City neighbours

I live in a tenement flat, in a stair with 10 other flats. Very typical for Edinburgh; and also probably typical is that despite living only a few metres away from them, I hardly ever see my neighbours. I don't go out of my way to avoid them, but we just rarely happen to be arriving or leaving at the same time. Sometimes I'll bump into my Polish upstairs neighbour when she's having a cigarette outside the front door, and stop for a quick chat about how her daughter's doing in school, or how her English lessons are going. But that's about it. We're all just too busy leading our own lives; and most of the other flats are rented out to tenants, from all over the world, who change every year or so, so I guess there's not much impetus to get to know neighbours who'll probably change pretty soon.

It's not always like this. As a student I lived in a tenement flat for 3 years, and we knew all our neighbours. We babysat for the couple downstairs' toddler (she's a student at St Andrew's now); had tea with the refined Edinburgh batchelor opposite them and admired his pet canaries; commiserated with the 1st floor family whose husband and dad had emphysema and could barely climb the steps to his flat; banged on the door of the PhD student opposite at 3am to ask him to please stop playing his trumpet; and bitched about the boyfriend of the ground floor's daughter, who was apparently the perpetrator of most of the bike thefts in the neighbourhood.

If you get to know your neighbours, they become real people, with good traits and bad ones, but very human. If you rarely see them, it's all too easy for them to become caricatures. If all I experience of my next door neighbour is his persistent loud music late at night; well, instead of being a happy-go-lucky indie band fan, he's a selfish, annoying toe-rag. Until today, mostly what I knew of the smokers in the building, who tend to congregate just outside the front door, is that they constantly throw their flipping cigarette butts on our doorstep, and no-one does anything about it. So this morning I did something about it. I felt like a busybody, but I stuck up a note on the front door asking the smokers if they could please clean up after themselves. I wondered whether they'd be annoyed and ignore it; whether my other non-smoker neighbours just weren't bothered about the mess; whether I was the only one who cared about it. I didn't really expect anything to happen. But when I came home only a few hours later, not only were the butts all cleared up and thrown away, but someone else had added to my note 'Thanks! Much nicer now'. Suddenly my opinion of my neighbours had changed, just a bit, but for the better. It might not seem like much if you live in an old fashioned friendly village or a suburban cul de sac, where you & your neighbours are constantly popping in and out of each other's kitchens bearing gifts. But in modern, urban, reserved Edinburgh, it's a start!