Neighbourhoods

What we gain from the public realm

Travelling a fair bit lately. In the last couple of days on trains I have...

...heard someone say they got a cheap ticket from London to Aberdeen, eight hours, 'I just went for the ride'

...heard someone explaining why he keeps smoking rather than endure the stressful cure. 'I like a fag first thing in the morning to clear me lungs'

...half-watched a young woman perform a 20 minute phase of what may have been a marathon meticulous make-up, including fastidious uprooting of eyebrows, the full MOT

…witnessed a clear example of a curious trend, where a couple sit apart from one another in a sparsely populated carriage, and then talk loudly across the compartment. (In terms of irritation level, it compares with insensitive use of the mobile phone, but there is a good tactic to deal with it: you simply go and sit ostentatiously next to or opposite one of them, it makes them realise they are not at home in the lounge)

...heard a tattoo-festooned and behooded young person strike up a conversation with an elderly couple, she saying it’s nice to have a chat and the lad saying 'I met my best friend on a train.'

And I just sit there like a sad blogger. But something I relish about the micro connection with others, without which we would not be able to know ourselves.

A bang at the door

I met a bloke today who told me he'd once put a firework through the door of a house on the corner of my street.

'They got me down the road - my trouser got caught in the chain on my bike, I fell off and they caught me. But they looked after me cos I cut my leg. They took me back and patched me up, and it ended up I went out with their daughter for about three years.'

Yes, since you ask, I had the temerity to ask him why he put a lighted banger in the letter box.

'Cos it was a big metal box' - his arms outstretched - 'it would have gone Boom!!'

This gent, now aged around 55, was clearly still animated at the thought of the sensational percussion he almost orchestrated. It was nowt to do with the people who lived there, about whom he knew nothing.

It's a nice reminder, chiming well with my own childhood recollections, that some behaviour perceived as anti-social is just boyish exuberance. (Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

Curtain-twitching and eyes on the street

The other day, on the point of going out, I glanced out the window and saw a delivery van in the street, the driver with a parcel at a neighbour's door.

I knew they would be at work, so I popped out and offered to take the parcel to save all that hassle of signed notes and 'collection between the hours of'. Apart from anything else, this meant that when I took the parcel round that evening, I had the chance to ask after my neighbour's health, knowing he'd been unwell the previous week. All sounds perfectly routine don't it?

Only later did I ponder that whole biz of looking out on one's neighbourhood - referred to as 'curtain-twitching' from one point of view, or 'eyes on the street' from another. I reflect on it here because I'm going through the proofs of a forthcoming text and just came across this bit in a section about privacy:

"Older people can use signs of occupation of the home for mutual support, taking a degree of responsibility for one another. Against this, the phrase ‘curtain-twitching’ is commonly used to denigrate such or similar actions. The easy misuse of the phrase is damaging, since the readiness to have ‘eyes on the street’ is a key component of neighbouring. In this sense, over-emphasising privacy threatens older people, both as subjects of concern (whose difficulties might go unnoticed) and in their legitimate role as co-custodians of the neighbourhood."

Well I'm not that old yet, but I'd like to think that if I ever get to be, social attitudes towards curtain-twitching will have dissolved in favour of more sensible notions of 'eyes on the street'.

And if you want the source for the above quote (and you do, badly, in order to help keep an impoverished consultant fed) watch this space.

Pssst, heard what they're saying about rumour?

Word of mouth doesn't have to take months. I was talking to a couple of residents a while ago about rumour and misinformation in an area of intense regeneration activity, and we touched on the value as well as the problematic nature of rumour. The following anecdote was offered with the conviction of truth of someone reading a log book.

A community activist was busy organising a meeting about an issue they perceived to be important, but too few people promised to come. Tactics adopted included getting on a local bus with a colleague, and using a loud whisper, convincingly foretelling a negative development which would have an unhappy effect on everyone locally. According to the story, this did the trick: the meeting was very well attended.

