The fact that he had a sling-shot at hand at 4am possibly should have worried me a lot more than it did.
The next door rap party that had continued for 72 hours was about to end. I'd offered to ring noise control but he had insisted that this was not neighbourly.
I doubted unemployed teenagers knew what neighbourly conduct meant especially, as unlike us, they had no need to get up at 4.30 every morning.
The Latin lost it - and muttering dark things about the rappers' mothers and their mothers before them he launched in super undie anti-hero attire on to the balcony with the slingshot and a plastic bag of gravel.
I breathed and hoped. I hoped that no one else was going to call the police. I hoped that no one in the other house was armed with anything heavier than a sling-shot.
Most of all I hoped I wouldn't indicate any lack of wifely support by laughing too loud.
The first fuselage landed on the neighbour's tin roof like a South American hail-storm. Then Super Undie Angry man, with rude hand gestures and sinister mutterings filled a bucket with gravel, and emptied it on to their roof from the road above. The rap music stopped and (what is the collective noun for a group of inebriated young people of limited mental capacity? A huddle? A stagger?) stumbled out on to the balcony to be confronted with an angry man in undies with an empty bucket and a sling-shot round his neck shouting at them in a foreign language. They shrugged and went to sleep. A sleep that was disturbed on the half hour by more gravel on the roof and loud cursing in their general direction.
This was followed by raucous cleaning of the vehicles to Celine Dion at full volume for the next four hours. Six months later, a sheepish young thing came over to ask permission to throw a party that would be finished by 11pm.
"Are you worried about a repeat of the angry man in undies situation?" She nodded. "We don't want that to happen again," she said. "No. No, we don't."
