Amber’s Guide to Neighbourhood Etiquette

Following our Sunday evening spent under siege from toddlers and the lobotomized at birth, I thought this little guide to neighbourhood etiquette might come in handy. (For Them, you understand. Not you. Unless you, of course, are Them, in which case would you get your caravan off the pavement and keep your kids on a leash, thanks?). So here it is: Amber’s guide to the acceptable and the unacceptable of neighbourhood life. Next week: how to wear clothes and why that’s important…

Acceptable:
Parking your car and caravan on the pavement for a few hours while you unpack and wind down from your holiday.
Unacceptable:
Leaving your car and caravan on said pavement for THREE WEEKS, and showing no inclination of moving them at all EVER.

Acceptable:
Playing your car stereo loudly as you drive in and out of the street.
Unacceptable:
Playing your car stereo loudly as you sit in the car while it’s parked, repeatedly banging your fool head against the steering wheel, so the horn sounds. You are depriving some poor village of its idiot. Get back there, now.

Acceptable:
Walking around the street wearing clothes.
Unacceptable:
Walking around the street wearing night clothes.

Acceptable:
Making a lot of drilling/hammering/lawnmowing noise as you go about the business of maintaining your property.
Unacceptable:
Turning up the volume on your car stereo so that you can still hear it above the sound of your drilling/hammering/lawnmowing. See, a pneumatic drill isn’t really designed to be drowned out, y’know? Can you see that?

Acceptable:
Allowing your children to play loudly in the street.
Unacceptable:
Allowing your children to play loudly in the street at one o’clock in the morning.

Acceptable:
Playing music in the comfort of your own home.
Unacceptable:
Bringing your stereo out into your front garden. Turning up the volume.

Acceptable:
Being pretty lax about cutting the grass in your garden.
Unacceptable:
When it gets to the stage where Shergar and Lord Lucan could be hiding in there and none of us would be any the wiser.

Acceptable:
Parking your car in your driveway.
Unacceptable:
Parking your car in your neighbour’s driveway.

Acceptable:
Keeping the hell away from my house.
Unacceptable:
Peering through my front window with your nose pressed against the glass. Inviting your small friends to join you. SWINES. (Nope, not over it.)

Acceptable:
Riding your mini motorcycle on private land, which is the only place you can legally ride it.
Unacceptable:
Riding your mini motorcycle up and down the pavement in the street. For eight hours straight. With a toddler riding pillion. Without a helmet. Repeating this the next day. For a week.

Acceptable:
Entering a neighbour’s garden to collect your ball, which has inadvertently landed there.
Unaccepatble:
Remaining in the neighbour’s garden to continue with your game.
Also unacceptable:
Entering your neighbour’s garden clutching a cat. Placing cat in the midst of the waist high grass (see: Being Pretty Lax About Cutting the Grass in Your Garden). Picking up your neighbour’s pitchfork. Walking towards cat with it. And, OK, I have NO IDEA what kind of innocent childhood games involve a cat and a pitchfork, you little swines, but next time I won’t just shriek at you like a demented thing for five minutes. (Nope, not over that one either).

In the interests of fairness, I should probably point out here that there are many ways in which our neighbours’ behaviour has not been totally batshit crazy. They have not yet, for example, run riot in the street with a sawn-off shotgun, massacring everyone who enters their line of vision, and nor have they torched our home one stormy night. At the time of writing, they are not dancing in hoods around a burning cross, and nor are they sacrificing small children to the God of Buckfast and Diamond White. But, y’know, tune in next week, because, really, nothing would surprise me now…