Pavement chalking epidemic?

I've just been reading some interview and survey material from a range of local residents who attended street parties, as part of a wee project I'm doing with Chris Gittins at Streets Alive. Let me share this extract with you:

How do you get on with younger and/or older people in the street generally?

Fine. Except someone in the street called the police about our 2 young children drawing with chalks on pavement outside our home. We actively want our kids to play in the street and were shocked and depressed by that attitude.

This took place in a city in England. I have no more information and don't know if it took place during a street party or not. But it's an eerie echo of the story of the Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker who received an official fine - indeed it may pre-date that story. What next?

In both instances, I'd have hoped the officials would have taken the time to make a point to the complainant, because it's in the authorities' interest that civil relations prevail, and it can't be hard to do that when there is no serious threat to anyone or to any property.

I can remember when I was a kid, with siblings or friends, riding small bicycles up one end of our street invariably caused one particular older woman to step out her door and tell us to go away. Presumably, she wanted that portion of the planet over which she had some control to remain just so. Is that what drives this uncivil anti-neighbour nastiness? The poverty of generosity under which she existed must have been wretched.

The idea that civil relations with the people who live around us is universally regarded as desirable seems to be simply false.

Community. Centre.

Yorkshire in frost. The light fractures the trees, or is it the other way round. Ellie crunches across the estate part-seeing, sort-of knowing the unfinished scrawling on the walls, the mutterings in the corner shop, a charred tyreless car up against a house, the litter half-swept.

Alone or not, people walk in an isolated way here. Nothing seems rendered. But there's a hope of garden outside these flats, and Merry Christmas being sadly insisted at the window.

She said, before, most days I'd just go to Morrisons, every day, on the bus, with me little boy, getting out of the house, it were like prison, nobody to talk to, and go to Morrison's on t'bus, walk round, wander round aisles, have a cuppa tea and come back, at least you got out.

I was walking dead most of the time, I just couldn't be bothered cooking. We'd come to the community cafe and we'd both eat well for a quid.

I help out here now a lot of the time. There's a big women's social isolation problem in this area. The group that's here now, quite a few have found themselves single parents, they come here and find there's a few more in the same boat, and they support each other.

The global and the local

The other day my neighbour and I were dealing with a tree slumped across the boundary of our properties, and in conversation I took the opportunity to apologise for the fact that the volume on our television had been (I'd discovered belatedly) cranked up to a whopping 40 last Saturday eve. She said she'd not heard anything - 'didn't you hear us stomping and banging the floor...?' No, I said, not a sound.

It's not that we're all hard of hearing, but this was the occasion of a distinguished performance by the England rugby team in a world cup semi-final and I had taken up the time-honoured tradition of shouting at the TV, and turning up the volume in order to drown out my own shouting. Something about the hermetic 'participation' in the experience, though, is not quite satisfactory. Maybe we should have a neighbourhood large-screen for tomorrow's final. (That, my son believes, is what pubs are for).

Doors

Here's a tap at the back door, my neighbour's asking for a witness to count the money and sign, it was her turn to do the cancer charity envelope collection in the street this year. No worries, see you later. An hour later, here she is at the front door. Just did a crumble for you, hold the edges mind, it's hot. Images from Dickens flicker in the steam as I scurry it through to the kitchen.

As it happens I'd just been writing something about doors, including reference to this voice from a study of Bengali elders in London:

‘In Bangladesh we spend time outside and we keep our doors open. We enjoy the fresh air and see our relatives and neighbours and chat together. Here if I go next door, the doors are always closed.’ (Respondent quoted by Katy Gardner, Age, narrative and migration, 2002)

Frog at the door

I popped out for a run in heavy rain this morning, and when I got back there was a frog on the doorstep, as if waiting to be let it in.

Frogs wanting shelter from the rain? Must be climate change. What next, SUV owners deciding to walk?

When the time comes

Mrs T tries round the back, it's locked, calls out, no effect, clops round the front and flutters the knocker.

