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As the year starts its inexorable crawl towards the heat of summer and the season of open windows and drive-by boomings and parties and loud music and I retreat into my shell, I am minded of that old story of noise abatement and the consequences of taking the law into ones own hands.
Yes it’s the traditional season to tell the true story of Beowulf---you know that great English Epic poem composed, as all the experts agree, some time between the beginning of time and the eleventh Century AD. Forget all that old stuff in Old English, and even forget the famous Heaneywulf in the brogue of Seamus Heaney---this is what really happened:
Many centuries ago, in (we believe) fifth century Denmark, there was a single mom who had, for absolute ages, been living quietly in a poor rather damp part of town with her only son. They lived quietly that is until they got some new neighbours who were into wild partying all the time (now this was surprising because they also appear to have been quite religious), so anyway these loud louts were always carousing and rejoicing just as hard as they could, from morn to night. Can you imagine what it must have been like living next door to what was fast becoming a cross between a revivalist meeting, a bar and a rock concert? Eventually... eventually it proved too much for the son, Grendel, who finally just completely lost it and rushed over and busted up the joint.
Now I would be the last person to claim that he didn’t go just a bit too far, I mean cannibalism has never been a good solution to anything except perhaps a severely protein impoverished diet, but I do think he was sorely provoked, and anyway he did try other solutions, but got absolutely no satisfaction. When he reported it to the police, they said, well ...hmm.. that it was outside their jurisdiction and he would have to take the neighbours to court and get a restraining order, and they could only act if the order was ignored and... and... and all that sort of rubbish, and the Noise Abatement Society---well they were just being snittish when they said that they couldn’t help at the moment because they weren’t due to be founded for another 1400 years.
Anyway tearing the neighbours place up a bit and munching on a few of their less nimble guests seemed to have the noise problem licked, at least for a time, and the party-goers spent more of their time sleeping around in the neighbourhood which at any rate was a lot quieter. But our tale takes a sad turn, because as soon as this young chap’s violence had given them the idea the bad guys wrote off to a friend of the family who was a real bruiser. A guy who was probably a psychopathic homicidal looney, and had already killed and even had trouble with Greenpeace for the wanton destruction of extremely rare sea creatures apparently merely for a bet. A thoroughly nasty character.
The inevitable of course happened, the bruiser provoked a fight during the course of which the youngster was severely injured - in fact his arm came off - Ahh! Medical science is not now what it then was. Nowadays he could have been saved but then all he could do was to stagger home to die in his mother’s arms. And just to make sure that there could be no comeback this vicious killer then went next door and did-in the old woman on the pretext that she had put the bite on some old guy, and these louts went back to their partying just as though nothing at all had happened and no one else in the district cared to complain. Of course, as so often happens, after a short while the bad guys took to brawling amongst themselves and, as they say, they all got theirs when their house burned down during one of their quarrels. Their tough-guy friend unfortunately went on with his career of violence and harming the environment for quite a long time until eventually he took on an endangered species which was too much even for him.
So take warning from my tale and don’t play your wireless too loud and do wait for the authorities to act even if it is going to take what seems like an eternity.
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton.
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