House vs. Flat

 For the first nineteen years of my life I lived in house in the middle of a quiet little town with no real neighbours. Now, I'm eight stories high with neighbours to the right, left and below... It's very different. It wasn't until last night, after an afternoon of drinking on the balcony playing cards with the amigos, that I realised just how different it actually is. 

A typical afternoon drinking with friends at home is spent in the garden, music blasting, drinks flowing until the very early hours of the morning. Tragically, in Covid times, we're unable to go past 10 o'clock so the early hours of the morning were seen in by Tom and I playing an incredibly long game of snap in the living room. 

"Why did that make you realise how different living in a flat is?"

Good question!I realised how dissimilar flat-life is to house-life when, at 11:30 pm on a Saturday night, the doorbell interrupted our game of snap and I came face-to-face with our downstairs neighbour standing at the door. 

Me: "Sorry, is the music too loud?"

Sleepy-eyed neighbour: "No, the music is fine."

Uncomfortably long silence

Me: Oh?

Sleepy-eyed neighbour: "It's the game you're playing. It's on top of my head and banging so I can't sleep."

It was at this point that Tom popped up over my shoulder and attempted to speak to the man in Spanish that I realised I wasn't sure if i was shocked by his surprisingly good English, or the fact he'd gotten out of bed, put on clothes, walked up the stairs and accosted us over a game of snap. 

Sleepy-eyed, oddly-good-at-English neighbour: "It's very late." 

Baring in mind, it was Saturday night and we're in a country where, pre-Covid, people wouldn't dare start a night out before 12 o'clock at night. My shock definitely came from the fact that we must have been playing an incredibly aggressive game of snap. 

The issue we were then faced with, was the fact that we'd had enough to drink to find our game of snap far more entertaining than two people in their twenties should and we had reached an incredibly tense point. Now we were staring at a stranger who was trying to suck the enjoyment and psychotic, drunk-induced passion out of our game. 

Me: "We'll try to keep it down."

A promise I was baffled to have to make and attempt to keep over a game of snap I was playing while half cut on what - tragically - is possibly the wildest Saturday night I've had for a year. The only solution we could come up with - because we both agreed we couldn't abandon the game at such a critical stage - was to put our stool we were using as a table on top of the seat cushion. It added an extra bit of unsteady drama to the last half of the game which we found oddly entertaining.

I think this is complete proof that it's about time Covid buggered off and let everyone have a proper Saturday night instead of spending them inside playing snap - to the great annoyance of your neighbours.