Neighbours being not so neighbourly

Being neighbourly is an old-fashioned notion. The thought that you could pop next door to borrow a cup of sugar or tell your children to wait next door when they get home from school, because you’re going to be late, is an old-fashioned idea. The old Australian TV series, called Neighbours, was just fiction because, in reality, no one really is neighbourly.

In fact, there are many neighbours who are unneighbourly. They are neither understanding nor empathetic and will, at the drop of a hat, call the police on you if you give them an opportunity. If they don’t immediately call the police, they’ll post it on social media and ask groups what to do and those members always say, call the police.

There’s a sort of war going on between two millionaire neighbours in a rural town in the UK. Both live next door to each other and the feud is about how tall their homes are. Both are competing to make theirs taller than the other. I mean, how stupid is that?

Neighbours argue over many things, some small and some quite serious.

The most common dispute is over noise. Your neighbours may be keeping you awake all night by yelling or fighting or they might be partying with loud music playing. Some do go over and politely knock on the door to ask them to keep it down whereas others either call security or the police. I don’t know whether doing either will help because, at the end of the day, you have to live there. If you think that calling security or the authorities, on your neighbours is good in the long run, you might be wrong. It might actually have the opposite effect.

But if it’s not noisy neighbours at night, it might be noisy, or purposely disruptive, children during the day, all day. Ever hear the so-called game, “Knock Down Ginger”? It’s commonly played by badly brought up children who run through their street ringing doorbells and then running off. The idea is that someone will open the door to find no one standing there. It could be an elderly person who went through a great deal of trouble getting to the door.

But these badly behaved children find this amusing. In fact, it happens in blocks of flats too and that’s when security is often called to speak to the parents whose children were involved.

And if they’re not playing this awful game, the kids are just thrown out of their flat to cause a disturbance by playing noisily in corridors. Let them be someone else’s problem, is the moto of their parents.

Now, in some countries where you don’t have a designated parking spot or a driveway, you might find that where your car is parked can cause annoyance to your neighbour. Where parking a car is concerned, even inches matter. If your car is even an inch in front of your neighbour’s house, you can be sure he’s going to march out and demand that you move it.

Walls are also a problem and building extensions of any type. If you block your neighbour’s view or sunlight, because you’ve increased the height of your wall or you’ve built a structure directly in front of the path of the sun, your neighbour may report you to the local council who will probably ask for it to be dismantled.

Pathways on your property can also pose a problem. In some countries, if you consistently allow strangers to use a path through your front garden as a shortcut by not saying anything and then one day tell them to stop, you’ve lost the right to do so.

Trees that belong in your garden and are near an adjoining wall can pose problems when a bough hangs into a neighbour’s garden. Can your neighbour cut down that bough? If it’s a fruit tree, can your neighbour pick its fruit? In the UK, yes, your neighbour has the right to cut it down or pick the fruit it bears. But some neighbours don’t take too kindly to that and make an issue of it even though the law is very clear on this.