Crossley's not concentrating on work but the tapping surprises, it takes a second for the sound to make sense. He creaks to the door.

Would he run them up to the club, you know by the roundabout, Mr T with this heart trouble now, it's alright coming back down, but he can't go up so well, with the hill.

Of course, how soon. Saying it slowly, perhaps he'd been dozing. Now if you can. And Crossley's not poured himself a glass yet, slips on his shoes, grasps unglancing for the keys. Mrs T careful now getting in the back. Are you sure you're ok for getting home.

Just here, we can cross. Thanks thanks. And isn't that reassuring, and Mr T with his heart, to feel she can ask any time, in case.

And how good is that, now he knows, with the old feller having this trouble, that she'll call straight away, I won't be sat there fearful that they'd not call. How would it be if something happened, to have been sat there, and not asked.

The washing of cars

Cars aren't much good for neighbourhoods, and paved front gardens are not always good news. But of course car-washing can be one of those excellent occasions for nods of recognition or quick conversations.

So if my son has to have a car, which occasionally has to be washed, it's not a bad idea if one his local friends pops round for a chat meantime. The conversation paused only a couple of times with a hastily shut door.

Street games

Having to prepare a few words to speak tomorrow in memory of my bro, up pops my other bro to talk about street games when we were kids.

Like the slow bike race. All the kids in the street had bikes, we formed a disorderly cavalry and it was the last one across the line who had not put their foot down or fallen off. We played bicycle football too.

And Squashed Tomatoes. We can't recall the rules but it was an elaborate variation on a 'Simon Says' or 'What's the time Mr Wolf?' type game, if I have that right, in which someone calls out instructions and people advance variously towards a line.

One of the calls required you to lie down in the road, then assuming a new (upright) position at a point level with the top of your head. I can't help suspecting that this condition was introduced by, and to favour, the taller members of the group.

But anyway, it tells you something about expectations of traffic in those days. From time to time the cry 'car!' would go up and we scattered. And it's true, we were out there most of the time, summer and winter.

The washing of hair

Here's something told me by a community worker recently. She went with some local women from a low-income neighbourhood on a residential trip, where some of them encountered shampoo for the first time and didn't know what it was, or what to do with it. They always use washing-up liquid.

I've never before considered shampoo in terms of cultural capital, although I've reflected often enough on the role of hairdressers in social capital. It did strike me that there may be many 'heavy-users' of shampoo who don't know what washing up liquid is.

Warm scones

How's this for timing? I was just fixing meself some strong coffee, to persuade my jetlagged brain to work on an overdue report, and struggling to find anything to dunk in it. So there's a voice at the backdoor, it's my next door neighbour, 'Oh Kevin you're back,' with some fresh scones just out of the oven.

Hang it all

A wave from my neighbour next-door, she spotted me at the kitchen window. I potter out. Are you hanging washing today? she asks, shielding her eyes from the sudden spring sun. I'm not. It seems she has the entire wardrobe of her extended family in the washing machine, as we speak. Of course you can use the line, and a good day for it.

Then because I'm such a slow thinker, I have to shuffle out there again because I forgot to offer extra pegs.

In-adequate: things lacking in life

Will Davies has a delightful handwritten fragment, of words and their meanings, here. (The poignant power of that technology - the alphabet, the script - which enables us to communicate beyond the immediate and the local, but keeps us pinioned to the human).

Thoughts about working from home

Heavy snow here this morning, people don't realise how hard it is. It took me ages to scrape the sleep from my eyes, then I skidded at the foot of the stairs but managed to get to my desk without damage. There was a collision in the kitchen and horrendous congestion around the toaster. And you wouldn't believe how long it took me to get the brain started. Then the nightmare of digging a pathway to some papers I needed. One of my ideas was left standing on a platform for three-quarters of an hour without any information. It never used to be like this.

