I was woken up at 5.30am by what I thought was a man talking loudly on a mobile phone. This was annoying as I'd had a late night doing Banter and had an early start heading into town for a day writing for (and then appearing on) More 4's "The Last Word" (who says I am not on TV anymore? I am somewhere on an obscure satellite channel nearly every single night my fine friend). I went to the toilet, but when I came back to bed the voice was still droning on. I looked out of the window to see that the man was not on the phone at all. He was just shouting up at someone in the window of the house opposite (
next door to the one where the mad woman used to argue with her estranged husband). From what I could gather from the rather one sided conversation the man was claiming to be a neighbour of the person in the house (I am pretty sure he wasn't - I have never seen him before) and he was saying that he needed some money to get to Exeter to see his brother who was ill. This seemed to be a weird time to be asking even if things were very urgent and if you were that good a neighbour, your neighbour would surely know who you were when you rang their doorbell at 5.30 and maybe come downstairs rather than listening from a bedroom window. The man claimed to have tried to go to the police station to ask for help, but none had been forthcoming. Finally my extremely patient opposite neighbour told the man to go away and he apologised for the inconvenience he had caused.
But then I heard him knocking on another door. Bang Bang Bang. Then a pause. Then another knock.
This seemed to be some kind of insane and unproductive new begging technique. Asking for money to get an urgent train ticket is an old ruse, but to think of doing it at people's houses in the early hours of the morning was a frightening new escalation. I imagined him working his way down the other side of the street and then coming back to me and loudly giving me his sob story down my video entry phone. What would I say to him? "Fuck off!" sprang to mind, but then again he was clearly mad and desperate and who's to say how he might react?
The thought kept me awake for a while, but then I finally drifted off to sleep with maybe an hour to go before my alarm would whisk me off to the world of work.
I love Shepherd's Bush, but prefer the daytime antics of the mad people to those from the early hours. But I guess you have to take the rough with the smooth and can't pick and choose when you will be entertained.
Hope the man got to Exeter, because maybe tonight he does our side of the street.
