Saturday, 31 July 2010

Terrifying encounter with friendly dog

Dogwalkers8 bw A friend has extended family staying over, from Nigeria, including two children, from one of the cities in the south. On arrival they had been terrified at the doorstep by my friend's dog, as placid and playful a beast as you are likely to meet.

I learned that the only dogs in their city are guard dogs, reared and trained to scare people. These children had not before met a friendly dog kept as a pet. That's sad.

31 Jul 2010 17:06:53 | Vignettes

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Neighbouring ain't what it used to be I sometimes feel I'm a bit of a lone voice in calling for an understanding of neighbouring that takes account of social change. Neighbouring ain't what it used to be, and that's only to be expected; most other things ain't, either. Now here's Chris, who's thought about it a bit, commenting on this blog post about the Vermont network Front Porch Forum. Chris notes wisely that 'being neighborly' has been redefined: 'Many people today, in cities at least, just don’t feel the need to know and interact with people regularly simply because they live next to them. We’ve silently succumbed to the realization that we want better reasons to invest time in strangers... 'I may not know my next door neighbor but do I really need to just because he lives next door? What if we have no interests in common? Don’t worry, I’ll still call the fire department if his house catches fire and I’ll still watch for suspicious people in his yard (in addition to mine), but I just don’t care about his obsessive gardening because I don’t care at all about gardening myself.' With the advent of the internet and global real-time communications, Chris notes, 'most people in the modern world have simply recognized subconsciously that making friends in person one neighbor at a time is just damned inefficient.'
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Participation and public service cuts Yesterday I had the privilege of interviewing two north London ward councillors, Alan Stanton and Zena Brabazon, and we found we had a lot of interests and values in common. As I left Alan kindly gave me a copy of a book he had written on co-operative working (Invitation to self management). Flicking through the pages on the train last night I came across and was struck by the contemporary relevance of this sentence: 'The rhetoric of participation is one part of the public services where no cuts have been made.' The book was published in 1989, and refers to work that took place before 1986.

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