Bake for your neighbour

I'm just sitting at my kitchen table trying to sketch out a briefing paper on neighbourliness and older people, when there's a tap at the door. It's my next-door neighbour with some scones she's just baked, still warm, to go with me tea. Oh thanks - you alright dear? A quick word about the panto and she's gone (a bit like Cinderella, I thought afterwards).

So I sit down again, thinking, how many of us bake and give, these days? Perhaps we need some kind of 'bake-for-your-neighbour' day to remind us of the simple power of sharing food. The multicultural potential could be rewarding.

Food shared creates something else, it can take the spice out of conflict (think of Act 2 of As you like it - 'sit down and feed, and welcome to our table') offering modest moments of connection and little low-pressure spaces of understanding. Perhaps the bridges of cohesion could be baked in our own ovens? (And somebody's going to remind me where I've seen something similar, please?)

Behind you!

And unto this humble blogger, there did befall a great honour. I was trying to grab a quiet hour by meself when the phone rang: could I come help backstage right now as they're one short, stage left?

It has been panto week here. You dismiss it at your peril, particularly since this year's number, Cinderella, was written and directed by my son. You could get a nasty curse from the wicked witch.

So I could hardly ignore his practical plea for the saturday matinee, by mobile some minutes after curtain-up. And indeed I got a buzz being in the wings (more in-the-way than of much use between scenes, I fear).

The production (I witnessed a full rehearsal, two and a bit performances from the hall and one backstage) seems to have been pretty much an unqualified triumph. But who am I to say?

Having experienced its evolution over several months, from the wings as it were, I'm going to have to unleash one more short stuttering monologue about community drama generally, and pantomime specifically. (I last hit this theme 12 months ago.)

Community drama insists on the accommodation of the gormless and the gifted, the shaky and the sure. It welcomes those who are there for the social, those who have talent anyway, those who come cos he or she dragged them along, and those who don't know why they show up. Over several months, parts are re-written to match competence and emerging confidence. It's intergenerational, it tosses together the older assured voices and the uncertain young ones. Dances are worked and re-worked, lines learned and forgotten and changed; scenes blur, separate, find consensus. Technicians come in and fiddle endlessly with lights and mikes, someone sources the costumes and props, someone quietly paints the scenery amid rehearsal mayhem, a man is up the ladder sorting the drapes, there's publicity to do and tickets and programmes. Musicians are found, magic is worked.

You can take your song home, and work on your lines in the privacy of your bathroom, but teamwork permeates everything. This is essentially a huge collective local endeavour. I sometimes think that we should scrap school education and just get people doing community projects like this: for young people at least, it's about as educational (in my definition) as it gets.

And pantomime leaves no space for competitiveness or nasty prejudices. It gives people a familiar framework for behaving quite outside themselves. They do so initially in a social context (twice a week, through the winter, since you ask) and then ultimately publicly (five performances here, each wilder than the previous). Pantomime facilitates modest creativity and a confident rapport with family and friends in the audience - oh yes it does! - and temporarily legitimates marvellously childish behaviour among adults. And we should not overlook the fact that it allows young people, in audience and on stage, to behave childishly too: for some, I suspect, that is a stressfully rare luxury.

And if you're trying to interpret the picture, ok I'll try to keep it simple. Ben plays the part of an ugly sister and happens to be involved in redecorating a room, as you do when you're getting ready to go to a ball. So additional costume is required, and a little slapstick ensues. I hope that's clear.

Little boxes, just the same

Round here I guess it's like a lot of places, sometimes you think why bother to leave your garbage all over the street when we pay to have our dustmen, sorry operatives, do it for us. And they love to leave the emptied boxes in unlikely places.

But it's not their fault we now have four boxes per household - green waste, paper, plastic bottles and cans, and yer authentic garbage. If it helps recycle, it's obviously desirable. Except the lids blow off the paper box and the bottle box is lidless. Stuff gets blown around the place, accumulating in corners, blocking the drain covers and making life just a bit too easy for the rat population.

