I haven’t been blogging for a while, so this really means something I feel strongly about to have me start writing again.

Wifey was down with high fever over the long Hari Raya/National Day weekend. Her fever persisted for four days. It went as high as 39.5 deg C.

Earlier this morning her fever was up again at 38.2 deg C even after a half-dosage of Panadol. Fearing it was dengue or some avian-flu thing, we drove to NUH A&E at 4am to have her X-ray and blood tests done.

As usual it took several hours to have tests done. By the time we returned home it’s already 7am; dengue tested negative, thankfully.

Wifey took her meds and laid down to rest while I headed downstairs for breakfast.

Just as I got home from breakfast all ready to do some work, lo and behold, all the pounding from neighbouring renovation works started. Adding on to the pain I still have my stomping neighbour upstairs randomly banging shit around the house at night — especially over this long weekend.

In short, I have practically no peace at any time of the day. It does not matter if I’m trying to do some work or trying to sleep after taking meds.

This is not the first time.

A headache was brewing from all the noise. My skull felt like a cracked egg.

I even made a recording with my phone. Playing it back appalled me. (Question: How can I share it?)

Where have the peaceful HDB estates gone? I don’t remember hearing neighbours stomping, renovations for weeks on end, pounding/chopping boards from housewives or noises from bamboo poles hitting against (stupid HDB design) metal railings. These are all noises I hear only after I moved to my new flat.

I was rarely woken by external noises at my parent’s flat. The loudest thing would be my mum yelling at me to wake up, the kranguni man or the hum from the vacuum cleaner. Occasionally there would be renovation works, but not once every two months!

Right now I can hear (if you have some faith in a musician’s trained ear) three concurrent pounding/drilling works going on.

What is wrong with our houses? Why do people have to tear them apart and put them together over and over again. Why are people moving houses again and again? Not tired meh? Not expensive meh?

With 20 to 30 storey HDBs built in closer and closer proximity to each other I foresee these noise issues to be even worse in newer estates.

All these made me wonder if I should just suck on it and save up to buy a landed property with my parents or simply leave this country because of the ridiculous property and car prices.

What good is life with no peace? Can’t work without peace, can’t sleep without peace. Heck, tell me if you can make out with your neighbours drilling. Baby bonus my ass.

The government needs to recognise that noise pollution is a major issue in densely built up areas. Our kampung era policies don’t work anymore. If they don’t work on doing something about this and leaving it all to “community mediation” we’re going to have neighbours burn each others houses down soon.