Whatever happened to knowing your neighbours? Glenn Dwight

These days, most of us would sooner get in the car, drive to the supermarket, find a park, navigate the self-checkout and spend $5 on a bag of sugar, plus another dollar on a reusable bag because you’ve forgotten to bring one, than knock on the neighbour’s door and ask for a cup.

Because the simple fact is that we don’t know our neighbours, and asking a complete stranger for a cup of sugar feels uncomfortably close to asking them to donate a kidney.

Now, I don’t want this to become another one of those articles about how everything was better in the good old days, because it wasn’t.

For starters, cars used to just drive along roads, whereas apparently now they can launch themselves off ramps and perform backflips.

Sorry, Elon, I’ve watched Back to the Future, and I know what a flying car looks like. Yours is just a Tesla gymnast.

But we’ve certainly made some giant leaps forward.

We have fridges that can tell us when we’re running out of milk, watches that tell us when to stand up and vacuum cleaners that wander around the house all by themselves, occasionally getting stuck under the couch and requiring rescue.

However, I do wonder whether we’ve lost something rather lovely when it comes to knowing the people who live around us.

Remember that wonderful old Sesame Street song, Who Are the People in Your Neighbourhood?

The one where everyone knew the postman, the fireman and the people they met each day? Well, it turns out Sesame Street might have been on to something.

And yes, remembering that song probably tells you everything you need to know about my age.

Growing up, neighbours were practically an extension of the family.

You knew who lived next door, who lived across the road and which families had kids your age who could be talked into becoming human bowling machines while you practised your batting.

Of course, being the bowler also meant retrieving the ball whenever it went over the fence, usually from the garden of someone who had made it very clear they weren’t a fan of cricket.

But the point is, you knew the people in your neighbourhood, and they knew you.

And there was a wonderful little economy operating in every street, where nobody needed to own everything because someone else probably had it.

If you needed a ladder, Barry had one, although he’d borrowed it from Dave, who was currently using your wheelbarrow, while the bloke three doors down was helping someone move a couch.

It was almost like an elaborate game of musical chairs, only instead of chairs, it was ladders, lawnmowers and whatever else you could find in the garden shed.

And don’t tell Inland Revenue, but the whole thing operated completely tax-free.

Essentially, it was the original sharing economy, long before someone in Silicon Valley worked out how to turn it into an app and charge a monthly subscription.

There were no complicated terms and conditions, the sort that require three hours and a law degree to understand, so you eventually scroll to the bottom and click “Accept” just to make the suffering stop.

The only rule was you returned what you’d borrowed, preferably in the same condition and before the owner needed it back.

But let’s be honest, there are probably still ladders and hedge trimmers sitting in garages around New Zealand that technically belong to someone who moved to Australia in 1998. But possession is nine-tenths of the law, isn’t it?

Besides, the sticker on the side of those hedge clippers clearly said “Property of Hamilton City Council”, so it’s probably best we don’t investigate their ownership too closely, or this story could quickly go from Neighbours to Police Ten 7.

The other thing I remember is that neighbours actually talked to each other, sometimes for considerably longer than anyone intended.

You could pop next door to borrow a couple of eggs and return 45 minutes later knowing who was getting divorced, whose son had bought a suspiciously expensive new car and why the Wilsons’ new fence was 6cm too high, and which neighbour had been spotted putting out their yellow bin on red bin day.

And if you happened to be in the middle of mowing the lawns, there was always the risk of getting trapped in a conversation over the fence while the lawnmower quietly ran out of petrol.

Speaking of lawns, remember when you went away on holiday and came home to discover your neighbour had mowed yours?

No invoice, no awkward discussion about payment and certainly no request for a five-star Google review. Just a casual, “No worries, mate. I was doing mine anyway.”

These days, things are a little different.

We’ve got doorbell cameras that can identify someone approaching our front door from 30m away, record them in high definition and send an alert to our phone before they’ve even reached the doormat.

We can zoom in, replay the footage and establish exactly what time the courier delivered our parcel.

Yet we probably couldn’t pick the bloke who lives next door out of a police line-up.

Of course, we do make the occasional attempt to reconnect.

Take Sharon, for example, who enthusiastically sets up a neighbourhood Facebook group to bring everyone together.

She prints off invitations and pops them into every letterbox, only for half the street to mistake them for junk mail and immediately throw them in the recycling bin.

Which is unfortunate, because the other half of the street is now using the Facebook group to complain about people putting the wrong things in the recycling bin.

And that’s just the beginning.

Someone is complaining about the neighbour who mows his lawn too early on a Sunday, someone else is complaining about the neighbour who hasn’t mowed his lawn for three weeks, and another person is demanding to know whose children are playing cricket on the street, because a tennis ball has landed in their garden.

Then someone posts a photograph of a suspicious vehicle parked outside No 14, only for No 14 to explain that it’s their daughter’s car and she’s been visiting every Sunday for the past eight years.

By Tuesday, Sharon has turned off notifications, three people have left the group, and somehow the page has been taken over by suspicious overseas accounts offering discounted sunglasses and investment opportunities in cryptocurrency.

So much for bringing the neighbourhood together.

And perhaps that’s the strange thing about modern New Zealand.

We’ve always liked to think of ourselves as a country where people look out for each other.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve started treating our neighbourhoods like little islands, surrounded by fences and security cameras.

And while we’re happy to share every detail of our lives with complete strangers on the internet, we barely exchange a word with the people living next door.

In fact, the very thought of knocking on someone’s door and simply saying hello seems to terrify us.

Perhaps we’re worried about interrupting people, or maybe we’ve become so used to organising everything through our phones that an unexpected visitor now feels like a security incident.

The old-fashioned “pop in” really has become a thing of the past.

These days, if someone knocks on the door without sending a text first, there’s a good chance the entire household will freeze, turn the television down and quietly wait for them to go away.

A reaction that used to be reserved for door-to-door salespeople selling encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners or the chance to make a fortune from a cleaning product pyramid scheme.

We’ve become so good at protecting our privacy that we’ve almost forgotten how to be neighbourly.

And I’m certainly not suggesting we all need to become best friends with the people next door.

There are probably some very good reasons why certain neighbours should remain on polite waving terms.

Especially the ones who really need to understand that their bedroom window is clearly visible from our lounge. VERY clearly. And while I appreciate the confidence involved in drip-drying after a shower, a set of curtains would be a wonderful investment.

But perhaps it’s time we made a little more effort to reconnect with the people living around us.

Nothing dramatic, just a hello over the fence, an offer to bring the rubbish bins in or the occasional chat that doesn’t involve a complaint about someone’s parking.

Because being a good neighbour is about those little things that make living in a community feel like being part of something, rather than simply owning a house next to someone else who owns a house.

And you never know when you might need to borrow a cup of sugar.