Quick, what are your neighbours’ names?

I can tell you mine but it may take me a minute. Borrowing a cup of sugar from them? Never done it. Asked them to mind my kids? Nup. Had their kids over for a playdate? Nope. How about you?

This morning during my regular weekly What’s Making News segment with Karl on the Today Show, we discussed neighbours (among a few other things including nuclear power, as one does at 7:46am) and how the majority of Australians don’t speak to or even know their neighbours.

According to News.com.au

NEARLY 60 per cent of Australians don’t speak to their neighbours, according to a new study.

The survey undertaken by That’s Life magazine also claims to have found 82 per cent of Australian adults believe their parents were better neighbours than they are.

Of the 2100 Australians surveyed, 59 per cent said they never speak with their neighbours and 38 per cent do not know their neighbours at all.

I was listening to this being discussed on the radio this morning and someone said that the amount of contact you have with your neighbours is often inversely proportional to the size of your land.

In tightly packed urban areas, people shut down and keep to themselves. In the country or anywhere were there are wide open spaces, people are much more likely to know and even socialise with their neighbours.

Mamamia Site Manager, Lana wrote about her neighbours recently

I am filled with sadness every time I step out my front door.

I look to the right and there on the front porch is an empty bench.  The bench on which my neighbour Phillip, spent so many of his days.

For weeks he was looking really unwell.

And then yesterday there was a constant stream of people wearing black coming and going from the house.

I feel sad that a man that I did not really know has died.  I have been into his house only twice – once to retrieve a ball my son had kicked over and now today to offer his family my sympathies and take them a cake.

Behind the front door of this house we never ventured into was a man, his wife and his daughter.  People who lived together, loved one another, argued, ate, celebrated and commiserated.  People who lived full and proper lives right next to ours and we never even knew them but to say hello.

There are people on Twitter that I have never met, yet my relationships with them are stronger than any relationship I had with my neighbour. If they are not on Twitter for a few days  I worry where they are, I know about their kids, and their partners or their quest for kids and partners or their pets or their love of the colour purple and their dreams to write books, their children’s habits and quirks and their own dreams (especially those involving Simon Baker).

Twitter has become my backyard and I really like it there . Always a friendly face and a hysterical tale.  The problem is that sometimes I forget to go outside and talk to the “real” people.

So now if you bump into me in the street and I greet you voraciously it’s not just because I think I recognise you from Twitter.

Do you speak to your neighbours? Fight with them? What are your memories of your neighbours growing up? Have things changed that much?

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