neighbourly interventions

Wednesday 24th October

It was an outwardly eventful day yesterday. The bungalow man presented me with a bottle of wine, “It’s not much, would of cost me more if I’d ‘ad to pay someone. You’ll do it again next year won’t you?” I dug his bean patch on Saturday afternoon. He came out to chat to me a couple of times that day and to show me his new jacket, still bearing its label, that he was going to be wearing to a formal dinner that night. The next day he told me, “I had my photo took w’i’t dicky-bow, I’ll show you when it comes back.” And also how he’d had a disturbed night through indigestion. Over the next few days I’ve heard several recitations of this story to passing neighbours, hard not to since his hearing difficulties cause him to shout. I’m really enjoying this friendship developing.

Also yesterday, the woman who used to have my allotment made her way in to tell me her neighbour, up the lane, has thrown out a carpet and underlay, she’d have a word for me if I’m interested. She also pointed to a gooseberry bush I’ve liberated from weeds and says it has lovely sweet fruit if you can keep the birds off it. I told her I have a whole row of its babies (self-rooted). It’s just occurred to me that I could have a table in my gateway of surplus fruit bushes for path-users to help themselves to.

Not long after this the owner of the carpet (it turns out) and her little boys, stopped to talk about the no-bonfire rule and offered use of her bonfire site up the top of the lane as an alternative way of disposing of burnable waste. She took me up to see it.