Amber Green Takes Manhattan. Rosie Nixon

very loud sex. She was a screamer, he a shouter. We might not have known their names before, but we certainly did now: Max and Tina. In between the thumps on the wall and the shouts, any chance we had of sleeping was put to an end by the fact we had so far failed to notice that we lived opposite a fire station. A whirring siren sound went off a couple of times just in the hour that we were trying to get to sleep.

      On the second night, Max and Tina held a dinner party with some equally shouty friends. We opened another bottle of beer each and pretended it wasn’t as loud as it was, already feeling like an old married couple in our late twenties. Then we turned up our own music and tried to have sex on the sofa, but the noise from next door was too distracting. So we went out and got drunk on tequila and more beer at our new local, passing out back home, some time after the dinner party had finished.

      On the third night, we wore earplugs and managed to sleep reasonably well, save for the strobing orange light from the streetlamp positioned directly outside our bedroom window and the occasional siren from the fire station.

      ‘Blackout blinds,’ Rob muttered woozily.

      But, to be honest, when the light buzzed on for long enough for me to admire my boyfriend’s matinée idol profile on the pillow next to me, I didn’t really mind. And I knew I’d get used to the sirens.

      There was something kind of pretty about the way the light hit our bed and bounced off the 1970s I HEART NEW YORK print we found in a thrift store earlier that day and which now hung on our bedroom wall, covering the brown marks. The only picture to grace our walls so far.

      In the next blast of orange, I captured the image and uploaded it to Instagram; Rise filter; caption: ‘Goodnight Williamsburg #NYC #stylist #newhome’