My neighbour was a pain in the rear end. In fact he wasn't, his entitled little rich boy son was. He had parties in the garden, singing - well, orchestrated groaning, really - at 3am, every time his parents were away or he thought they were asleep. It was a big house and they slept in the front, so the blameless (according to his mother - was I sure it wasn’t foxes?) little boy just off to Cambridge University (where I hope a town boy filled him in on general principles) could make a lot of noise out the back to his heart’s content.

I had enough.

I couldn’t sleep once I’d been woken, I never can, so I decided I shouldn’t suffer alone. At dawn I got dressed and went next door. I leaned on the doorbell, uninterrupted, until Daddy opened the door.

I told him that I’d been woken up by noise from his house. He didn’t believe me.

I told him I didn’t care if he believed me or not and that I was now making him a firm, binding promise: every time I am woken by noise from his house, I will come and ring the doorbell until everyone in the house is awake.

I got the oh, is that a threat? stuff. I explained that no, that’s nothing like a threat. That’s a promise. Guaranteed. Every time it happens, it’ll happen. Adding “I hope I make myself clear” always helps them concentrate, I find.

Very unreasonable. What a bad neighbour I was. What a selfish thing I did. My girlfriend joined in with this too, next day That was nice, I thought. Still, as I said to all of them, a promise is a promise.

Except the next week, at a time when in fact I didn’t hear anything, Daddy went down to the kitchen in the wee small hours to find his darling little boy sitting up drinking in the kitchen when he’d promised he’d be asleep with some very unusual company, not the kind of people he was supposed to be mixing with at Cambridge at all. In the house. People from the village!!!!

Daddy told my girlfriend. She told me. Somehow, I didn’t ever speak to him much after that. But you have to keep your promises, don’t you?