For Thirty Years I’ve Ignored My Neighbour

It turns out he’s lovely

My neighbour lives at the bottom of the road where my parents live. I walked past his house twice a day for over ten years on my way to and from school.

He was (and still is) a smoker, and he could often be found sitting on the steps of his house smoking a cigarette.

I had plenty of opportunities to say hello to him, or for him to say hello to me and for either of us to strike up a conversation, or even talk about the weather for a minute or two, but it never happened.

If I ever walked past him, I would put my head down determinedly and scurry past where he was sitting, and he would stare upwards toward the sky to avoid looking at me.

If you’re British, this behaviour won’t be that shocking to you. Not knowing whether to make eye contact and say hello to someone you don’t know but are walking past on a narrow street is a constant source of anxiety.

Back to my neighbour. Since I never said hello to him, and he never said hello to me, I just assumed that he was a grumpy old man who I’d never have anything to do with.

But while staying back at home recently, I got involved with a local food bank charity and at one of the volunteering events, he was there.

At first, I wasn’t sure what to say. We both knew who the other person was, without actually knowing each other’s names or anything else about each other except for the fact that we lived on the same street. But then we were assigned to the same table to pack boxes and we couldn’t avoid talking anymore.

For the first time in thirty years, I actually said hello to him. Not only that, but we got chatting and it turns out that he has a brilliant, wry sense of humour and we spent the whole afternoon cracking jokes and laughing about the fact that we hadn’t said hello to each other in all this time.

He told me about his family and his job (although he’s now well into retirement) and I told him about my various travels and my plans for the future.

All it took was this one event to realise how nice he was. He was a normal amount of grumpy for a seventy five year old, but not at all in the way that I had thought for all of this time.

We still volunteer once or twice a month at the same time, and now when we see each other on the street we stop and chat and it’s lovely. I feel like I have created a community through this one interaction as I now say hello to his wife too, and to his children if I see them outside their house.

My street feels so much friendlier now (and I seem so much friendlier). How much nicer to wave and say hello than to duck my head down and scurry past their house.

This whole experience has been an eye opener and I’ll try not to judge my neighbours in future before I’ve even had a chance to talk with them.