Tag: Neighbours

Pandemic Pondering #118

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Friends, Serendipity3 Comments

Sweet Peas, such a thoughtful gift from a neighbour who we’ve come to know better during the pandemic. Gil and his wife Jen live just down the hill from our renovated Cornish Hedge. Gil is also a South Londoner, by birth rather than adoption like us! I found the perfect vase @theoldmortuary for a gift from a native Londoner.

I also tried another ‘flat-lay’ with the Sweet Peas, the orange painted 🍊 box and inadvertently my foot.

Gifted sweet peas are a happy reminder of Hannah’s mum who always gifted us large bunches of them and my grandfather who always delivered home grown flowers. With him Sweet Peas were always safer than his dahlia deliveries which always came with a side serving of earwigs that nipped small fingers.

Another gift this week of gooseberries has inspired another ‘Flat Lay’, thanks to Mel and Ed for the goozgog inspiration to make Gooseberry Drizzle Cake and Gooseberry Fool.

Pandemic Pondering #109

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Home Towns2 Comments

Restrictions being lifted on travel and overnight stays could not have come at a better time for @theoldmortuary.

A scumbag fly tipped outside our flat in London this week

Imagine our happiness when we discovered our neighbours/friends had tidied it up.

London , like many big cities, has a reputation for being an unfriendly place but from the moment we moved here we were surrounded by neighbours who quickly became friends.

Shit happens everywhere and our neighbour/ friendships were forged over another adverse event. Three days after moving in we were burgled, traumatic enough in itself, but the day after, our flat and by extension ourselves were subjected to a frightening police raid.

Our lovely new neighbours swooped in and picked up the pieces just as they did this weekend.

Socially distant Pandemic Pondering in the garden with our neighbours.

Pandemic Ponderings #29

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Be the nosey neighbour.

Walking the dogs gives us a rhythm to our day and a purpose that we sometimes, in dreadful weather, would rather not have. In Lockdown our walks have become much more home centric. In particular our late evening walk follows a pattern . There is a pattern for the dogs who like to sniff which other dogs have passed that way and a pattern for us which involves graveyards, patches of grass, the backs of a few houses and never other humans.

Yesterday a neighbour came to.see us concerned about another neighbour who had not drawn their curtains.

We immediately knew that all had been fine the night before because the pattern of lights had been quite normal on the last dog walk.

With some trepidation we did nosey neighbour things, realised there was a serious problem and called the emergency services.

I’m writing this because of the trivial things we thought about that might have stopped us doing the right thing.

Fear of doing the wrong thing.

We had previously offered help to these neighbours and were politely declined.

We were not afraid of finding the worst possible outcome. It’s what we used to do in our day jobs and it doesn’t bother us.

What we were, for a moment, concerned about was upsetting people who had politely declined help a year or so ago. We were concerned that someone might be cross with us or upset about us invading their privacy. Thankfully our brains defaulted to working heads and we got on and did the right thing.

Covid 19 is shrinking all our worlds to something more like the 17 th Century except we don’t know our neighbours as we would have done then. All the technology in the world would not have sorted out yesterday’s situation. It just needed us to be nosey, however awkward and worrying that felt at the time.