As I plunge out of the supermarket, squeezing myself free of the cashier’s desperate grasp on my due change and attempting to re-orientate myself after the relentlessly harsh stoner-deterring lighting, I’m immediately accosted by a salesman. Such an occurrence is to be expected in the delightfully quaint world of Surry Hills Shopping Village, location of my local supermarket and point of convergence for annoying salespeople.

Without warning, my eyebrows appear to suddenly succumb to the forces of some strange localised gravitational forcefield, dropping down to such lengths that they appear to be shielding my face from the salesman. Silently, I pine for eyebrow strengths so forceful that I could simply bat unwanted attention away brutally with my lower forehead alone.

Slightly curious, I risk a glance to see what today’s loonies are trying to sell me. No longer can I attend the local shopping centre for fruit, vegetables and sodium bulbs alone - I’m now required to deter pests trying to sign me up to a new discount phone plan, apply for a new credit card or fight off the temptation of a “trial” foot rub which, post-massage, is swiftly followed with firm requests for payment (’you think-a this is free, eh?’)

A salesman notices my cursory glimpse at their cutting-edge information display (a florescent cardboard and blue marker combo never fails to attract the attention of the design community elite) and sprints towards me, as if he was not being paid in commission but simply being allowed to live an extra day for each customer he conned into a bodgy phone deal.

‘You must sign up for this phone plan,’ he began as I simply held up my hand in defiance.

‘I come to this shopping centre to buy groceries and small bomb components,’ I dismissed. ‘Not to be bombarded with mobile phone deals and other useless shite that can obviously only be sold to shoppers in states of shock from your florescent display.’

He waved a mobile phone in my face as if expecting me to swipe at it mid-air - many locals would have done this due to their jaunty heroin addictions.

‘Free, free,’ he cooed as if talking to an infant. ‘Don’t you want this phone?’ he grinned ominously.

‘Does the Queen throw a tantrum when she hears the words ‘Australia’ and ‘republic’ in the same sentence?’ I demanded.

His brow wrinkled in confusion at this answer. It appeared he was the kind of person for whom Troy Dann’s Outback Adventures was an intellectual challenge. Realising I’d have to make a run for it while I still could, my bag of groceries and I jangled at high speed towards the shopping centre exit.

Heads turned as I sped headlong towards the front doors, and I attempted not to make eye contact with any of the unsavoury characters who haunted the shopping centre. Navigating around Surry Hills Shopping Village is akin to being a contender on the Gladiators game ‘Gauntlet’, except if you’ve raped and heartlessly slain the loved ones of each Gladiator. And that’s just the security staff.

But this is Surry Hills, home of the most wonderfully diverse and dodgy community you could ever hope for in an inner city suburb. It sure beats where Adam and I were living before - Campbelltown, which isn’t exactly diverse but most definitely dodgy.

But where burning tyres, bountiful mull plants and suburban rugby and RSL clubs were bountiful, we now live in an area flooded with student sharehouses, drug busts, regular break and enters and long-term dole recipients who like to claim that they’re installation artists - they’ve just got a lot of projects in the ‘pre-conceptual’ stages right now. Adam and I wanted to move here more because of the quaintly strange locals than the stones-throw distance away from the central business district.

Yes, Surry Hills, known lovingly to locals as simply ‘Slurry’. It’s a suburb that defines the term ‘dodgy’ so perfectly that it should come as no surprise that Juice magazine is produced in this very suburb.

Upon moving in to our new apartment, I discovered the neighbours weren’t necessarily as entertaining so much as incredibly annoying to the point where I began constructing small explosive devices to plot their downfall (ingredients for which, by strange convenience, are readily available in the local supermarket). It was merely weeks after we’d arranged our furniture that Opera Bastard over the road began his drunken marathon sessions of history’s most famous operas. This was inevitably accompanied by Opera Bastard, Victoria Bitter in human form, yelling out of key from his window.

It soon became obvious that Adam and I weren’t the sole neighbours who didn’t share his enthusiasm for all things opera which seemed to peak at around 3am - but only on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights. One particularly sleep-deprived neighbour went so far as to write a letter of complaint - under normal circumstance I would have applauded such a move, but unfortunately the irate author resorted to racial insults such as ‘Abbo’.

By doing this, the letter-writer did not urge the Opera Bastard to tone the music down but instead incited him to turn the music up louder, and stand in the middle of the street yelling to everyone in blind-faced anger at 1am in the morning.

‘Who wrote this fucking letter?’ he ranted and raved, standing in the middle of the road for over two hours, as Pavarotti’s finest blared from the bedroom window of his terrace house. ‘You call me an Abbo? Well, that’s right, I am Aboriginal and I’m proud,’ he screamed.

I can totally understand his anger over the names he was called, but… crap. There were surely better ways to deal with such developments than that. He eventually stopped crying out to the world in general when he seemed to run out of breath for the night.

