Everybody needs good neighbours....

....yet still we end up with randomly irritating ones.

On the day we moved in a strange, pale woman with a wall eye and very bad teeth indeed wandered through our open front door* to "have a look at the kitchen floor". I was a little taken aback, to say the least. Fortunately she is at the other end of the row, and is on "Avoid" status owing to her scary husband (he looks like if Boycey off of Only Fools and Horses was on crack. And was a serial killer), and her ginger son ("ooh, they've got a little girl, Jason". Cue slight increase in the fervency of Jason's mouth-breathing and a mental note on my part to never let Small Person out of my sight if their car is outside the house), and my utter, unfounded conviction that at some point there will be a double-murder-suicide round there and our road will be featured a lot on the evening news.

We have also learned that "town house" is a posh way of saying "terraced" (to be fair, we knew this already), and that, on being asked about the soundproofing quality of the party wall, site managers will lie through their teeth with the fingers of both hands crossed behind their backs and waffle on for ages about modern build quality and technological advances in the study of insulation. This of course means that we spend pretty much every minute between the hours of seven am and midnight listening to the people next door, who number anywhere between four and thirty-seven, thundering up and down all of their stairs like a Weight Watchers class on a group outing to the chippy. The chief culprit is a small boy of around three years of age who has come to be known as Mr Thumpy. His is a very particular style, which owes a lot to the Incessant Thudding school of noisy-neighbourliness. Little bastard. I hope he trips on his fashionably baggy Gap cords and falls the whole three flights, breaking both his thumpy little feet and fracturing his shriek.

That aside, we absolutely love it here. Apart from the weirdos, the loud people, the building site over the road, the parking issues (now resolved. I was even polite), the fucking-over we got from the mortgage company (apparently "twenty-eight days after completion" translates to "whenever we fucking well feel like it" in terms of taking our first payment), the broken boiler which necessitated a three-hour trip through the life and times of the boiler man (more on that another time), the breathtaking speed at which we're haemorrhaging money and the fact that I can't decide where to put the toaster, it's a beautiful, beautiful house and I wouldn't change it for the world. Moving in with the Other Half has been blissfully smooth and me, him and Small Person are already forging a happy, comfortable family life together. As she said this morning, she's lucky to live with someone she loves that isn't her Daddy, but is one of her parents. Brought a tear to my eye, it did. Even the Ex, who brought her home on Saturday and saw the place for the first time, remains rational and cheerful.

Oh dear. It's all a bit too good to be true, isn't it? Never mind - bring it on. Nothing can phase me at the moment. I'm all uncharacteristically cheerful and optimistic. Watch me crash and burn...

* It was only open because we were moving stuff in. Bloody cheek.

** Obviously, as a mother myself I don't mean this. I'd settle for an accident which, although relatively minor, makes them rethink the logic of living in a three-storey house and move somewhere else, leaving me free to vet potential new occupants and scaring away everyone bar middle-aged, childless librarians*** .

*** Who will, knowing my luck, turn out to have sexual proclivities that would make a Conservative MP blush and who will haunt us night after night with the moans and wailing of kinky librarian sex.