Tuesday, 15 August 2006

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.

15 Aug 2006 23:05:44 | Neighbourhood relations, Vignettes

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