National Good Neighbour Day

National Good Neighbour Day.

You may be interested to know that today is Good Neighbour Day. Who'd have known it? While the rest of the world may be at loggerheads with each other and battling for survival this is the day when neighbours should become the best of all friends. You spend most of your life living next to the same people and now you suddenly discover that you've got to get on with them because on  one of the last days of September it's time to invite your neighbours in for lunch or a cup of tea. What's the point in just taking our neighbours for granted?  They'll always try to help regardless of circumstances.

Every so often your neighbours will do their utmost to instigate a lively and friendly relationship over the garden fence and the male will invariably be spotted in deep discussion with his male neighbour on Sunday mornings while washing the proverbial car or mowing the lawn in the garden. Then in a spirit of diplomacy and entente cordiale one member of the family will cordially join in with a private summery barbecue because that's the accepted norm when neighbourly hospitality has been fully extended to each other.

So it is that today around the world leafy roads and sleepy suburbs will come alive to the sound to small clusters of men, women and children chatting, laughing and perhaps gossiping light heartedly with each other. Mum will hang out the washing on the line while her neighbour will be doing much the same thing. Then through a forest of flapping sheets and shirts the two women will engage amicably on the topical subjects of the day. Maybe they'll offer their opinion on the exorbitant price of washing powder, bread, milk, lettuces, carrots or the latest episode of Coronation Street.

But we do get on well with our neighbours. My mind drifts pleasantly back in time to my parents neighbours while I was growing up. They were two very elderly ladies but some of the most charming and approachable neighbours you could have wished for. They were both very private but uncomplaining people, always read to lend a co-operative hand whenever they felt the time was right. Nothing was ever too much trouble for them and nobody ever had a bad word to say about any of them.

On the one side were a middle aged couple who seemed to fall hopelessly in love with their beloved garden. The wife, a wonderfully mild mannered and polite lady, would always be seen popping in and out of their kitchen and was forever tending very considerately either to her plants, flowers or grass. Wherever you looked you would always find handsomely pruned and manicured roses and a whole host of violets, chrysanthemums, orchids and magnolias.

Then for years the husband would lovingly follow his wife into the garden for a brief potter around the garden before quietly inquiring about her welfare and whether a cup of tea would be appropriate. So it was that springtime would be accompanied by the traditional moment when the husband would heave his manual lawnmower out of its wintry seclusion. But although a painstaking and laborious chore, the husband would never grumble and was invariably contented with his lot.

Then there was the almost reclusive lifestyle by the neighbour on the other side. Grey, silver haired and sadly perhaps a widow, she would always greet both my parents and the rest of her neighbours with the most cheerful greetings and radiant smiles. We never really discovered whether she was on her own or maybe had simply chosen not to marry but she always took a solicitous interest in her garden. Always caring, always concerned and compassionate, she would always find things to do in her patch of grass although there was something frail, fragile and vulnerable about her that always made you sympathise with her lonely plight.

Still it is Good Neighbour Day folks. It's time to knock on their door or ring their bell, shake their hands and make them feel an integral part of the community. Some of us go through our whole lives without really knowing who our neighbours are. We may see them as they set off to work or school in the morning but our respective lifestyles may differ so markedly to ours that it may be impossible to know quite what may be going through their minds.

There are the neighbours who simply keep themselves to themselves, completely detached from society and blissfully unaware of each other's existence. There are the neighbours with whom we  form lifelong attachments, sharing good news, asking them whether they want for anything or just good, sharing and caring neighbours who ooze good natured generosity, a genuine sense of humanity and a willingness to come together in a crisis.

In 1977 the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee, a cue for national merriment and jubilation. In every back road, town, city or snoozing country village, the neighbours of the world decided to throw the biggest party ever seen in Britain. It was now that the street party had re-surfaced 24 years after the Queen's Coronation when the whole nation lifted itself out of its post War gloom, rationing and despondency.

Across the meadows, hills, valleys, hamlets, pubs and post offices of every corner of Britain, good neighbours came into their own. They lugged huge trestle tables into deliberately empty roads, smothering the whole of the road in a riot of colour. Union Jack flags were hung in the most orderly fashion, bright bunting decorating every table, table cloths neatly laid out across a proudly British landscape and parents with a veritable banquet of food in their hands.

Unfortunately I wasn't there to see our road's Silver Jubilee but it must be assumed that everybody had the jolliest and happiest day in many a year. Archive photos show quite clearly that this was perhaps one of those precious days when good neighbours made the most emotional commitment to each other. They made cakes on behalf of their road, they buttered sandwiches for each other, they invested in small supermarket shelf quantities of fizzy drink, spared no expense on equipment for those memorable party games  and then there was the confirmation of neighbourly harmony and joky conviviality.

In a world of seemingly constant division, disagreement and nonsensical hatred at times, there must surely be a great deal to be said for striking up lasting friendships with our neighbours. Besides these are the people who we have to live next door to, maybe tolerate each other at times and when things do go wrong always be there to lend a helping hand to when we run out of vegetables or just ready to lend an ear for the most confidential of chats.

Neighbours are friends, our confidants, our sympathetic ears, the ones we go to for well intentioned advice, the ones we look out for when we go on holiday. Neighbours are the people we come to rely on when the going may get too tough. Neighbours are the people who, for no apparent reason, ask you whether you'd like to join in a game of improvised cricket with a rickety old bat and a cricket ball which bears a much closer resemblance to a tennis ball.

Still it's time to run across the road and ask Tom, Pete or Bill whether they'd like to get some chicken or beef sausages for their family neighbours barbecue. It was about time everybody got together for a neighbourly social gathering. We'd done it in 1977 and we could always find the time to do it all over again. Didn't Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue become the most chummy neighbours in that most celebrated of Australian soap operas? We must pop in again because good neighbours are so utterly priceless and we might as well.