Chapter 10: Meet The neighbours

I must say sorry to my wife first. I did this without telling her until it was too late and she was understandably not too happy. Sorry.

I invited our whole street round to our house.

It does seem mad to me that generally neighbours don’t seem to want to know each other. I was also inspired by the ‘change the world for a fiver’ book and by ‘How To Be Good’ by Nick Hornby.

So I dropped an invitation full of irony, and hopefully some depreciating humour, through the letterboxes of the 27 identical houses that we are attached to, in the terrace street in which we live in.

The Invitation

So what happened?

Well a week later you nearly got to read about it in the papers as I was on the verge of PR’ing the fact that we lived in the most anti-social street in Britain – no replies.

Over the next week though we started to get a few polite rejections, so at least people acknowledged we existed, although by the end of that week I wasn’t sure if I lived in the most ant-social street in Britain or the street with the most second homes as the popular excuse was that ‘sorry but we’re going to our place in the country for the weekend’

We did start to get a few acceptances though and by party day – Sunday at 5pm – we had nine – yes nine – yes’s!

Which actually meant it went well. There were few enough people to enable everyone to meet everyone else – mostly for the first time. The room was full of mainly lawyers or writers – or a combination of the two.

We even had someone volunteer to be the host for next year.

So it worked, although I have to say the relief we felt as we shut the door to the final leavers was immense. I think it was an experience that has brought our whole family closer together.

My wife asked me the other day why I want neighbours to talk to each other when they obviously don’t want to. But why is that people want to talk to old school friends, meet possible new partners on-line or at speed dating, have dinner parties with incompatible other parents, who they only know from the school gate or even make life long friendships on charity treks that have taken them away from the people they spend all their life with?


Talk to your neighbours – you never know you may have something in common and if not it should help defuse the negative thoughts you have when one of them invariably annoys you by parking in the wrong place or making too much noise…