Living in a goldfish bowl

The other day I was hanging out in my kitchen semi-naked and quite possibly picking my nose when a man and his kid wheeled their bikes through my back garden RIGHT by my full-length windowed back doors. Flippin' heck. I thought. What's going on?

One of the things I'm adjusting to here is that life is much more 'public'. Down the side of my house runs an alley (or ginnel in northern speak, I'm told) that leads from the street to a path that runs along the length of the back gardens. It is the only way a whole bunch of our neighbours can get their bikes and wheely-bins round to the back of their houses.



Not only that, between our gardens are low, see-through, wire fences, gaps in fences like this one between us and our dreadlocked professor neighbour ...



... or no fences at all - the path you see here to the other side of us is not a path down the centre of someone's garden., but the line between two houses' gardens.



I find all this really refreshing. When we first moved in to our house in Witney, our neighbour knocked on the door, not to introduce themselves as I first thought, but to ask if they could put a high, wooden fence between our back gardens. More recently, our newer neighbours asked if they could put up a chest-high fence up between our front gardens.

The mark-your-own-patch-with-a-f*cker-of-a-fence-and-prevent-all-human-interaction simply does not exist in much of Lancaster. If it did, it might have taken a lot longer to meet our next-door-but-one neighbour who we had a long over-the-garden-fence chat with (turns out his good friends run that lovely bookshop-cum-cafe in Chipping Norton) and 'special' Peter next door wouldn't have been able to have shown Jim the model plane he hadn't quite finished in time to show his dad before he died.

All good.

However, I must learn to 'relax' less in my kitchen. 😉