Life at Number 12
Somewhere around 4:00 am, June, Lancaster 2009

"Don't you eyeball me sunshine!" Sean asserted, sternly pointing his finger at the thirty something Pakistani-Birmingham neighbour, leering at him over the three foot brick wall whilst his elderly mother and father huddled around. Through the front door of number twelve, Jon appeared out of no-where, revealing the open wound on his elbow.

"There's blood everywhere!" he croaked like some sort of demented hag out of a horror movie. The glassiness in his eyes brought about by the vast amounts of alcohol he'd consumed over the course of the evening. Acting as an emissary of neighbourly behaviour, Dan followed soon after his seemingly insane friend, chuckling to himself over the hilarity of the situation like an absolute loon.

"I'm sorry about this guys," the orange skinned DJ said to the fuming neighbours. "Come on you two.. get inside" he said to his other house mates. I'd been trying to usher his message without stepping out the front door. Beside me Jewface stood laughing and shaking his head in complete disbelief at the ridiculous nature of the situation.

Moments earlier, Jon had taken the decision that a crack in the window of the kitchen door should warrant him to smash the window with the point of his elbow. Desperately trying to hold onto my sensibility in the face of adversity, I had attempted to discourage him from this blatantly stupid act. Attempting to act as an angel whenever a silver tongued devil in the form of Sean was on the other shoulder was a futile endeavour. In his dismay at the fact the window hadn't broken in a clean smash, Jon wanted revenge upon the door itself. I once again attempted to incite some sense into my vandal friends but seeing Sean's foot puncture wood couldn't have made it any more clear that this attempt was as futile as the last. Realizing that the door had reached the point of no return, I opted to seek a piece of the action for myself. I hurried into the cellar and returned with a brick to hurl through the remaining failed window like I was rioting on the 12th of July. I was quite the little fallen angel.

It was not the first time that we had decided to trash an element of the house. After the first month there wasn't a bannister remained standing intact. The kitchen door was also the second door to have been eradicated, the living room had fallen casualty merely days before. It shall come as no surprise when I say that we regularly incensed the neighbours. I wasn't proud of it but by in the space of a year they had put their house on the market, sold and left. We weren't the first student household to have caused distress to the Patel's. It's much more likely that we were merely one of a long line of noise making, substance ingesting nut-jobs. When we were asked on the first nigh we moved in to keep the noise down, we tried to develop a healthy relationship with our Muslim neighbours. Initially this had a degree of success but this was not to last. On top of two pounding parties we had a multitude of minor gatherings, pot smoking happy hours, jam sessions and post clubbing house destruction that had created so much noise that we had received letters from the council threatening further action. Those aforementioned parties that we had thrown in the house had proven very difficult to keep under control. Both times had uninvited appearances from our neighbour demanding that we turn the volume down. Although we had did our best as residents of the house to turn it down at his request, our moves were usually undone by party attendees enjoying the face-meltingly good tunes within our music libraries. One could argue that this all this is a case against alcohol and drugs consumption but really they were more exacerbating what was already there. Remove substances from the situation and you still had four semi-professional musicians desperate to hone their instrument playing skills and a geek that yelled at the TV whenever he lost at an xbox game. It would be easier to argue a case that the walls between houses were too thin. After all, when I asked our neighbours on the other side about the noise they had heard nothing.

Those of you who know where I live will probably understand the irony within of the fact I lived in such chaos. In Belfast I live in a nice house that's right in the middle of student territory. My parents regularly attended resident meetings that would highlight the difficulties trying to carry out a normal life with drunken youths chanting songs at the top of their voice during the early hours of the morning. Had I not grown up aware of the stress that noisy students cause, I might have been a lot worse. I'm also well aware of the fact that looking back over it in later years, I might be filled with a sense of shame that I was part of such madness. No doubt that if and when I come to raise a family I'll have to march into a neighbour's house in order to turn the music down. Until then I know I'll have moments where I look back and miss the life I lived as a long haired stoner in number twelve. We may have had the ups, the downs and everything in between but that was our house.



Viva the legends of Blade Street