Selective hearing.

Moaning old women, they just become a frequently annoying thorn in your side in bedsits, here I am in a shoebox sized room and if I so much as sneezed or coughed, the dragon next door would hear it and 'report' me to my landlady, I would get a weekly dressing down. Meanwhile a taxi driver a few doors away would warm up his diessel charabang for about 15 minutes at some ungodly hour so loudly it made the single glazed, rotting window frames rattle, it became my alarm call but the cantankerous biddy next door never heard it, this taxi driver was a 'lovely man who would do anything for anyone'....including wake me up at 4am, I had to be up at 4.30 anyway, every time I put the kettle on or switched on the toaster, I wondered if the noise was waking up the neighbours.