We had a note through the door some days ago from one neighbour asking if anyone had their green bin. Someone else went without their paper box for a bit, another found their bottle box gone. All excellent stimuli for neighbourly interaction.

Sounds like a job for a retired painter. On behalf of us all, my next door neighbour got all the boxes together and painted the numbers on. I had to have a quiet word about getting number six and number nine the right way up, but otherwise everyone now knows whose is whose. Not that we're afraid of putting stuff in each others' if there's space and the need arises, I'm glad to say.

Panto in the dark

I was just walking home from a meeting this evening and noticed the street lights and house lights weren't on at the edge of the village: a very local power cut. I happened to know the community drama folk were rehearsing the pantomime in the hall, so I popped in to see how they were coping.

There they were, oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa romping away at a song with all the electric heaters on for light, and a collection of candles blazing. The heaters created challenging conditions, as it's exceptionally mild weather at the moment (I'm at home with the back door open to get some evening air); and the candles might have had the health and safety officer reaching for the rulebook (I suspect he or she had had to be bundled into the panto-horse costume and left in a cupboard for the duration). Well it's just two weeks til curtain up, can't afford to let such concerns disrupt preparations. The panto is serious business round here.

The way our neighbours might be living

There was a conversation at my dinner table the other night about home visits made by (broadly) social services professionals. The winning tale came from an old friend who's an educational psychologist. He tells of a house where there was a parrot flying around indoors, and he watched as it crapped on a plate of uncooked sausages. (Oh says the child's mother, it's poo'd on me dinner). His other prize vignette concerned a motorbike on a bed and a dead goat hanging in the hallway. It sounds like an image coughed up by Tom Waits.

The inconsistency of neighbouring

A friend was telling me today about a conversation with a neighbour, who she reckoned has lived in her street for well over ten years. The question she was asked was something like 'have you seen so-and-so over the road? I haven't seen her for a while.' The lady in question had died some three years previously, unbeknown to the questioner.

For my friend, who grew up in a rural area, a bit of adjustment was necessary, because this couldn't have happened in her village. But she lives now in a northern English city. I'm not surprised and probably most people who think about neighbourliness in contemporary society wouldn't be surprised, which suggests that this sort of disconnection between neighbours is far from exceptional.

My friend works full time all week and is often out of the country, yet she had known about the neighbour's death. The story highlights an inconsistency about neighbouring in urban areas, an unpredictability, which is related to risk and which is accentuated by comparing it with the relative consistency of neighbourhoods in rural areas.

Put simply, when humans move into unfamiliar areas, like any social animal, they do so at risk of being unwelcome, and we prepare for such risk by being ready to put up shutters, to close in on ourselves. In complex urban societies there are a lot of people moving into unfamiliar areas, among unfamiliar others, so there are lots of people ready to put up the shutters on engaging with those around them - especially when the connections we need for sociability can often be sustained remotely and through our work or travel, and when we don't have to collaborate with those around us for basic needs like food and energy.

We have lots of ways of closing others out of our worlds - gates, curtains, personal sound systems, mobile phones, and cars especially - and too few ways of giving connections a chance.

I went on from that conversation to a meeting which included consideration of an outline research proposal on the role of celebration in 'building stronger community ties'. I'm a fraction clearer now about why that's a good idea.

Car alarms, pah

I was woken several times last night by a neighbour's car alarm, set off presumably by the unusually strong winds, or who knows a mischievous cat, I don't much care. Only, 0430 of a sunday morning it was unexpected, esp since the thing was unappeased and went into insistent attention-seeking mode, sounding off every 15 mins for about two hours and a half.

The fact that the owner apparently was unable to hear it from a few metres away does encourage speculation, I mean about the usefulness of the device. I also suspect that if theft is really such a concern, it might be worth thinking about trading down to the sort of car that no-one wants to steal. (I won't say 'that's what I got' because Fate, who I happen to know takes a feed off this blog, would decide it was being made subject to unreasonable temptation).

