Raddled

I am up early this morning. Well, I'm up early most mornings because if I dawdle, the hens kick off and stamp on any eggs they may have inadvertently laid over night, and then I have sticky- egg-mess clearing duties to add to all the other first-thing-in-the-morning malarkey that goes on here.

But the reason I am up really early this morning is because I got about three hours sleep last night because some people in our road decided to have a slanging match in the wee small hours, and because it was stifling hot we had all the upstairs windows open so heard every effing word.

And yes there was a lot of swearing. One man's girlfriend wouldn't let him back into the flat (the house I am talking about has been divided into two 'flatlets' which is ridiculous because if you ask me, that couple need as much space to get away from each other as possible) because he was effing drunk. Then his effing interfering neighbour, who lives in the other flatlet, came out and said the reason his effing girlfriend wasn't letting him in was because he was behaving like an effing c*** and if he was to shut the eff up she'd let him effing in and they'd all be able to get some effing sleep. Oh, and if he didn't effing shut up, he'd make him effing shut up because he'd got to go to effing work in the morning, unlike some effing people.

Well quite, I thought. And as it was all getting louder and more heated and phrases like' beat you up', ' knock your effing lights out' and 'shut up you b******, you know nothing about my effing life' were making their way into the equation, I dragged myself, bleary eyed to the phone and called the police.

Well, I can only think the police had put on extra patrols to cope with the wild celebrations of England getting through to the next round of the World Cup (ahahahahahahahahahahaaaa!!!) because, I kid you not, within three minutes of my call, two squad cars arrived, one from either end of the street, as thought they had been having a competition to see who could get there first.

Of course, about a minute after I'd made the call, everything went quiet on the effing front. Typical, I thought, so I hung around downstairs in my jimjams in case the police wanted to arrest me for wasting their time. Luckily, the police knew exactly which house to go to, and there was a lengthy discussion with much flashing of torches about 'what's been going on here then?' and 'it's okay, officer. Bit of a contretemps, don't you know, but we're all hunky dory now.'

After fifteen minutes, everyone went away. Needless to say, I couldn't get back to sleep and now have huge bags under my eyes to show for it.

Yesterday, Andy and I were out and about in the bottom end of the county of Kent, We travelled through some very pretty villages and surrounding areas, untouched by the concrete hand of John Prescott. So, of course, when we got home, we were on the interwebbly looking at property prices in those areas and being pleasantly surprised that we could make a move there if we so wanted to.

Now what I want to know is this - do you get effing ruckuses/ ruckusi in the middle of the night in these lovely little villages? And if you do, do the police get there within 3 minutes to sort them out?