So, last night we did our usual "winding down from the weekend" thing: dinner, glass of wine, calling the police at midnight to complain about the EAR SPLITTING NOISE from people blasting out loud music from their houses… Just the usual, really.

This experience was slightly strange, though, for two reasons:

1. The music was coming from at least two streets away

2. It was Terry who finally flipped and and called the police about it, not me, Freaky Noise Hatin’ Girl.

Being the party animals we are (Look, you try living in the Little House of Renovation Horrors and see how tired you are of an evening…), we had gone to bed at about midnight. Terry was settling Rubin down for the night, so it was I who heard the noise first. In fact, I heard it the second I walked into the bedroom.

THUMP! said the noise. THUMPTHUMPTHUMP! Then THUMP! it said again. Then it did that thing where it shut the hell up for a few minutes, making me think that maybe it was just a car stereo or something, and then THUMP! it said again.

Instantly, my head exploded.

Regular readers will not need me to explain to them how totally incandescent with rage excessive noise makes me. For the benefit of new readers: excessive noise makes me incandescent with rage. Seriously.

Well, I threw open the bedroom window and glared around the street, trying to work out where the THUMP! THUMP! of the booming baseline was coming from. It was at this point that I made my shocking discovery: the noise wasn’t coming from our street at all. It was coming from some unspecified location far, far away – a distant galaxy perhaps – way the hell past our street and in the direction of the estate that lies beyond it.

Now, I know sound tends to carry at night, but in order to understand just how ear-splittingly loud this music would have to have been for us to have heard it from INSIDE OUR HOUSE  you have to know that there are no other streets really close to us. There’s our house, then there’s a row of houses opposite us, then there’s a strip of freaking FORREST, which normally acts as a pretty good sound buffer, then there’s a footpath, then there’s the next door estate.

So, basically, this must have been one hell of a party is all I’m saying.

Anyway, I must have been even more tired than I realised, because rather than pacing the house hysterically for hours, ranting about how INCONSIDERATE and FREAKING STUPID other people are, I chose to rant hysterically for only about two minutes, before putting in my earplugs and trying to go to sleep. Which left Terry do deal with the onslaught of noise all by himself.

Now, Terry is a pretty placid person. Nothing really annoys him. Seriously, you could come and wash your car near our house any time with the stereo blaring, and Terry wouldn’t bat an eyelid. I know this because most people do wash their cars with the stereos blaring. But Terry had just spent an entire week destroying and then recreating a kitchen with his bare hands, which is why it came to pass that I woke with a jolt some time later to hear him calling the police.

Yes, people, Terry had finally Had Enough. It was no more Mr Nice Guy for him. Sadly it was "No More Mr Nice Guy" for the police, either. The woman who answered the phone, you see, wanted to send someone round to our house to "assess the noise level". This person would call us first, she said. Did I mention that it was now about ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING? Well, it was. And we were not at all down with the idea of getting out of bed and sitting down with "noise assessors" in the middle of the night. I mean, what happened to the old method of dealing with loud parties, whereby the police would drive into the street in question, identify the source of the noise (which, given that we could hear it from MORE THAN TWO STREETS AND A FORREST AWAY, shouldn’t have been the hardest job in the world, ya know?) and tell them to shut the hell up?  Seriously, the type of noise that can be heard from that far away is not the kind of noise that needs "assessing". It’s the kind of noise that needs switching off. No?

Apparently not, though. We have no idea whether the police did go out to the noise makers, but the THUMP! THUMP! went on until about 1.30am in the morning. Which sucked. And this, my friends, is why everyone in the world should own ear plugs…

In slightly better news, I found my gym mojo – it was hiding underneath the kitchen sink. Latest crazy running time: 45 minutes. I am back in the game, people! (What is the game, though?)

It was one of those wild and windy nights last night: so windy, in fact, that Terry had to go out and weigh our rubbish bins down with rocks to stop them making another bid for freedom. It didn’t really work. By this morning the bins were all huddled up against the back gate, like refugees awaiting freedom, and the wind was still blowing, and making an almighty racket, which actually kind of reminded me of that time workmen arrived in the street and proceeded to blast out music loud enough to be heard above the sound of their power tools (and also: in every room in our house).

