12 December 2022: That woman seems to be gone now…? I haven’t heard her voice for a few days, that is. (I think I ran into her a little later after I typed that. If so, then she is fine and she smiled at me.)

10 Dec 2022: I’m leaving this post online to cover my ass because it seems a little odd that the response to “stop verbally abusing your wife” is “my wife is pregnant”, on second thought.

(The guy came out of his flat when he heard me vacuuming the staircase. The only thing I said to him was “stop shouting at your wife”, repeatedly. If his wife is pregnant, then that is no excuse for shouting at her.)

There is been a lot of really bizarre stuff during my years here in Portsmouth and it would not surprise me to hear that next, I am being accused of doing god knows what to some woman who’s pregnant, regardless of whether I even knew that.

Lots of loud shouting from one or more men and in response, the whimpering child-like voice of what turned out to be a grown woman. (I genuinely thought that I heard a child’s voice, until I finally saw a man and a woman one day.)

I just learned that the ground-floor folks have raised the issue with them directly.

I didn’t dare. I’ve experienced too much blind hate in England, certainly for older women, and I’m in my sixties now. I had shouted at him from a distance that if he hurt her, he was going to find out how I felt about that. There must be places where you can report domestic abuse of a neighbor, even in England.

In Amsterdam, I once lived above a similar situation. Somehow, the woman got help. I’d been unaware until the support worker spoke to me about it and said that she was getting a divorce, but it was not as obvious and loud as in the current situation. (The housing quality is generally better there.) I kept my distance at the time (and must have disappointed the support worker as I didn’t even recognize the neighbor’s first name). I probably shouldn’t have kept my distance. I have nothing against normal quarrels, by the way, but abuse is a different matter.

I can (literally) stand up to random folks in the street when they do things like try to drag someone out of his car in busy traffic, but this here is a very different situation.

Anyway, it’s been relatively quiet since. Yesterday evening, a man still came running up the stairs in the evening, did a lot of shouting and then left again within a minute, leaving our front door open. I quickly went downstairs to close it. It’s COLD.

Occasionally, there are two men in the flat, besides the woman. (These two men shout at each other too.)

He or they also kept knocking decorations off the wall, so I changed some around to make things easier. When one of them then began to be used as a waste paper basket, I gave up. That particular canvas is on my wall now. I like it fine there.

26 January 2023: So the guy who “works two jobs” to support his “pregnant wife” is home most of the time, continuing to run in and out a lot, with and without his pals, and still occasionally shouts at the woman, who I rarely hear except when he shouts at her. Am not sure that she is actually really living there, but it’s hard to tell. We have had a similar situation in that flat a few times before (and in the front building, too).

6 February 2023: I’ve got it. He has a YouTube channel and is on TikTok. That’s why he’s yelling and shouting all the time. It’s for the videos. Has to be.