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2004-12-11 - 1:19 p.m.

music box

it is pretty much xmas now - i do not know whether you have noticed. it is the time of year when a lot of people where i live do their only creative thing all year by decorating their houses with modest nativity scenes. haha, not really - it is glowing plastic icicles and giant inflatable snowmen all round.

ok, so my idiot neighbours have joined in the whole decoration thing too. i do not mind the ones who have just covered their garden in a messy explosion of light bulbs and reindeer and etc because they are sort of unobtrusive but one of them has crossed the line with some sort of motion sensitive musical thing. every time anybody walks past the house it plays "santa claus is coming to town". it pretty annoying after you have heard it 100,000,000,000,000 times, i think.

anyway, up until yesterday i thought i had tried everything to stop the music. my two tactics had been: thinking really hard about the music not playing any more and ignoring the problem and hoping that it would go away. they are both good plans and when they did not work i was about to resign myself to moving away before i realised that i had not exhausted every avenue of attack. the answer was so obvious i did not know how i did not think of it sooner.

you are maybe thinking that i just asked the neighbour to turn it off but it is not true. this is london after all and i did not want to risk knocking on their door, asking them and then waking up on the roadside two hours later with bloody ears and no incisors. some people are civil but unless you have a robot to protect you it is not even worth thinking about. no, the answer to the problem was electricity. it takes a certain level of intelligence to change a battery and i am not too sure if the neighbour has it so the plan was to run the battery down while he was not looking. that way he would maybe just think that the music box was broken and throw it away.

ok, so i waited until the neighbour had left for work (i was being late but that is not too important, i think) and then i got a whole load of nuts from the back of cupboards and under floorboards and in nut packets and threw them around in the garden of the music box house. it was not a plan to attract humans because work time means less people for setting off music but guess whose work is collecting nuts all day. the answer is squirrels. squirrels are just as good for setting off a motion sensor as humans so i thought that if they were all hopping around in the garden all day to xmas music it would be sure to run the battery down to nothing by the time i got home.

in the evening the music was still playing. either the music box had been running on mains power all along or the squirrels must have left work early, i think. it is pretty hard to find good animal employees these days - maybe i need to go to an agency rather than just collecting them in the woods. anyway, it seems that my only hope is that the neighbour (cough) accidentally crushes the box tomorrow morning after carelessly leaving it under the back wheels of the neighbour car. something tells me there is a good chance it will happen.

paul.

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