The BBC News page posted an article today about the declining communication between neighbours. Back when I was a kid, we lived at the end a cul-de-sac, which had eight 1970s-built houses. The majority of them were families with children around the age of my siblings. We all knew each other names, talked and played in the street, heard the occasional bit of gossip, and so on. This was in the 1980s.

The area I live in now has around 40-50 houses, a mixture of privately owned and council houses. I know the first name of my next door neighbour, but not his surname. I know he has a daughter, but I’m not sure whether she lives with him full time or just occasionally. He argues with his partner (I hear her shouting through the walls), who’s not the mother of his daughter, but I don’t know her name. We’ve exchanged few words in the six years we’ve both lived there, and most of those consist only of quick, almost rhetorical greetings of, ‘Hello, how’s things?’. I have no idea who the owners of the other three houses in my row are, and I’ve never spoken to them. Of the other houses, the only resident I’ve talked to is the father of the house on the corner. I don’t know how many of the kids in the neighbourhood are his, or even his name. The same was pretty much true of the house I lived in when I first moved to Sheffield, and all the houses I lived in (rented) down in South Wales.

Seems like the concept of the neighbourhood barely exists any more - I exchange more words with the owner of the sandwich shop close to my office, or the gardener who comes round regularly!