding us when the bins were collected or offering us his extra Domino’s Pizza vouchers — in the hope of ‘tagging along’.

He would take any packages he saw hidden in the garden into his house and then coax you in for a cup of tea to get them back, holding your Asos goodies hostage.

We once foolishly told all of our neighbours in advance that we were planning a house party for my flatmate’s birthday, to which he responded ‘Well I won’t call the police if I’m invited.’

We laughed nervously knowing the threat was only half a joke.

He hung outside his house all night chewing the ear off the smokers who came out to light up.

Ten years on, I now guiltily wonder if we were too harsh on the man next door — if maybe he was just lonely.

But then I remember the way he’d shout ‘Whassup?’ out of the window when we returned from lectures and my guilt immediately evaporates.

THE CORBYNISTA WHO TERRORISED ME FOR BEING A TORY

By Clare Foges

Clare Foges (pictured) said the person living below her flat would rant about David Cameron and bang on his ceiling, until she spoke to him in a peaceful meeting at a pub 

It was my first week in my first flat. At 34, I had finally managed to buy myself a shoebox (child’s size) in an outer London postcode. I was in heaven, but on the sofa one evening with a bowl of lasagne, I suddenly heard a noise. Someone was shouting in the room beneath me.

I knew nothing of my neighbours but this chap sounded decidedly angry. Then I realised his tirade was directed at my flat. At me.

And I could make out the same name shouted several times. David Cameron. Or more accurately, ‘David f***ing Cameron’.

Given that I was then working for Mr Cameron (as his speechwriter in Number 10) this was a little too close to home. I had used my work email to contact the other leaseholders in the block, so he had clearly deduced I worked for the Tory government and had strong feelings about it. I hoped it was a one-off shandy-induced rant.

Until it happened again. And again. Plus the occasional hammering on his ceiling. Famously, communist-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy invoked fears of reds under the bed; I had a red under the floorboards.

Each morning, I would pelt down the stairs to avoid him, and each evening, my mother would stay on the phone until I was safely through my door.

The final straw came one day at about 8am. Standing in the garden under my bedroom window, my neighbour-from-hell was jauntily chanting the words “Tory f***ing c***”.

Tearfully, I asked another neighbour if they could warn him off or I would call the police. This wise soul suggested a better course: a peace meeting. Thus the Conservative and the Corbynista met a few days later at a pub.

In a very English way, we talked mainly of the weather and other trivialities until, ten minutes or so in, he apologised, confessing that though he loathed Tories as a rule, I seemed nice enough.

Over the following years, we became amicable neighbours, if not friends. The moral of the story? Don’t just ‘know’ your enemy next door, meet and talk to them. They might not be as bad as you think.