Of course, my inability to use the phone might have been the result of my lack of sleep last night. Unlike last Friday, this had nothing to do with me worrying about the Dutch housing market or our return to the UK; no, this was solely the fault of our irritating neighbour downstairs. At 5.45 a.m., he pulled his curtains -- hung on the world's noisiest curtain rail -- back, ensuring that most people in the flats around the light well woke up. To encourage the others to leave blissful sleep behind, he started clattering around, seemingly throwing large wooden objects onto the (wooden) floor. And finally, just in case someone had managed to elude him, he talked. Loudly. In fact, you could call it barking. I don't know if there was someone else there, whether he was talking on the phone to someone who's extremely deaf (as I suspect he is), or simply shouting at himself, but it was bloody annoying.

All this from the man who came up to see us on our first visit to the flat as owners and informed us, after the usual courtesies, that we weren't allowed to install wooden floors without the requisite and approved amount of insulation because "it would cause too much noise." Grr argh!