Love thy neighbour (or at least admire their risque decor)

11:00am Thursday 10th July 2008

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New Southgate resident Tracy Lloyd-Evans has some rather old-fashioned ideas about her neighbourhood.

She believes everyone should know each other and chat to each other and - God forbid - maybe even occasionally do stuff together too.

And not in a grudging, you're-my-neighbour, I-still-have-your-flymo-leafsweeper-and-a-few-guilty-smiles-will-assuage-my-conscience kind of way either. In an authentic, Harold and Madge, come-in-for-a-cuppa, my-flymo-is-your-flymo kind of way.

She wasn't always like this. A month ago Miss L-E was just like you and me: private, reticent, healthily detached from the mindless minutiae of village life, smugly content in her absolute immunity to any Dibley-esque attempt at community cohesion.

But now it's all changed. Because, after 14 years of only knowing six of her neighbours, Miss L-E finally decided she wanted to see what the grass was like on the other side of the fence. Literally.

And so Good Neighbours Day was born: a concept that involved 250 neighbours being invited around to her house to meet one another and offer each other help with chores.

"It was brilliant," she said. "About 40 people turned up, some to help, some just to be social. It's amazing how it's changed the feeling in the street."

Not content with this one-off frenzy of intimate social interaction, Miss L-E is now planning more: dinners, events, parties, "do's ". There's no stopping her. It's only a matter of time before they all start talking in Aussie accents and disappearing sporadically to Adelaide, only to re-emerge years later with singing careers and perkier breasts.

By far the most irritating thing about my conversation with Miss L-E, however, was that I actually found myself quite warming to the idea. My irrationally isolationist tendencies, on which I'd come to depend, floundered helplessly in the face of her simple cookie-tin logic.

Why doesn't anyone know their neighbours anymore, I thought to myself? Why do we live in these HG Wellsian cocoons, communicating with each other via morning grunts and coded twitches in the curtains?

Take my parents' place, for example, in a bit of leafy suburbia on the outskirts of High Wycombe. Three decades ago every house was different, every occupant unique. And everyone knew everyone else - for better or worse.

To our left was a semi-famous film producer with a monolithic Dutch wife and an erotic bathroom admired for miles around. A central hub of the community, this bathroom had the works: phallic taps, Bacchanalian murals, erotic candles, testicular light-bulbs... Anything and everything guaranteed to offend even the most open-minded of toilet-goers.

My mother recalls one December day when a lot of snow fell and she could not get her car up the road. "As I struggled home, I shall never forget the sight of (the producer) leaning on his gate in a snow-white cowboy outfit complete with giant hat," she said. "He looked like a small fancy mushroom with an attitude. I shall never know why he dressed up like that."

Beside the producer lived M: the then-head of MI5 - or "well-known secret service guy", as my parents remember him. A friendly and colourful character, he apparently married his secretary late in life before adopting a baby with her.

But now everything has changed and all pearly stetsons or phallic showerheads are safely tucked away behind closed doors. Slobodan Milosevic could have moved into the neighbourhood with a harem of winged monkeys and nobody would be any the wiser. Because the fact is, nobody cares anymore.

We kid ourselves that we are oh-so-more connected than we ever used to be, with our computers and Blackberries and Facebook accounts, but it's all connection by proxy —a detachment masquerading as an intimacy.

So, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to leave my laptop now to find 250 neighbours to invite around for tea. Where I live, they'll probably nick all my stuff and set fire to the curtains - but at least I tried.