Friday, 09 September 2011

'Don't knock my door. Call the council'

It's new year's eve, past midnight, a neighbour's music is blasting on way beyond reasonable levels. You step down to tap at the door and have a word, as our culture and present government policies would expect you to do.

There's a chance you might get stabbed in the neck with a pair of scissors, as happened in this very sad case reported in a case in Watford recently.

"He was very aggressive. He said: 'New Year.' I said 'I know this is New Year. This is a residential area. You have to show respect.'

"He replied: 'Don't knock my door. Call the police. Call the council.'"

Meaning, you are my neighbour, I only expect to have to deal with you through an official intermediary.

In mitigation, the defendent's barrister said 'He was not the one who left the flat to confront his neighbour.'

 

9 Sep 2011 19:59:53 | Neighbourhood relations

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On holiday with the neighbours Apparently 49 people from a single street, Coronation Avenue in Haverfordwest, all went on holiday together to Ibiza recently. Rob Greenland reported a similar story a few years ago about an entire street in Liverpool doing something similar. Bryony Gordon in yesterday's Telegraph offers a light-hearted reality check on spending downtime with people you may depend on, if you don't already get on with them really well. When we got to the hotel last night, the family at No 10 complained that their room was smaller than the one allocated to the family at No 12, “which is just what we need after they got planning permission to build that monstrous extension that blocks out all the light in our garden”. I think it's great if people get on so well with their neighbours that they do not regard going away together as a risk to their relationships. It makes me think of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century annual migration of east London residents to the hop fields of Kent for temporary rural employment. As Gordon's piece suggests, there might be a fascinating sociological study to be done of the extent to which established behaviours were reproduced, or not, in the different temporary environment. I hope there wasn't undue pressure put on any of the hesitant or reluctant to sign up. I hope they rewarded those who stayed behind to feed the cats and water the gardens. And I hope there weren't too many burglaries while they were away. I have no comment to offer on the choice of Ibiza as a holiday destination, but the people I'd be most curious to hear about are the ones, if there were any, who went away at the same time but chose somewhere else.
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Talking over the palings I was in a community centre the other day chatting with residents about some of the images they had brought for the local website they are developing. As soon as this one came up they all said: 'talking over the palings'. The picture seems to have encapsulated a historically intense neighbourliness, and the phrase was its widely-accepted shorthand. One of the residents said: the man in the background, that's Mr Bernard, he was from London, such a nice man. The picture dates from about 1950. I was born a few years later and grew up in the sixties, and I remember a lot of fences like this and, later, chain link fences. In many cases these would have replaced iron fences and gates, where the iron had been taken and used for armaments during the war.

Kevin Harris

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