Choreography of neighbouring

Thursday is bin day, today it was also paper recycling collection day. I happened to be on hand just after the latter so I reunited a few boxes with their lids, and slotted them away off the path. A little later I heard the dustbin collection, followed by the sound of a neighbour wheeling various bins into place.

Then presently a knock at the back, here's the lady from next door with a small cake she's baked - one for me to go with me coffee. Thanks me dear, you alright? Oh fine. Mind the step. Off she goes.

Sounds: universal, personal, neighbourhood

Jacques Loussier playing Bach live on R3, the back door open to the autumn air and the sounds of children playing and laughing in a nearby garden. As ideal a coincidence of sounds as I can imagine.

Community involvement, the reality

Today I met Tony Hillier, 'community poet' of Swindon, who lent me a slim collection which contains various resident-generated poetic thoughts. This is page 28. 

Neighbourhood water feature

Here's a T-junction at the foot of a short hill, in a neighbourhood much-used for rat-running. Over the last couple of years residents got some much-needed home-zoning and the volume of through-traffic decreased as a consequence.

The re-design included this traffic-calming platform. Unfortunately the engineers didn't put a gutter beside the kerb. When it rains, the water runs down the slope and into the homes. Neat eh? And I used to live in one of those houses, they don't have hallways, nor gulleys under the doorstep.

Let 'em know what you think

Health enquiries

I trotted round the park this morning and there was an old lady I've known for a while, with her dog. She'd parked her powered chair at the end of the path and was making her way round, today with just one stick.

I stopped for a quick chat. I complimented her on her reduced dependence on her wheelchair, she expressed delight to see me running again.

It was a nice confirmation of one of my half-formed typologies about neighbourhood connections - of the shades of meaning when we say we 'know' someone. Maybe the simplest sphere is a nod or a smile of recognition, graduating perhaps to a comment about the weather; but the enquiry about health (whether superficially polite or genuinely concerned) suggests a slightly different, slightly more robust connection, based on a little genuine knowledge about each other.

Missing

I was on the Havelock estate with my friend Wasim today and we came across this. Theft or abandonment, I just thought it was indescribably sad.

Shot and stoned

I was with David Sillito of BBC news yesterday, filming in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Kids were straggling round the way they do, playing in the home-zoned street which was good to see, they asked questions and seemed ok about it. We did some walking shots and David asked me a question about anti-social behaviour. Before I could come out with any of the usual drivel, there was a clatter on the street sign close to our heads and we realised they were throwing stones at us. Of course I switched from saying something like '...and we don't listen enough to the needs of young people...' to 'what they need is a good thrashing...'

This is perfectly true, except the last bit.

How to thank your neighbours

I came across this in another neighbourhood, so I wasn't even aware that Poppy had been lost. Heck, I could be the last to know.

Just have a word

You know how it is, you sit down at a meeting in a community centre or a school or somewhere, and the kids outside are doing a bit of attention-seeking / boundary-testing provocation, kicking balls against the windows, and it's hard to hear. There we were last night in the community shop on Havelock, so young Wasim says quietly, would you like me to go and speak to them? Up he gets, we all know he doesn't need anyone to go with him. They carry on for a minute or so just to show they don't have to take any notice of him.

How lucky, I think, as the noise stops and the kids move off, for a community group to have someone to just do that: too many simply don't, I suspect, and can't cover it when they need to. The mood in the meeting, for the next two and a half hours, is confident and assured.

Local park vignette

Just strolled down to the park and back. Busy. A few young lads perched on the kids' slide and climbing frame, one or two hoods going up as the rain started. The boys soccer team in training and the girls team about to start. Impressive the number of adults turning out for coaching and support. A single dog-walker, a lone jogger. A couple of blokes walking through on their way back from work. A group defiantly playing cricket in the corner, complete with stumps and proper gloves, the biz, fending off stray footballs that drift onto the pitch. Things pretty much as they should be then.

