Naybours

The thing about living in houses with low or no fences, especially the ones on our street where the sections are very narrow and packed together, is that you get to know your neighbours. Being deeply suspicious and recalcitrant Saffers, to date we have only got to know the neighbours in our newest house by observing their habits through the curtainless windows and by watching the comings and goings in their driveways. Oh, and by observing the state of their houses, naturally. People are born voyeurs, and if there isn't anything good on tonight's reality TV show, there is always the neighbours.

We have three sets of neighbours - or four, if you count the solitary sheep in the paddock behind the church over the road, who bleats conversationally everytime he spies us loitering in the driveway. First, to the south, there is Kerry, who is the Tenant-in-the-Garden. Kerry and her dog Tahi are seldom home, but when they are, Maya loves to go over and chat on the stoep, sorry, porch, about what everyone is having for supper (including Tahi), and then come home and tell me that both Kerry and Tahi are having spaghetti bolognese and although she thinks that must be a very unhealthy meal for a dog she thinks it's a great one for a child and what are we having for supper and is it spaghetti and if it isn't can't she perhaps go have supper at Kerry's...? And then to the east there lives an older couple with an adult son who spends a LOT of time playing computer games in his room. His desktop background is a pic of a scantily-clad model. (As I've mentioned, the houses are rather close together.) The front garden is well-tended, with carefully painted garden gnomes in attendance. They have a back lovely garden that, together with the son's bedroom, I can gaze at from the kitchen window. It is fragrant (the garden, not the bedroom) with magnolia and peach trees, and a luscious, green-spangled grapevine rambles across the sloping lawn.

And to the west are Tom and Isabelle, and their two year-old son James. Until recently we knew little about them beyond the fact that our magnificent view of the setting sun and the distant sea was marred by the unsightly heap of scrap wood and general DIY debris piled on top of their flat garage roof - clearly visible to us as our house stands much higher than theirs, and evoking undesirable images of derelict trailer parks weightily occupied by beer-bellied burping cat-shooting rednecks. It also rather spoils the effect of their garden, which is a bountiful, untamed green, replete with wild, happy flowers and tall, leafy trees. The picture is such that Willem and I have taken pains to arrange a row of potted plants along the narrow deck outside the west-facing living room to draw the eye to prettier things, and have contemplated lining the deck railing with shadecloth to further obscure the scruffy view.

But then Isabelle and I got chatting in a neighbourly way over the proverbial fence, and it ended in my inviting them for drinks after work last Wednesday. She accepted with alacrity - no doubt because of my sparkling personality; and surely not at all because of the opportunity to inspect the neighbour's interior, mere glimpses of which are gleaned before the curtains are drawn or while the movers cart the furniture in. It is always interesting to see what life looks like from the house next door. The view, for example.

As the children played happily indoors, we sipped our drinks on the deck and looked around at the vista as the sun went down. Tom and Isabelle gazed out over the deck, remarked on the view of the tree canopy and the sunset-sea, gave us an entertaining rundown on the comings and goings in recent Maraetai history, and compared notes on our perceptions of living standards in NZ and SA. With the conversation, the wine, and (some of) the view, it was all-in-all a most pleasant evening.

And when I took my morning coffee out onto the deck early on Thursday morning, all of the scene-scarring debris on their garage roof had, most myseriously, disappeared.