woolymonkey | I'm becoming obsessed with noise.

We live next to a student house whose main rooms are back to back with ours so life in the Monkey House tends to be lived to a pulsing soundtrack of someone else's rock music at the best of times. Generally we can cope with it. It's what made the house affordable and we make a fair amount of noise ourselves.

This year however we have a group of students who are not only unbelievably noisy and unremittingly insommniac, but also vile and obnoxious. Apart from a few hours in the morning, there is generally more likely than not to be low-level noise. Then, very frequently there is loud music, loud television, and even louder bellowing, screaming, yelling, chanting, door slamming... All the sounds of a crowd of drunken yobs staggering home from a football game, only at three o'clock in the morning, loud and clear in our bedroom.

Even on a more normal night, there's no point asking them to turn it down a little because it's keeping us awake. The either agree, but do nothing, or get abusive and argumentative.

On Friday night, the council noise officer's visit finally coincided with a bad episode, so she was able to serve a Noise Abatement Order on them (which means that next time it's a crime and they can be prosecuted). This has helped a bit, but not much. We are dealing with people who think a sensible response to an NAO is to stand under our bedroom window at 11.30 last night, shouting abuse and kicking the recycling crate as noisily as possible. Of course, they don't do it for long enough to get the Council out to witness it, so there's no point calling.

The irony is it has made me hypersensitive to all the little city centre noises that I'm normally very good at ignoring, or even enjoying. I find I'm disturbed by sounds I can hardly hear. Now, for instance, there is just a very faint bass beat that I could easily have blocked out before, but today it brings me close to tears even though I know I'm about to move to another room where I probably won't even hear it. Even when the neighbours are quiet (ha!) or I'm away from the house, I start worrying about what they might do later, whether I'll be able to work this afternoon or sleep tonight, or tomorrow night.

I hope the Council process will help and I know this is an exceptionally bad group who will leave in the summer - if they don't get themselves evicted before then - but I'm finding it really hard to cope.

If anyone has any suggestions, or just sympathy, I could really use whatever you've got right now.