A Perfectly Reasonable Afternoon
It was a Saturday in July 2026, which is to say it was one of those days where the universe, having looked at your carefully arranged plans, decides to have a small but pointed laugh at your expense.
My wife and I had settled on what seemed, by any reasonable measure, an entirely achievable ambition: to sit on our terrace, in our garden, in the afternoon, and do nothing in particular. This plan had the considerable virtue of requiring almost no effort to execute. It had, however, failed to account for our neighbors.
Perfectly Unreasonable Neighbors
Our neighbors are enthusiastic people. They approach the concept of the weekend party with the kind of commitment that other people reserve for religious observance or competitive sport. We bear them no ill will for this. We have, in fact, been those people. We understand the social contract.
Which is why, when the afternoon produced loud music, a significant quantity of noisy humans, and - with what felt like deliberate escalation - a karaoke machine, we said nothing. We are, by any objective measure, tolerant people.
It is worth noting that in Romania, as in much of the civilized world, people are legally permitted to generate noise until 10 pm. Our neighbors exercised this right with considerable thoroughness. We waited until 10:30. Then 11. The noise showed no signs of entropy.
A Series of Reasonable Decisions
At midnight, two things converged in a way that felt, in retrospect, inevitable. First: the noise, rather than declining in the manner you might reasonably expect from a party that had now been running for the better part of a day, had achieved a kind of self-sustaining momentum. Second: England were due to play Norway.
Now, the game itself was not the problem. I was going to watch it regardless. The problem was that my wife, who had long since abandoned any hope for the terrace and simply wanted to sleep, could not. The noise had become, in the precise technical sense, a problem that required addressing.
I stepped onto the balcony. I attempted to attract the attention of the party. The party was not interested in me.
I went to the front door and rang the doorbell. The doorbell, I discovered, was not working. This is the sort of detail that seems minor until it is the only detail that matters.
I stood for a moment, a man at midnight with nowhere obvious to go, trying to establish contact with a group of increasingly drunk people who were, by now, entirely enclosed behind a fence and a hedge that had, over the preceding years, grown to a height that could only be described as ambitious.
I got a ladder.
Reasonable Escalation
The ladder, when placed against the fence and climbed, revealed the hedge. The hedge was taller than the ladder. This is the kind of setback that, in the cold light of day, you might have anticipated.
I climbed onto the roof of our terrace.
It was midnight. It was dark. These two facts, individually unremarkable, combined into something that felt faintly absurd, in the way that many entirely logical sequences of events do when viewed from the outside - or, indeed, from the roof of one’s own terrace, at midnight, in July.
From this vantage point, I could see, clearly and for the first time, the source of the problem: five people on their terrace, between the house and the pool, in possession of a speaker system they were using to its full potential, drinks they were using to a similar standard, and no apparent awareness that the night had a time associated with it.
They had not seen me yet.
This changed when I said - I might have yelled - “Yo, neighbors!”
There was a pause. The pause had a particular quality to it - the quality of five people simultaneously trying to locate the source of a voice that seemed to be coming from the direction of the fence, or possibly from somewhere slightly above the fence, or possibly from nowhere at all. When they did locate me - a figure apparently hovering in the darkness beyond the boundary of their garden - they were unsure what to make of this. Given the quantity of alcohol involved, it is possible they were unsure I was real.
I said, “Would you mind turning this down?”
No response.
“Like, now? It is rather late.”
This, finally, produced a reaction. They looked at me. They looked at each other. And then, with the grace that people sometimes find when surprised into it, one of them said, “Yes, of course, we’re sorry.”
To their credit, they turned the music down. Then they turned it off entirely.
I had gone over there to ask for some quiet. What I had apparently done was end the party. I regret nothing.