Opera Bastard was silent for most weeks after this, but recently began turning up the classics once more. Just last Monday I was staying up late applying for jobs on the net (although I’ve now got a new job which I start tomorrow - hurrah!), when traditional Koori tribal music began blaring from his terrace house. I peered out of the window next to my computer and could see him dancing wildly around, oblivious to the sleepless community surrounding him.

The final straw was when the music continued right throughout the day into the evening, when Adam arrived home from work and noted that the music sounded strangely different from his usual mix of didgeridoo and opera music.

Curious, I offered to go to the shop up the road to buy some dinner, and to check out the music situation on my way past. To my absolute disgust, as I passed the Opera Bastard’s house I realised the strange stuttering music we could hear was a skipping CD: it seemed he’d gone out for the night and just left his music on at high volume.

We called the cops on him that night, and he’s been quiet since. His friends haven’t, though - to attract Opera Bastard’s attention, they don’t knock on his door in the conventional method. They simply use the convenience of yelling from his front gate until their throats are hoarse. Even if he’s obviously not at home, they continue in the hope that he will hear them (which he probably could if he’s still in the postcode region).

Then there’s the characters who walk the streets during the day, ranting alternately about God and turnips. ‘Would you like Jesus to give you UNLIMITED FORGIVENESS?’ a man with a plastic bag filled to the brim with orange peels breathed at me last week on my way to the train station.

‘Would you like me to defecate on your face?’ I asked as I strode past him.

‘Beachballs, onion peel!’ he threatened in reply, waving his grubby, grimy fist. ‘Jesus, and… INFLATABLE BEACHBALLS!’

The harmless insane souls I don’t mind talking to. Some of the folks around here are simply a little bit different (or they’re an art student), and… well, there’s not much that separates them from the other individuals that walk the streets in Surry Hills except that they don’t rant about Jesus as much as turnips. On Thursday I was returning a video to our local video hire store and a large woman in bike shorts and Fame T-shirt stopped me in my tracks.

‘Were you in The Blues Brothers?’ she politely asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. After a moment’s thought, I added: ‘No.’

‘That’s a pity,’ she tutted. ‘Thought you were, that’s all,’ she spoke, wobbling her thigh jowls with alarming elasticity.

I attempted to walk forward, but she grasped onto my arm desperately. ‘I… my husband Jody was in that film,’ she assured me. Suddenly, I added another case into my phobia of men’s-names-that-sounded-like-women’s-names, filing it alongside such titles as Courtney.

‘You have been in a film, though, haven’t you?’ she pressed, examining the video I was holding in my hand. ‘Is this some of your work?’

‘Afraid not,’ I quickly replied, now rather urgent to remove myself from her pungent grasp.

‘You played royalty in a film, I’m sure,’ she insisted.

‘The closest I’ve come to that is when an ex-boyfriend of mine hypnotised me - he sent me into a past life regression and apparently I was a knight of some sort or something, and-’ I suddenly stopped mid-sentence, unsure of why I was telling this to a panting pinkish woman wearing clothes three sizes too small for her, gazing insanely at my face.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I announced. The look on her face expressed disappointment, but after a moment’s thought I quickly added ‘I’ve got a casting session to attend up the road at Fox Studios,’ which seemed to please her enough to release her grasp.

One thing I’ve always been thankful for is the sanctuary our apartment block provides: it appears populated by other relatively regular folk, unaffected by insatiable desires to broadcast their favourite musical genre at all hours of the morning. I know I can always retreat to my apartment away from the rest of the madness of Surry Hills.

But I fear this is all changing. Two new neighbours moved into the apartment next to Adam and myself last weekend. Already they’re exhibiting behaviour such as slamming their front door five times when it really only requires one simple nudge shut, and there’s some disturbing squealing emanating from their apartment too.

Adam and I were discussing their door-slamming, right before I was about to take out a bag of rubbish to the dumpster. By coincidence, one of our new neighbours was leaving her apartment as well, and slammed the door five times to mark our meeting.

‘Is this door slamming annoying you?’ she asked. I flushed, wondering if she’d heard the discussion Adam and I had just conducted.

‘Nah,’ I replied in reflex. She grinned and bounded down the stairs, ponytail bobbing about as she flung herself out the front door. I realised she hadn’t actually explained the door-slamming, and instead had simply advised that she’d be engaging in this activity further in the future.

I shrugged and began making my way down the stairs, struggling with the large garbage bags I was carrying. The door behind me creaked open and another woman’s head hovered in the doorway, although she appeared to be crouching down as her head poked out just below the doorknob.

Frowning, we both studied each other for around ten seconds. The silence was beginning to disturb me, so right as I began to say hello to her, she opened her mouth, widened her eyes and screamed ‘GALALALALLLALLLAGHAH!’ at me.

I’m sure they’ll fit in to Surry Hills without any problems at all.

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