One man, three songs: Six months with a neighbour from hell.

How Katy Perry, Meghan Trainor and Imagine Dragons were used to bully us out of our home.

You know that feeling when you get a wet towel then twist it to squeeze all the water out?

That’s how I feel about last year: pulled tight, in knots, struggling to unwind.

For many reasons, 2023 put me through the wringer.

Some of what’s happened I won’t talk about, at least in a public way.

But there’s one thing I do want to discuss, something that kicked off my annus horribilis, an event that put my family and I through our toughest test yet.

It’s the neighbour.

This may not sound like the kind of topic I’d typically cover in this newsletter. Rest assured, it is.

My neighbour liked pop songs.

To clarify: he liked exactly three pop songs. And he liked to play those three songs over and over again. Every day. Every night. Every weekend. At full volume.

I haven’t talked about this story until now because it was too stressful to think about. It was too painful, too soon.

But as we kick off a New Year, I need to let it go.

Now feels right.

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This story involves a terrible person, his hopeless landlord, bullying, threats, vile text messages, and buckets of weedkiller.

Ultimately, it involves the police.

It’s a story that ends with me and my family moving out of the home we’d shared for 13 years, the place that allowed us to raise our kids, to walk them to pre-school every morning, then graduate to primary school, intermediate, and high school.

We changed jobs and careers in that time. We hosted barbecues and birthday parties. We hunkered down during Covid lockdowns. We started and ended a business there.

We lost family members, and friends. We buried a beloved pet cat under a rose bush.

We got our first dog.

We didn’t want to leave that house.

Then we couldn’t leave it fast enough.

The ordeal’s over, but we’re still picking up the pieces.

But there are definitely funny elements to it. When I tell people my neighbour played the same three songs over and over again, non-stop, for six months, forcing us out of our own home, they look confused, and then they laugh.

I get it. It’s funny.

At one point, this is a story that has me yelling, “You don’t have to be on CSI: Miami to work this one out,” at a police officer.

At another, a landscape gardener promises to put a curse on the neighbour – and it kind of works.

This is a saga. I can’t tell all of it in one newsletter. This is part one of a scheduled two.

My hope is that by the end of it, I will feel cleansed, at peace. Perhaps, by sharing this, the knots will unravel and I’ll be able to let it go.

One day, maybe I’ll even be able to laugh about it.

But not yet.

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I want as many people as possible to read this story. But I also need to be careful. The events I’m depicting here took up six months of my life, and it took another six to report it. The man at the centre of it is still around. I had to get legal advice. None of this is cheap. #journalism.

So this post is for paying Boiler Room subscribers. If you’d like to read it, sign up to a monthly subscription, or an annual one, which works out cheaper. I’ve kept prices low but I understand times are tough. If it’s still too much for you, please reach out and I’ll comp you a sub. No judgement whatsoever.