The pub next door can now legally stay open and play music till half past midnight at weekends www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-1887623,00.html. Depending how you read the confusing judgment the council put up on its website after we killjoy residents complained about its initial plans for karaoke till 2am on Fridays and Saturdays, it can also stay open and play music till 11.30 or 12.30 on weekdays. My husband rang to check with Camden which was the correct version, pointing out with lawyerly knowledge that their judgement allowed for both. One woman at the other end of the phone got furious with him. A second looked at the judgment, muttered “oh-oh, I see what you mean” and promised it would be looked into.

It hasn’t been, of course. And now D-day is here. Drunk day, that is, the first of many under the new Licensing Act, in which the disgustingly pissed can meander out of the pub doors to vomit on our innocent front doorstep or bash our car while we try to sleep upstairs. All that will be left to me and the other outraged, sour-faced locals who protested against the extension of the pub’s licensing hours in that wondrous coming together of the people that Tessa Jowell promised would be “democracy in action” (but in which our wishes were ignored), will be to twitch behind our net curtains and phone each other and the noise police in the small hours to register our futile protests.

The problem is that we’re a pretty hopeless bunch of fighters. There’s Ann the headmistress, who organised the petition we all signed. There’s Hilary, a leading light of the local Labour party, who’s friends with a councillor who wants to help us. And there are Daphne and Maria and Bapu, a Cypriot family who spend a lot of time worrying about crime and think the longer licensing hours will bring more burglars and bag-snatchers www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1887881,00.html.

At the beginning, it was all big ideas about how we’d see off the bad guys. We banged our chests in the street. We walked tall and talked tough. But what have we actually done to stop the pub turning our pleasantly dull street into a raucous battle zone? Precious little. The petition didn’t count. Everyone promised to write to the council saying the extended hours would constitute a public nuisance, but in the end only I did. I also went off to the hearing a month or two ago, taking a couple of hours out of work, but – what an idiot – got the wrong day and turned up 48 hours late. No wonder we were turned down. And that was our last real hope.

Everyone still gathers on the pavement to moan. We’re definitely among the 52 per cent of Londoners who told the Evening Standard yesterday they were against the new law www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1887862,00.html. We’re still appealing against the extension, since my husband realised on Day 20 of the 21-day period that it was time to bung in an application. But appeals by neighbours haven’t been doing well (so much for democracy in action). It will take months – we don’t even have an appeal date yet. And, since I’m the only person who wrote to the council before the first hearing, the appeal now has to be in my name.

Although all the neighbours say they’ll chip in if I get lumbered with costs, they also say they’ll ring up the noise police whenever the pub has one of its very-late-night, very-noisy, and illegal private parties – but always forget. I’m beginning to feel rather lonely on my Mrs Angry crusade. I’m almost (but not quite) beginning to feel it might be better to drop the whole thing and nip into the pub for a stiff early-hours drink instead.

I’m not quite ready for that yet, though. I don’t know what further forms of protest are available to me that I could actually stomach. But my husband and at least two of the neighbours do. They’re getting radical in the winter of their discontent.

“If we don’t win the appeal,” I heard the pack of Labour old guardists grumbling together, in the biting cold, as I approached my house last night, “I’m going to vote Conservative.”

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