Is it too much to ask to have my neighbours say hello?

The thing I find peculiar about neighbours is the curiosity with which it brings. It is almost a right to be much nosier than you would any other collection of strangers, purely because they happen to live in a close proximity to you.

I live in a small and quaint cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Broadstone, a very well-to-do area where the local average age of residents is around 70. When I first moved here I dubbed it the ‘white picket fence’ road, because each house looks so pristine, with its white wooden porches and symmetrical windows and immaculately manicured lawns that I was half expecting the houses to be cardboard facades of some television programme, because really – who honestly has time to de-weed a lawn every single day.

It turns out that my neighbours do. I have been here for just over one year, and in that time, my neighbours opposite have never let their grass grow longer than 0.5 inches (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they measured it every morning) . They’re a married couple in their late sixties, and only wear clothes in a shade of beige or grey. I have often tried to strike conversation with this couple – the odd ‘hello’ or a ‘lovely weather, isn’t it?’ sort of comment. They never respond with anything more than a ‘mmm’ and a nod. Whenever they see me, they do one of those half-smiles, which is a regular smile whilst simultaneously trying to hide a lot of judgement. I assume their conversations behind their net-curtained kitchen windows go like this:

“Dear me, George? Look it’s that girl again. The one who never moves her wheelie bin for days after the rubbish men have been.”
“What was that dear? Sorry, just ironing my underpants, give me a moment.”
“I do hope she cleans her windows sometime soon – that bird muck has been facing our lounge for almost two months now and I simply can’t stand it. Oh, quick, she’s coming this way.” Linda promptly let’s go of the corner of the kitchen curtains and watches as I walk out to my car to retrieve something. She strains her eyes through the curtain.
“Is that a Harry Potter nightie? I’m not sure she’s even wearing a bra.”
George, in the background, places down the iron and places his hands on his hips. “I do love a fresh warm pair of pants – what was that about no bra? Oh yes, I see now. How about you fix me a tea instead darling? I need to trim the edge of the lawn again, it’s almost been 20 hours since it was last cut and I need all the energy I can get.”
“Better wait until she’s left her house or gone back to sleep – I’d rather you didn’t talk to her.”
“Good thinking darling. Shall we go watch another episode of Mastermind?”

I’m not entirely sure if their names are even Linda or George, but they look like a Linda or George. In their defence, their garden does always look immaculate. My mum once tripped and fell out of my front door because she was too busy staring at their hydrangeas, asking herself ‘how do they get the colours so vibrant?’

Over the other side of the road are the two detatched houses. They stand proud, with their garages, mocking us terraced houses over the road. There is one with a small boat and a Smart car parked outside the house, not on their driveway. I don’t like this house purely because the Smart car blocks me from getting in and out of my allocated parking space with ease. When reversing, I have to do a seven point turn to ensure I don’t smack the front of the car and reverse into a nearby tree. When I first moved into the house, I noted that the man who lives there was very angry, mostly because he had a go at my ex-boyfriend who thought he’d be nice and cut his grass while he had the lawnmower out. ‘Do not cut my grass ever again, thank you,’ he had said.

When I said the residents of my road were proud about their gardens, I was not lying in the slightest. Apparently there is a certain ‘way’ to cut grass that is different to the usual pushing forward and backwards motion which I’ve been doing all my life, and woe betide you if you try and help out your neighbour with their garden. My newest housemate accidentally drove over the corner of his garden and squashed a newly planted shrub – you should have seen his face; he was livid for weeks.

The neighbours next to him are a young family, with three children all under ten. I know this because they ride their bicycles up and down the road and round the block at such speed that you have to swerve your car to avoid them.  I once saw someone crash his bike into a wall trying to avoid them as he cycled home from work. I don’t think they quite realise that they’re cycling on a real road, where real live people will be trying to get to work.

They also like to run across my front garden because it’s a shortcut for when they’re playing ‘it’, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I swung open my front door and called down the road ‘please stop running on my garden, you’ll squash my newly planted daffodils!’. I’m a keen gardener, you see, and I think it’s just plain rude to run across someone’s garden. The daffodils came up and bloomed, by the way, in case you were wondering. But if they continued to run across my garden, well... it might have been a different story.

When I talk about these neighbours though, they all seem positively delightful. I used to live in a flat in Bournemouth town centre, right on the High Street. It was an odd building to live in. I seemed to be the only ‘normal’ resident who lived there. There was ‘Poo Man’ who lived in the bedsit nearest the side entrance. Please don’t think I am calling him this purely to be mean. He earnt this name fairly, because he always had ripped trousers and poo stains over his front door. I learnt to open the main door, and sprint as fast as I could towards my flat, holding my breath. The smell emanating from his flat was nothing short of foul, and I had to wonder if he even had a sense of smell left anymore.

It was the woman who lived opposite me who I found most curious. When I had first moved there, I baked a large batch of cookies. Too many, in fact, for me on my own to eat. I boxed up two lots, one I placed upstairs outside of the door to the people who lived above me (who had their TV’s on so loud and argued so much I felt I knew them quite well), and one outside the lady opposite me. Upstairs returned the box the next day to my door with an origami swan made out of the note I had left them, which was lovely. I was always rubbish at origami and it was a lovely gesture. The woman opposite, however, had simply pushed the cookies back to my door. No note saying ‘thanks but no thanks’ – just a ‘sod off’ sort of gesture.

This was just the beginning of it, I soon realised. There were the occasional instances when I was leaving my flat, about to walk into the High Street, when she opened her front door opposite me at the exact same time. She’d see that I was there, and promptly slam it shut again. There were times when I was taking the rubbish out to the back into the large bins, and I saw her returning from the bins. Instead of continue walking towards her flat, like any normal person would,  she turned down another corridor and proceeded to run away from me. As soon as I had passed the corridor, she ran towards her flat and slammed the door shut.

Perhaps I did something very wrong without realise – maybe she was allergic to cookies, and was insulted that I had tried to kill her. Perhaps she disliked my taste in welcome doormats. Or perhaps she was just scared of people. Whatever it was, I never found out the real reason, and am only hoping that she continues to run away from her neighbours.

It is odd though, isn’t it? How you can live so close to people and yet know so little about them. It would be nice to do the whole ‘hi, I see your new to the area, so here’s some sugar’ routine, like they do in films, but I’m quite sure that if you did that to anyone in England they’d be so terrified and would be convinced you’d done something to the sugar. But people want to be left alone. They want to go about their daily routines, and then go home to become a stranger, and have no one question what they do, or how they cut their grass, or what they do with their cookies – which frankly, I think is rather sad. I’d love to live on a road where everyone knew everyone, and you could all go round each other’s house for a barbeque, or to watch the Olympics, or just to have a tea and say hi.

So if you ever happen to live next door to me, please note you may receive baked goods from me at point - if you don't like them, then please just humour me and return the container back to me empty. Whether it goes in your stomach, in the bin, or in the dog is entirely your decision. In return, if you could not judge me for walking around in my pjyamas at all times of the day then that would be great.