The power of fences: vignette

Close to where I live there's a disused lane, now a footpath, and on one side a large open field which contained an old dirt running track. A natural scene for dog-walkers. Before I became ill last autumn, it was my home training patch: I did well over thirty miles in a single session there one day just last summer. The land has been sold and development has been going on all winter.

I finally made myself go down there and take a look. I went up to the forbidding fence, I peered at the earth-mounds, the huge concrete pipes, the broad tyre tracks. No sign of course of where my own tracks had patterned out half-mile reps or a steady ten. I turned and heard the way my weeping shocked against the quiet.

Mostly self-pity of course, about my confiscated health. But hard, for a moment, to distinguish from something more universal. I told myself that the plush houses and flats that will sprout here might just mean that existing housing will become available to others, somewhere along the chain. I didn't feel convinced.

People all over the place are watching their local green spaces disappear under the need for homes, complete with the snatched comfort of personal and collective memories. It's the thought of the BMWs and Mercedes that will be parked here, perhaps, and the unseemly millions being made by a handful of developers.

I watched a butterfly flicking along the inside of the fence for 50 metres or so, feeling for a gap, like the last wafer of some spirit of freedom trapped inside. Moments later a woodpecker clattered into the metal fencing, recovered and made off.

It's the most profound experience of the power of fences that I've ever had, and I feel rather naive about it. Change buries us.

Remote happiness

I noticed a woman a few seats away, intent in subdued conversation on her mobile. When I put my work away, to get off the train, I noticed she was weeping.

“Are you OK?” I asked. Yes, she said, I think so, from a damp smile.

“Happiness?” I said. Yes, she said, yes.

Food surplus vignette

My next door neighbour is going away for a couple of weeks. Over the past 24 hours there has appeared:

• on my back doorstep, two cloves of garlic and a bunch of spring onions
• on the recycling box outside, a bag of onions from the allotment of one of her friends
• beside the fence, some current magazines
• by hand at the back door, an apple.

Safe journey, says I.

Neighbourhood vignette

I got home last night shortly after dark and it was cold. As I turned into the street I saw three or four kids from the houses around, playing cricket under a lamp-post, using an upturned recycling box as the wicket and what looked like a trashed skateboard as a bat.

The pic is from CABE's 2004 report on The value of public space.

Troublesome kids vignette

The other day I was in a community centre helping out with this and that, when a woman came in and asked what she should do about her sons. She said they don't do much except sit in and watch telly, then they start to get angry and violent, she worries that they will get into trouble. She was aware that they may be using drugs, and it seems they bully her for money.

We found a telephone number for her to call for advice, and I hope she went away and used it. I asked her how old the boys are. One is 28, the other 25.

Neighbouring vignette

Classic neighbouring. A knock at the door on a sunday afternoon, it's my next door neighbour who moved in about four months ago. Something about mending a wardbrobe, hammers and floorboards, a punctured water pipe, can't find the main stop valve, where is it in your house?

I popped round with my son, someone has their finger on the pipe in question, there's water dripping through the ceiling in the front room, buckets and towels, we find the valve straight away but there's a lengthy hunt for the drain cock. One of us goes for the neighbour who works for the water company and knows about plumbing, one of us goes for a garden hose, the flow is stopped and the ceiling plaster's saved.

It seems a previous owner or worker had laid pipes just below the bedroom floorboards, then replaced a board with a nail that went right through the pipe and out the other side, the hole sealing itself until disturbed by the new owner. It's a phenomenon familiar to cyclists, where you have a shard that's actually holding the tyre up.

When I called again in the evening to check all was well, our more practical neighbour had cut out and replaced the pipe, rebalanced the flow, and all was well. I'm just embarrassed that I didn't have the wit to fill the kettle while waiting for the tank to drain.

