July 2025
‘Accept our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ!’
Ugh. This guy again.
Ever since I got burgled, I’ve become more defensive when it comes to protecting my home. I haven’t told you about the burglary yet. It happened in May 2025. I’m still dealing with the fallout.
Part of the fallout is that my mind lives in overdrive. Like a meerkat in the African savannah, my mind is always up on its hind legs, scanning for threats and vulnerabilities in my little London flat. I’ve been exploring methods of fortification: barbed wire, anti-climb paint, cacti. I’ve been clocking unfamiliar faces who tailgate into the block. I’ve been writing emails to the council about security like I’m on retainer.
It’s been exhausting.
I’ve even borrowed a pair of binoculars. Not for perving. For my ongoing vigilante work. More on that another day.
The most pressing and present threat to my home was a messenger from God. A Christian preacher had set up shop just below my balcony and was booming religion down the phone line to a virtual congregation, in what sounded like a Nigerian language.1 When he first visited, I thought: Oh, that’s new. How charming.
Then the sermon would go on and on and on.
When he finally left, I thought it was over. That was, until the following week.
Like a zealous cuckoo-clock, every Wednesday at 1pm, he would return, don his giant headphones, patch through to his followers, and howl.
‘You will burn in hell!’
The English inserts were the most jarring. Most of the sermon wasn’t in English, but he’d throw in phrases for emphasis.
It’s a quirk I’ve noticed of most language-rich people. My mum used to do it on the phone to relatives. The Gujarati would be flowing and then a pinch of English would poke its head out.
‘The dirty cheater!’
It was great for me and my sister. We could keep tabs on the family gossip. And because my mum could switch languages as easily as a frog leaps from land to water, she didn’t realise she was looping us monolinguals in.
For all the preacher’s talk of hell, London was already a decent impression of it. Europe was in a sticky heatwave and mild weather is the bread and butter of Brits, so we were in a spin. Some of us were even in coffins. Heat-related deaths had spiked. I’d been coping by throwing the windows open, abandoning the decorum of a t-shirt, and gulping icy water.
Open windows invite pests. A few flies, a curious pigeon wondering if I’m open to sharing some grapes. The wildlife outside is worse. I once saw a seagull mob a man for his pizza. Panicked, the man threw it into the air and it landed in the gutter of my neighbour’s roof like a tragic offering.
The seagull had a feast.
Defending myself from today’s recurring pest was a pickle. I considered the saying, ‘It’s easier to put on slippers than to carpet the world.’ I could plug my ears and close the windows, but I didn’t want to become another victim of the heat. Plus, this was my home. I wasn’t going to cede my peace to some religious invader.
I needed to do something.
The vigilance of my meerkat mind offered another saying: si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.
I did have some rotten hummus in the fridge.
No. A mashed-chickpea-based war was not the answer. I didn’t want things to escalate. I played out a civil conversation in my head, appealing to his sense of reason and compassion. He was a man of God, after all. Though I wasn’t sure if he was more Old Testament or New Testament. More vengeance and wrath, or empathy and forgiveness.
‘And God’s fury will reign down upon you!’
Ah. Old Testament.
I considered some Love Actually diplomacy. I could write some cue cards, wave him to attention, and then hope he co-operates. I mentally drafted some options:
Please be quiet.
You’re disturbing the peace.
Eat hummus, baby!
No. No projectiles.
A cunning and clean solution came to mind. It was brazen, but deliciously subtle.
I grabbed my Bluetooth speaker and tucked it into the mouth of the open window. The next step was picking a song. I deferred to the algorithm. I tapped shuffle and waited to see who would answer the call of duty.
Radiohead. Perfect. The fight was on.2
How loud did I need to make it? Was it working? Could he hear it? I leaned forward and peeked down, trying to see if my cause was having any effect.
‘Shame! Shame on you and your family!’
I needed to make it louder.
I dialled up the volume a few notches below maximum. I wondered if I was trading one disturbance for another, though I would take Radiohead over the preacher’s caustic vitriol, so I had to assume my neighbours would agree. I pushed forward, held the line, and kept it high.
He moved away from below my balcony to across the narrow road. He settled directly outside the front door of my other neighbour’s house. The one whose gutter had hosted the hungry seagull.
It wasn’t clear if he’d moved because of my music or for dramatic emphasis. I stood firm regardless. Radiohead reached their climax, all the instruments coming in like they were arriving to back me up.
Where was he?
He’d disappeared from my neighbour’s front door. I craned my neck up and down the road.
Empty.
He’d gone.
‘And unless a woman obeys her husband, she will burn in hell!’
Crap.
He hadn’t gone. He’d just moved again. I tried to spy his new location and saw the top of his head poking out from my blind spot, further up the road and closer to the neighbour on my left.
No, the baby!
My neighbour was a new father and he wore sleeplessness on his face. I couldn’t let the preacher compromise naptime. Some things are sacred.
I grabbed my Bluetooth speaker and rushed down the hallway. I set it in the bedroom window and hit shuffle.
An anime track kicked in, one of those hype instrumentals built for boss battles.
It was working. The preacher moved further away, but he was still lingering on the road, still sending his message into the heat and into our homes.
I needed more reach.
I grabbed my other speaker, paired it, and skipped to another song. A pop-punk track arrived with drums and guitar, the sort of energy that makes you stand like there’s electricity in your bones. The chorus came with that familiar promise of comeuppance, the petty satisfaction of someone finally getting what’s coming to them.
Down the road he walked on, phone in hand, shouting away. He’d decided to take his call on the go. He didn’t look like a man who’d been defeated. Just a man carrying on with his day.
Which, to be fair, was what I wanted.
A glee bubbled up in me as I made my way back to the living room, the music now down at a neighbourly volume. I switched it off and listened.
The fan.
The distant traffic.
The birds.
The breeze.
I got my drink, took it to my desk, and let the music shuffle on.
‘Sweetness’ by Jimmy Eat World.
I picked up my work and sank back into bliss.3
- Nigeria doesn’t have a single language called “Nigerian”. It’s one of the most linguistically diverse countries on earth, with hundreds of languages spoken across the country, alongside English as an official language. So what I heard was likely one of many Nigerian languages, not “Nigerian”. ↩︎
- For anyone else in need, the songs that played during this battle were: I Can’t – Radiohead; Confront Battle – Yuki Kajiura (Sword Art Online); The Consequence – You Me At Six; Sweetness – Jimmy Eat World; Dream Is Collapsing – Hans Zimmer; Resistance – Muse; Know Your Enemy – Green Day ↩︎
- And I’ve not seen him since. ↩︎
