When I moved to Finland we had neighbours who spent most of the summer away.

They'd travel on Friday evenings to their summer house; come back on Sunday evenings and spend a solid block of five or six weeks holiday at that summer house as well.

Add to that the fact that all the houses nearby had children who were teenagers (or had left home) and therefore the swing and sandpit area just beyond the bottom of our garden was empty all the time and you had an idylic time most of the summer that I supposed I should have realised was not going to last for ever.

When our neighbours (with one quiet teenage son) moved away they were replaced by a family of five with three young children. They had no summer house and especially that first summer they spent most of their time in their garden (adjoining ours) - unfortunately with a plastic swimming "pool" that their daughter delighted in splashing and screaming in.

For a couple of years it was a nightmare but as always children grow up and start behaving more normally (and especially more quietly) and now for the past couple of years the only minor problem in the summer has been the fact that if I move myself and a couple of books onto our terrace, you can bet your life that within minutes at least of couple of the (five people) neighbours will go onto their terrace which by an amazing feat of bad design (but typically Finnish) is built (like the balcony above it) right alongside ours and thus they are a foot or so away from me (behind a wooden wall/fence)

I'm alone so I'm quietly reading a book and disturbing no-one. They are almost always at least two so talking now and then. Usually quietly but the comparison to the total silence there was just before is noticeable.

Last year I then just moved to the front garden where there were a second set of chairs set up, but that was a nuisance because of course I had to go in; lock the back (terrace) door from the inside; go out at the front door (not forgetting my keys) before I could settle in again.

Now, however, as I discovered yesterday evening I have a new and very effective option.

I simply put on the very effective (and expensive) Boss noise-reduction headphones that my mother bought me for my birthday recently (that ended in a "0" so she wanted to get me something special).

Even though they let some sound through of course, they proved to be very effective in giving me the same level of almost total peace I had many years before. They probably wouldn't work if the neighbours were shouting at each other, but as I wrote above they are considerate and speaking quietly and so the Boss headphones seem to get rid of almost all their speech.

Not bad considering they were bought for air flights ...

(and they are also quite effective (not 100%) in drowning the noise of the neighbour's son praticising the piano [which my normal headphones only succeeded in amplifying the sound of compared to no headphones at all, which was a disaster when I was listening to classical music (in the quieter parts) as the tinkling of the piano came through - listening to rock music was no problem....])