Love Thy Neighbour...

...Good fences do indeed make for good neighbours. (Though the hedge has yet to be invented that can repel noxious bar-b-cue smells I find.) We live on tolerably good terms with our immediate neighbours mercifully, despite the odd whingeing child or over-long party. (Theirs not ours mostly.)

But one, these days, not only has real-time next-doors, one also it transpires has them here in virtual-time. I 'popped over the fence' as it were the other day to see whose 'blog' [still dread word] was to be found adjacent to mine own, and was somewhat startled by what I saw. Not that I could tell you a word of what was there, as it was written in what I had to assume was fluent Arabic. A photograph of a singularly stern looking, robed figure was the only clue to its contents, which were lengthy and of, I would imagine, a hectoring and prescriptive nature. (As a practitioner myself in the dark art of theological persuasion I am apt to recognise a fellow busybody.)

I was also rather alarmed at my instant and almost instinctive assumption that the hidden message [hidden that is from my non-Arabic reading eyes] must be seditious and dangerous. These are troubled times indeed when a fellow cannot squint at another fellow's words without presuming they mean trouble simply because they are literally unreadable.

There was, as I say, something about the deportment of presumably the author - or perhaps a person of whom the author approved - that struck a note of heavy-handed 'This is Truth, So Listen Up.' Yet for all I know these many - and there was page after page of them - words could have been no more than over-elaborate recipes for authentic home cooking, or even messages of universal joy and peace.

In my alarm I leapt back to my side of the fence and I so wish I hadn't. For when I went back today for another look I found my neighbour had been replaced by a far less interesting and, in some ways, far more worrying offer to make me churchloads of money would I but invest a small capital sum upfront.

Is it then the norm for virtual neighbours to come and go this way? It could be an improvement perhaps on having the same people close by year in and year out, though one would never then have the chance to become truly neighbourly as that is a process that takes on average about three generations round here.

Wilf and Doris came up from London in the Blitz for a wedding and, having then heard the news that their home in Poplar had taken a direct hit on the Saturday night, decided to stay safe in the country for a while. That 'while' lasted for over fifty years yet, according to Wilf, although they were accepted as not strangers at once they never in all that time ceased being foreigners. 'You're not from round these parts are you?' people would ask who had known and seen them daily for decades.

"I was a stranger and you took me in." Well yes, that is what these good people did, finding them half a cottage for starters and work for both. But somehow I doubt the Gospel text would have quite the same force if it read "I was a stranger and you took me in, yet you never quite let me forget from whence I came."

And so to the garden.