Now we're cooking.
Here's a story about something I am not so proud of. About fifteen years ago, a neighbour that I didn't know that well came round on a Saturday afternoon and said he was having a big bash for his 30th, it might get a bit noisy in the early evening because he had an Elvis impersonator performing at 10 pm but not to worry, it wouldn't get out of hand. No problem, we said.
Famous last words. It was a stinking hot night and they spent the rest of the afternoon setting up megadecibel sound equipment in his back yard, pretty much directed straight at our place. The Elvis clone gave his performance at 10 and that was fine. Things went quiet after that, we put the kids to bed and everything was hunky dorey for a while.
At around midnight, they decided that seeing the sound equipment was already in place, woundn't a bit of Karaoke be a great idea? By two o'clock it was annoying the crap out of everyone. At three o'clock I finally cracked it and called the local constables, who basically said, get in line, we have had a number of complaints and have spoken to them twice already.
At 6 am we were still awake, listening to drunken renditions of American Pie. At 8 am I got up, tired and grumpy, with a grumpy wife and three grumpy kids. I looked out into their back yard and saw about 20 people sleeping in the open on the lawn, no doubt the party die-hards from the night before.
I walked out to the shed, got my lawnmower, placed it carefully next to the common fence, started it up and let it buzz there until it ran out of petrol.
