The Residents' Committee

The noisy neighbours to our right have left; two German blokes who played booming music until after 11pm every night and responded to our polite request that they "turn it down a bit please" by telling us they pay their rent, they can play their music however loud they like. They've been replaced by an asian family who converse in rapid tonal shrieks and have the volume on the telly so loud you could turn yours down to "mute" and still watch the programme.

Our neighbour to the left is Irish. His girlfriend, Kelly calls him "lower class", which really pisses him off. All he wanted was for her to send him a text message and she didn't do it. That was all he was asking for. If she calls him "lower class" one more time, he's outta here. And he means it.

Welcome to a peaceful Sunday afternoon in Sydney. There are advantages to living in a complex; somebody else does the garden and cleans the pool, but the walls are thin and when your neighbours have a row you feel like banging on the wall to act as umpire. Most of the residents are expats like us so there's no real sense of community and, except for during the summer when you meet people in the pool, you hardly see a soul.

When I say there's no real sense of community, I mean they're happy to commit criminal damage to your property, despite the fact most of the people living here are young professionals and a good proportion of them have kids.

A couple of months ago I noticed a visitors' parking spot inside the lock up garage. I commented on it to Darren because I thought it was odd having a visitors' spot in the garage when you need a key to activate the door. Anyway, we noticed that nobody ever used it so after a couple of weeks we parked our other car there, the so-called Illawong Jack. If you've followed this blog from the beginning you might remember this is the old banger we bought back in January. Well it's still going strong, but as it's over twenty years old it's not perfect, and specifically, the roof leaks a bit if it rains. So we left it in the visitors' spot with a note on the dashboard explaining it belonged to us and that we would move it if any visitors needed it.

About a week later there was a buzz at the door and a man, a resident, representing the management of the building told me we had to move the car because it was parked in a visitors' spot. I questioned this because I'd never seen anyone use that space before and anyway, as a visitor, you wouldn't have a key to get into the garage, but no, rules were rules, we had to move the car.

So we moved the car back up to the road and a couple of weeks went by and still nobody used the indoor parking space so when we went to Brisbane and the weather forecast looked iffy we put Illawong Jack back inside the garage and went away.

When we got back, his tyres had been slashed. It had to be someone with a key to the garage. I'd hazard a guess it was the nice man from the committee. We reported it to the estate agent and spoke to the owner of the flat, who advised us to report it to chairman of the residents' committee. I'm not certain, but I think that was the man who buzzed on the door.

Nice, aren't they? Sometimes we have days we'd like to be in our own home.