Quote Originally Posted by Nelsonca61 View Post
Imagine how big our police force would have to be if every neighbour called them whilst having the tumbler to the wall listening out for arguments of the next door neighbours
The house I moved out of in Fairwater last year was in a terraced block of six and, for the first twenty years or so after it was built in 1963 our neighbours on one side were a young family where the father would come home drunk on a Saturday night quite often and I can remember being awoken quite often around midnight as a child by the shouting, arguing and general commotion coming from next door. The issue was something of a standing joke among the other families living nearby with the line "it must have been a full moon again on Saturday" often being trotted out.

My mother was probably the best friend of the wife and the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, my parents never rang the police when he was playing up can probably be put down to my mum being told by the wife that her husband never resorted to physical violence (she also told her that she would leave him as soon as her kids grew up and she was as good as her word). However, some of the other neighbours obviously felt concerned enough on a few occasions by what they were hearing to dial 999 because I can remember the police coming to calm things down.

Similarly, when I was living in the house alone after it had been left to my siblings and I when my mother died in 1999, my neighbours on the other side for about seven years would often argue loudly first thing in the morning using dreadful and threatening language from both husband and wife. These arguments would sometimes spill outside their house and, again, I can remember the police being needed on two or three occasions, so, presumably, a neighbour had thought the disturbance worthy of a 999 call.

I got one with all three of the argumentative individuals pretty well on a personal level. Indeed, I can remember meeting the first man I described after not seeing him for about fifteen years in an odd conversation where I kept on trying to ask him about what his life was like now and getting nowhere because he couldn't stop apologising for his behaviour on those Saturday nights a quarter of a century earlier. It was obvious he was deeply embarrassed by what he had done and this didn't surprise me really because, just like my other noisy neighbours, he was a fundamentally decent human being.

However, if any of the three were ever to be one of two candidates in a contest to elect our next Prime Minister, my vote (provided I had one!) would go, without hesitation, to their opponent and I would consider it my duty as a UK citizen to let other voters know about their character defects if asked.

That's why trying to make out that Boris Johnson, at this point in his life, is just like anyone else when it comes to incidents such as the one that happened on Friday morning doesn't wash with me I'm afraid.