1993. In London. The guy who lived in the flat next to me was fond of playing Eagles and Rolling Stones songs on the guitar at 3 AM. Thing was, he couldn't play the guitar or sing. Now I, being of the nocturnal persuasion, had no real problem with this. I had long ago learned to sleep through noise during the day, so his shenanigans in the middle of the night didn't bother me.
But the man upstairs, well, you can imagine.
Eugene (the offender) was bonkers, pure and simple. The man upstairs, something of a wallyish type ("nerdy", for North Americans), would come downstairs to Eugene's flat and bang on his door, only to end up in verbal altercations that I could overhear, and which would make me convulse in laughter.
The man upstairs would say the kind of things you would expect... "could you please turn the music down", "I'm trying to sleep", and progressively clever forms of pleading.
Eugene would answer with comments like "Do you want to come in and have a cup of tea?" or more agitated, "You look after your kids and I'll look after mine." Neither of them had kids and lived alone.
For reasons which I'm neither sure of nor comfortable with, Eugene took a liking to me, and would, during regular hours, communicate to me how much he liked "half-cast" girls (a ridiculous old term for mixed race), and try to get me to share tea with him (which he mixed with coffee), and various other things.
One day he spent about three hours trying to discover why it was his car would not start. He insisted that his petrol gauge was broken and that there was absolutely no way that a lack of same could be the problem. He went out and bought a new battery, to no avail. At the end of that three hours, he finally accepted the verdict of his mechanic friend, that the damned thing was totally out of petrol.
Had he not been so bloody entertaining, I guess he would have to be my worst neighbour.