Page 48 - Gilbert & Me_Neat

Rent was due yesterday, but I think my Landlady, Yvonne will be okay to wait another few days.
As far as I know, I should have received some money as the balance of the first part-payment of
my April salary due at the beginning of the month, and the second element late yesterday
afternoon. I’ll go check later this morning.

It’s officially been declared a heat-wave. One wonders what metrics weather people use to
determine these things – I could have told them we were suffering a heat-wave days ago – I use
the “T Shirt” metric, which is loosely based upon the number of t shirts I have to use during a
day because of perspiration. At some point, one will become so wet that it has to be changed,
because if it isn’t, well, it’s just not nice. Yesterday I used four. That’s a class One heat-wave, as
far as I’m concerned. A couple of days ago, I got through two and then three t shirts per day. I
tell you, the warnings were there.

I can tell things are getting challenging for the tenant living in the apartment beneath my
landlady. It’s a young lad, whose lease was signed by his mother (she’s listed as residing there as
well, but I’ve seen her just once).

The past few days, he’s had another chap staying with him and occasionally a young lady too,
but she comes and goes. This afternoon the two guys started messing about with a motorcycle
one of them owns. It’s a noisy, off-road type of bike that, while you can use on regular streets, is
actually designed for dirt tracks and the like, He sometimes uses it to go places.

So today they start it up and are revving it for effect. Then they take it out onto the street and ride
it up and down, up and down, with no apparent purpose and with no apparent helmets. It’s
stupid, but they keep doing it for about twenty minutes. Then they bring it back into the
compound, park it and go indoors. There’s some jackal-style laughter and they come out again.
This time they just rev the thing up, then stop and go back indoors. They are restless, I can see
that, but they’re just going to have to deal with it.

The situation with lockdown and curfew is already tough enough with neighbours deciding to
blast neighbours with loud music at all hours. I wouldn’t mind the noise, if we could all go out
on our balconies – those that have them – and dance because that would give us some much-
needed exercise. But this noise is awful. It sounds mostly like people singing through their noses
with no real sense of rhythm or rhyme, using a language nobody else understands – totally un-
danceable. Give me some Donna Summer PLEASE!

It’s hot, there’s nothing happening anywhere, there’s nowhere to go because nothing is open. It’s
challenging. I get it, but we’re all caught in this lockdown and we all need to handle it sensibly.

Evidently these lads just can’t handle it.

Curfew kicks in at eight pm. Everybody knows curfew has started because an alarm – rather like
the old fashioned air-raid warning sound that used to be operated during the last World War on
the tops of buildings. Okay, you might not know what they are, but it brings back memories of
my Air Force days (another long story for another time). Anyways, the alarm goes off. You three
warnings: first at fifteen minutes to eight, the second at ten minutes to eight, then five minutes