Painting the house purple and other ways to turn your whole street against you

FEELING close to your neighbours since lockdown? Undo all of that goodwill by pissing them off using one of these methods:

Paint your house an obnoxious colour

Unless you live somewhere famous for it like Bristol, painting your house anything other than a tasteful shade of white or beige will infuriate your neighbours into twitching their curtains at you whilst muttering darkly about house prices. You may even get a reputation for being a worshipper of the occult, if your cul-de-sac Facebook group is bored enough.

Have a huge extension built

Spend all the money you saved during lockdown on extending both outwards and upwards. Months of noisy building work and tradesmen’s vans taking up the parking spaces will get on everyone’s tits. Your neighbours will retaliate by sneaking all the shit they can’t be arsed to take to the tip into your skip in the dead of night.

Get heavily into DIY

If you can’t afford experts, take on a mammoth DIY task that you’re incapable of, for example re-tarmacing the drive. Buy a jackhammer and spend every weekend making a hideous racket whilst you slowly dig out the concrete, before heating up some stinking tar and getting it on your neighbour’s car.

Use your garden as a rubbish dump

Nothing ruins the good character of a street more than a front garden full of bin bags, broken toys, plastic patio furniture and a car on bricks. Inviting your friends over to drink cans in the mess before setting some of it on fire will add to the unpleasant ambience and have your neighbours calling the police.

Start a neighbourhood WhatsApp group

If you didn’t already start one as a result of Covid, why not create one now? After an initial pleasant 20 minutes it will quickly degenerate into a series of passive-aggressive rants about bad parking and unkempt hedges, leading the whole street to hate each other as well as you.

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Opposites attract, and other lies mismatched couples tell each other

CONSTANTLY clashing with your partner? Convince yourself that your differences are totally healthy with these lies:

Opposites attract

Just because one party is an adrenaline junkie who lives for adventure and the other a hermit who collects thimbles it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a romantic relationship. That’s unless you actually plan on doing anything together, in which case you’ll quickly realise that the only thing opposites attract is heartbreak.

We balance each other out

This is a nice way of saying ‘We inhibit each other’s true selves’. By cancelling out the extremes of their personalities, mismatched couples quickly become a bland pairing of simmering resentment. Your relationship will last until the novelty of shagging each other wears off and one party upsets the balance by suggesting a threesome.

Variety is the spice of life

Another euphemism. This one means ‘This person is nothing like me but we’ve got a mortgage now and it would be too much hassle to separate’. Couples drop this phrase into polite conversation to mask the obvious cracks in their relationship, usually after their other half has done something embarrassing in public.

Compromise is normal

Good relationships are built on healthy give and take, but mismatched couples convince themselves that tense, drawn-out negotiations on where to go for a pint are entirely normal. Despite finding your day-to-day existence deeply tedious, you’ll both compromise your happiness and stay together for several decades.

Eventually we’ll agree

Clinging on to the vain hope that one day you’ll be on the same page is what keeps all mismatched relationships going. This is despite knowing that you disagree on everything from how to fold t-shirts to whether or not to get married. If it wasn’t so tragic, your commitment to self-delusion would be impressive.

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