'Do you get on alright with next door?'

Here's the aerial man fitting a digital aerial so I get the benefits of all that technology I occasionally hear about. Except he can't conveniently reach the right side of the chimney stack, you know how it is. Hence the question, which I daresay he often has to ask of residents, so he could position his ladder and walk on her roof...

He wasn't to know, and I wasn't going to mention, but his tap at the door to ask interrupted me in drafting a report section about how privacy and publicness are constantly in tension in the practice of neighbouring. And there I was pasting in a reference to an entertaining paper by Elizabeth Stokoe about 'neighbour relationships and complaints,' in which she uses discourse analysis to explore how transgressions of the norms of neighbouring often occur around the boundaries of the private home - through the wall, over the fence, out of the window, in the garden and so on.