Excitement in Burgess Hill

OK, so 'excitement' and 'Burgess Hill' are not words that normally go together in the same sentence. We thought that the flooding of the street in the previous week was probably the highlight of our time in Burgess Hill. But we were wrong.

We returned to Tim's place, to spend one more night, mow the lawn one more time and help ourselves to anything else that Tim owned. He had cleverly hidden his stock of expensive alcohol above head height, so we missed that. The folks next door were having a few drinks on a Saturday night and playing some music. Ellie was catching up on a fortnight's worth of blogging, Facebooking, twittering, messaging and whatever else it is that teenagers do on the Internet. I was flopped in front of the TV. This was already pretty exiciting for me as it was the episode of 'Bones' in which an earthquake causes a water main to rupture and the subway is flooded. When Ellie and I were at Universal Studios in Los Angeles on the backlot tour, they had taken us to the underground set where this particular episode was filmed. They triggered the 'earthquake' and then the whole tunnel filled with water - it was very exciting. It almost didn't look as spectacular on the TV as it was in 'real simulation'.

Anyway, at about 9:30pm there was a massive banging on the front door. Loud. Aggressive. Prolonged. I leapt up, muted the TV and asked who was there, but the banging just got louder and more violent. I then wondered whether someone might be in some trouble and couldn't communicate. Having watched 'Bones' I was thinking of icepicks through the eye, Indian tomahawk through the skull, fossilised spearfish skeleton through the thorax, but the reality was not nearly as interesting. I cracked the door open a few centimetres and wedged my foot behind it, in case it was flung open by a tribe of tomohawk-wielding Indians, but what faced me was a very angry, and very rapidly embarrassed, woman. She had been trying to kick the door in but it was the wrong door! It turns out that she lived in the house that overlooked the backyard of the partying neighbours and had called the police and the Environmental Agency about the noise, to no avail. She was now determined to confront the party-goers in person, but in coming around to Tim's street, had mistaken the offending house. Now as Ellie pointed out, perhaps the fact that there was no noise whatsoever eminating from Tim's house might in fact have been a giveaway, but she was apparently too angry to notice.

She then proceeded to rant and rave to me about how noisy the people next door were, not realising the irony that in fact she was far louder than anything that I could hear from next door. She then stormed off to the neighbours house and proceeded to do it all again. Violent banging on the door, and when they answered, a string of expletive-laden abuse. The bemused neighbours said that they would turn their music down and she left.

Ellie and I couldn't stand the excitement of Burgess Hill any longer, so the next day we caught a train (well, several trains, it is England after all - if you're not going to London then you have to change trains on your journey). We went to Cheltenham in the Cotswolds. And here we are!