Harassment vignette

The other day I was sitting chatting with some people from a residents' association, in a community shop on an urban estate. We had the door open so that it was welcoming for passers-by. An elderly man appeared at the threshold, very short with a quiet voice and hesitant manner. We sat him down and he told his story, which he related with resigned dignity. It concerned physical attacks made upon him by a young girl, over the past several months. He lives alone, having been on the estate for thirty years, but had not been able to get much support from neighbours nor from the police in dealing with the harassment. We saw him later as we walked round the neighbourhood, and the girl was identified. It's not appropriate here for me to say much more, for obvious reasons. I just wanted to note that help was given because the community shop was there and it was open, some of its representatives were available, and people were ready to make time to listen to his story. According to the man's account, the police, paid to take such incidents seriously, seem not to have done so.

Social contact in apartment blocks

I was in Bethnal Green, east London today, interviewing some folk about a project, and was shown round one or two neighbourhoods. A moment before I took this picture, we'd been looking in the opposite direction at a block of flats which appeared to have minimal opportunities for social interaction - just the lobby and the lift probably. We turned round to look at this block, and heard people calling from the walkway. It was a three-way conversation between two people on walkways and a third passing below in the street. These walkways are the kind of 'estate action add-ons' that tend to get derided - but it's obvious they give opportunity for some interactions that are much less likely in blocks without the option to be 'open to contact.'

Good Neighbours Against Street Furniture

Nice vignette from my friend Martin Dudley in the York outpost of Bishopthorpe (temporarily known as Ascot-upon-Ouse) - about a neighbour's action as a wheelchair-bound pavement user was faced with an obstruction.

Neighbourhood encounter vignette

I'm in a buzz about this. I was as usual late for a train this morning, yomping down the hill to the station, when I spotted a diminutive half-bent hobbling figure ahead going in the same direction. "Could that be Mrs Walton?" I asked alongside. It was indeed. I hadn't seen her for I reckon 10 years, and frankly assumed she'd died or had to move into a home. I'd got to know her from chatting in the queue at the bread shop and the fruit shop, in the days when we had such. And of course we'd stop and exchange a few words whenever we saw one another in those days. There was a sense of huge mutual delight in this rediscovery of what is after all a low-level acquaintanceship. I'd once given her my phone number because I knew she lives on her own and might need it, but apart from that there's no possible claim between us.

I felt genuinely torn between the impulse to chat longer with her, and the duty of getting to an important meeting on time. I've now lived in the same place for nearly 19 years, a suburban village on the very outskirts of London, and it's seldom I walk through the village without seeing and greeting at least a nodding acquaintance. I really must make myself leave earlier to allow for these encounters.

The delight that Mrs Walton and I shared in our quick catch-up is both superficial and profound. It reflects our general need for uncomplicated occasional recognition from others with few demands; it adds to the gradual accumulation of the sense of belonging; and it somehow reaffirms our simple identity as individuals inhabiting a place.

Civil behaviour vignette

A half-busy town centre, a young lad chatting with his mates turned round too quickly, must have made contact, the old lady fell to the ground just in front of me, her stick dropping it seemed in slow-motion to one side. She so nearly, but didn't, cracked her head on the paving. The young man was apologising, offering to call ambulance, grabbing a mobile from a friend to do so. She too had friends with her, I offered water, we sat her up, relief all round. So there we were, three generations it's fair to say, sorting the situation and then moving on, unlikely ever to meet again. Civil behaviour in action.

A couple of vignettes

Just thinking about the myriad ways in which neighbourliness manifests itself. I was talking to an old lady whose husband had died recently, leaving her with relatively little practical knowledge or experience. She found that she'd punctured a tyre on her car, just outside her house, and really didn't know what to do. A young bloke from across the street noticed and offered to change it for her, then directed her to a good dealer to get a replacement at a very reasonable rate.

A couple of weeks ago my 17 year-old daughter was at home alone during the day when the gas-meter man called. Knowing he was doing his rounds, our next-door neighbour knocked on the door a minute or two later, just to check.