Following on from my earlier post this month, I've just been reading another great article by Jon Canter, the novelist and scriptwriter, about the very same, in yesterday's Guardian.
He suggests that you pay hundreds of pounds for a survey. Why? No surveyor answers the £164,455 question. (That, according to the Land Registry, is the current average house price in England and Wales.) Without an answer, no one should buy a property, anywhere, ever. The question is: what are the neighbours like? Never mind the state of the property — what's the state of the neighbours? Are they unsafe? Are they cracked? Are they falling apart? Are they dangerously wired?
I ask from bitter experience. We're regularly woken at five in the morning by neighbours hollering from the rooftops, with weirdly Mancunian vowel sounds, like 10 Liam Gallaghers fighting 10 Noels. The police keep telling us – correctly – that there's nothing they can do. These are seagulls. There's no such thing as an anti-seagull behavioural order. Surely our surveyor should have warned us, though. Perhaps he reckoned the nearby presence of the sea was a clue.
Mercifully, the humans living under the seagulls are good neighbours. "Love thy neighbour as thyself": even I, as a Dawkins-worshipping atheist, can see that this is the fundamental commandment of civilisation. Loving them, though: it sounds like a high-risk strategy. We all know what love can turn into.
Christopher Boyce, Gordon Brown and Simon Moore, psychologists at Warwick and Cardiff universities, have just published a study called Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction. The study, involving 80,000 participants, bears out the "rank income hypothesis" – your happiness is not determined by your absolute income but your income relative to others. "You might buy a new car," says Boyce, "but if your neighbour has just bought the very same car, that new car doesn't seem as good as it once was." So. Neighbours can make you happier. Not by loving you but by earning less than you and having an older car.
Sorry, Boyce, Brown and Moore. As I sit here at No 7, I couldn't tell you, without looking, what make of car is outside No 9. I couldn't tell you its age or current resale value in comparison to our Citroën. I can tell you this, though – it's green. The point is not that I'm a Buddhist who's oblivious of material things and sits here smiling serenely and – Om! – not wanting. I want, all right. It's just that my wanting is not relative to what my neighbours have.
Neighbours are random. They're the people who happen to be living next door when you buy or rent your place. My relative happiness isn't determined by those who are linked to me by walls alone. I'm affected by people I grew up with, by university contemporaries, by friends. I'm affected, in particular, by friends who were poor when I was poor and now, unhappily (for me), are far, far, far richer. (It's that third "far" that does it. I'm OK when they're far, far richer. But far, far, far richer makes me want to weep.) To be made happier or unhappier by another human being, I need to have invested something in them. I need to have invested emotions, over time. Without that investment, there can be no loss or gain, either of my happiness or unhappiness.
There is nothing, of course, to stop me spending so much time with my neighbours that they become friends too, assuming they like me and I like them. Nothing except the basic and unavoidable problem. The problem with neighbours is, they live next door. Once you start loving your neighbours, where's it going to end? You'll end up thinking about them all the time. You will, in that rank Boyce, Brown and Moore way, become dependent on them for your happiness or unhappiness. I don't think of my richer contemporaries all the time. Out of sight, out of mind. But neighbours are never out of sight.
The secret, surely, is neither to love nor hate your neighbours. Be polite, without intruding into their lives, or inviting them to intrude into yours. Yes, I talk to my neighbours – about seagulls, or that night when we accidentally set our chimney on fire – but mostly I nod. Nodding is good. Nodding is low-key. Nodding keeps you from developing a mutually loving relationship; equally, it keeps you from car-envy hell.
Nod thy neighbour as thyself......
Yours noddingly,
Mr Jackson .
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