Or so I presume. Because, unless he’s recently taken to causing significant pain to the woman he has sequestered in his bedroom, he must be doing something to make her moan and scream as loud as she has been pretty much constantly for the last month or so.

Our respective bedrooms, at the back of the house, share a wall, and the usual mating hours seem to be around the time I want to go to sleep, which I suppose is something of an improvement on their previous liking for getting nasty at 5 o’clock in the bastard morning. But who cares what the time is – I don’t want to hear it! For one thing, the woman has the most annoying sex moan ever. She sounds like a seal pup barking.

At first, Craig and I found it quite funny – even going so far as to give them a sarcastic round of applause, in the hopes they’d get the hint that we could hear them. Which now seems to have spectacularly backfired on us, as they’ve redoubled their efforts, and we’re now being rewarded with louder performances, and they’re even doing matinees now. And when I say ‘louder’, I mean Craig could hear them while he was pushing the hoover around my room. That kind of louder.

So, what to do? Singing loudly enough for them to hear me hasn’t worked. Banging repeatedly on the wall with one of my clunkiest shoes hasn’t worked (and left scuff marks on my walls which I then had to sheepishly scrub off). Hell, even screaming “SHUT UP!” at the top of my lungs hasn’t worked. So, my options, as I see it, are threefold:

a) Put on my slinky satin nightie, light the candles, invite Craig round, and give them a taste of their own medicine (although this really makes me no better than them, and I would be disturbing my downstairs neighbour, who is very sweet, and doesn’t deserve that – plus, I doubt my flatmate wants to hear it)
b) Put an appropriately polite but seething note through the door
c) Position my stereo speakers flush against the wall, and repeatedly play the most annoying song I own at full volume. I’m thinking MMMBop by Hanson, or Saturday Night by Whigfield. And yes, I do own both of those.

But if you have any suggestions of your own, I’d love to hear them. Especially if they involve kitchen knives and sensitive parts of the human anatomy.