How to Piss Your Neighbours off This Summer
And get away with it
Invite Family
Watch your neighbours’ terrified looks as your driveway fills up with the worst your family has to offer.
See the curtains twitch as the street fills up with an assortment of hyperactive children, loud uncles, shrieking teens, and Iraq-war veterans who could flip out at any time.
Witness your neighbours sigh, as your family files into your house carrying armloads of cheap alcohol, jerk chicken and rotten fish!
Barbecue Jerk Chicken and Seafood
I’m not a barbecue fan. I prefer pots of stew, curry, rice, and salad. I like to taste my food, not incinerate it.
But that doesn’t annoy the neighbours.
What annoys the neighbours is grilling highly spiced marinated chicken and seafood.
Watch their faces as the neighbourhood suffocates in a haze of burnt chilli, paprika, cod, lemon and pepper.
See the windows shut as quickly as the portals of a ship in a storm. Hear the coughing and the complaints:
“We’re not at the beach!”
This is when you turn on the music
Play Prog Rock
Guaranteed to annoy everyone, including your family. But it’s worth it because it’ll drive your neighbours crazy.
Imagine relaxing in your lounger one Sunday afternoon with a nice G&T, reading a book, when 1970s band Faust comes pounding over the fence on a continual loop.
Jerk chicken, family, rotten seafood, they can handle. But German Prog Rock turned up loud at three o’clock in the afternoon is worse than inviting gay people.
Invite Gay People
Nothing is going to piss your middle-class conservative neighbours off more than inviting all your gay friends along.
And if you don’t have any, go and find some. Say there’s a party! Dress as you want! Bring your friends! Park on the neighbours’ driveway; they don’t mind, they’re liberal-minded.
Furthermore, when you tell Mike and Sue (my neighbours as a kid were always called Mike and Sue), you’re having gay friends around. And make sure you use the term LGBTQIA+. They’ll hate you even more for that.
Then tell Mike you’ve got a new chainsaw.
Buy a Chainsaw
There are probably rules for cranking up a chainsaw on a Sunday in mid-summer. But rules are there to be broken.
So try cranking up one of these:
It’s a STIHL 881 Magnum: the world’s most powerful (and loudest) chainsaw. Which at 200 decibels, will wake anyone up. Even the dead.
And if they complain, tell them you have mental health problems.
Get a Cockerel (Or Two)
When I was growing up, kids used to be obsessed with the Chinese Water Torture where you would strap other kids down and slowly drip water onto their foreheads for five minutes.
In medieval times, prisoners were held for weeks while water slowly dripped onto their foreheads.
The constant, yet irregular drips, drove them insane.
Ever lived with a cockerel? Ever lived with two? I have, and it makes the Chinese Water Torture look tame.
When one cockerel crows, the other crows. Then the other replies, and the cycle is repeated.
But not at a steady rate. Sometimes it’s every ten seconds, sometimes a minute, sometimes two. Then there’s a break. Then starts again, but the frequency is different.
And if you start trying to predict it, it drives you crazy, just like the poor guy above.
Fly Flags
I used to live on a bland English suburb.
One summer, all the balding middle-aged men started erecting flag poles and letting the Union Flag flutter in the wind like they were in the Navy.
You might think this is normal where you live, but unless it was a state occasion or a major football match, folk in the UK never did this.
If you started waving flags about, people thought you were a bit weird. One of those obsessive Royalist types who used to camp out at Windsor Castle to get a glimpse of the Queen’s foot.
Now it seems normal. So let’s jump on the bandwagon!
Start with something bland, like the Union Jack (or your country's flag).
Then each day progress to something a bit more edgy.
Maybe the Scottish (or similarly annexed country), or the Rainbow flag. Then African or Asian countries that were once British colonies (or colonies where you’re from - if you have one).
Then, when you’ve plucked up enough courage, you can go for the killer blow (applies to the UK only).
On St George’s Day, erect a whole line of giant French flags fluttering in the wind as though Waterloo never happened.
If that doesn’t annoy them, nothing else will. Trust me, I’ve tried it.
For more boring comedy, check out 21st Century Comedy here
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People are so easy to annoy, it's fun to mess with them.