(I mean, seriously, who does that? (Other than White Van Men, obviously). Who thinks to themselves, “Hey, I’d really like to listen to some music while I work with my power tools. I know! I’ll just blast it out so that the whole street is forced to listen to it too! Because really, who cares that they don’t want to listen to my music all the livelong day? As long as I’m happy, that’s all that matters!” WHO THINKS LIKE THAT?

And I know that sometimes people like to have a bit of music while they work (The Seven Dwarves did, for sure), but there are lots of people who’d like to blast our music all day long, but who are just forced to accept that they can’t do it without inconveniencing the people around them. I’m sure we’d all like to be able to go through life just doing whatever the hell we liked, with complete disregard for other people – I for one would like nothing better than to beat the ever-loving crap out of Patrick Kielty, for instance, but I don’t just go and do it, do I? And not just because the restraining order makes it difficult for me to get within a few hundred metres of the fecker. No, I don’t do it because it would be rather antisocial of me, and because IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT ME, and what I want. Oh no, wait: it totally is all about me, isn’t it?

Anyway, my point is that it’s a shame more people don’t just stop and consider the people around them before indulging themselves in a spot of good old antisocial behaviour. It would make the world a much safer place for Patrick Kielty for one thing, and it would allow me to sleep later in the morning, without having to listen to someone else’s music. Nope, still not over that, apparently.)

Now, where was I? Oh yeah: the wind. It was big and it was loud (oh, so loud!), but, weirdly, even although it knocked over The Brown Bin, and almost made The Black Bin disgorge all of its contents onto the driveway, it did nothing to shift the flattened Irn Bru can that’s been lying on our front lawn for four weeks now. What’s that about? I didn’t even manage to take the dog for a walk, the weather was so wild, and I’m guessing that’s why we returned home from the gym this afternoon to find two neat turds decorating the kitchen floor. So far, this whole “2008″ thing isn’t working out too well. I’d quite like the old year back again, thanks very much.

(Yes, I am now reduced to talking about the weather, like an Old Person. We can only hope I choke on a piece of steak or something soon, so that things can get back to normal around here…)

Terry said no to the Habitrail idea. Instead, he went downstairs and pretty much ripped apart the kitchen in his bid to hermetically seal it against Clive and his little buddies – for yes, it seems that there is MORE THAN ONE OF THEM.

"They’ve been crapping all over the place," Terry told me, his face pale as he emerged from under the sink. "It’s hard to imagine how one mouse could crap so much."

We looked at each other, light beginning to dawn. CLIVE IS NOT WORKING ALONE. The mice, they are taking over the world, folks, and they’re starting with our house, in much the same way that when the neighbourhood kids start destroying the neighbourhood, they’re always sure to do our garden first. Be good if we could maybe be first in line for something nice once in a while, hmmm?

So, knowing that what we’re dealing with here is not one solitary, timid little mouse looking for a warm place to lay his head, but actually a whole hell-raisin’ gang of them – probably on motorbikes – makes me feel a little bit less sympathetic towards them. Even more so given that, in order to try and deal with them, Terry has sawed up wood INSIDE THE KITCHEN, and it was just last night that I doused that place with bleach and picked up all the crumbs one by one. Now I’ll have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN, and it’s like, "Get out of my house, Clive, you little b*****d, ok?" These are some bad-ass mice we’re dealing with here, and also, they ate Terry’s cornflakes again, so we’re really not happy.

Now that the mouse entrance (the bit under the sink where the pipes come up into the cupboard) has been sealed up, we’re hoping Clive and the gang won’t come back. As a test of their cunning, though, Terry has laid some sunflower seeds down inside the (now empty) cupboards, so that we’ll know if they do make it over the top. As if, you know, the mouse droppings aren’t enough of a clue. He’s laid these seeds (do mice even like sunflower seeds?) out in the shape of a giant ‘T’. Now, what would be really cool would be if, when we went back to check on them, Clive had changed them into the shape of a giant ‘C’, no? And if Clive does that? He is SO getting the Habitrail…