A dog is roaming our street, barking away.” Every evening after brushing my teeth, I get into bed and explore my new neighbourhood. “Some people are now scared of coming out as they may be attacked. The dog is beige in colour.” To walk through nextdoor.co.uk at night is to map not just my local streets but its minds, minds that appear to flip fairly evenly between lost pets and new bathrooms, with regular loo breaks for paranoia. I love it. And what’s more, it makes me love them, love it, my new home, where Laughter Therapy is now available in the scout hut for the special price of £10, and foxes scream at night.
It’s a year since we moved in – we discovered this only when the house’s previous owner texted to say happy anniversary. I should have realised, the light is the same. There is this brightness that we didn’t get in the city, a lowness of sun that causes shadows the length of the M1. Walking to school in the morning takes twice as long as it should because my daughter wants to wait for the shadows to catch up. She’s just started in reception, but it doesn’t feel entirely new, as it’s the school that I went to, and my sister, and my dad – I keep waiting for the rush to come, the hit of nostalgia that will leave me gasping against a wall, but nothing yet. Everything is in place to make me cry – on her first day two weeks ago, each parent was sent away with a small plastic bag, inside which was a teabag, a toffee, a poem and a tissue, for the tears. The equivalent of, having scratched you with a nail, offering a little sachet of salt for the wound. Still I didn’t cry.
She is in the classroom below the one where Katie showed me how to hide in the pretend oven to avoid a teacher looking for a rogue poo in someone’s pants, and there’s the playground where I would be She-Ra between the hours of 12 and one, and the hall smells the same, wood polish and crayons, and the toilets are tiny, for bottoms the size of perhaps a bagel, and still, no tears. All I feel is a raw sense of joy at the relentless circularity of time, seen in this low yellow light, which I expel in noisy hellos to strangers’ babies.
In his often-quoted book Bowling Alone, social analyst Robert Putnam looked at the decline in membership of churches, trade unions, and 10-pin bowling leagues, linking social involvement to quality of life. He concluded that the internet had encouraged a breakdown in both. I would refer him today to Nextdoor, where, in the US it’s been reported, one neighbour donated an organ to the person 10 doors down, and a shocking camaraderie is visible simply in the plumbing recommendations.
It reveals as much as it accommodates. On my local page, I monitored a full and frank debate about the effect of immigration that sat underneath a blurry photo of a family picking wild garlic. There’s a stretch of woodland just north of here that, every spring, is carpeted with garlic. You can smell it from the tube station, green and piercing, and we collect it in plastic bags and eat it with chicken. But one neighbour, seeing a family picking, he believed, more than their fair share, posted their details on Nextdoor, “after the police said they weren’t interested”.
And so began a thread three streets wide, about these people coming over here and stealing our weeds, and the politics of sharing, and how much garlic was too much. It reflected something I noticed during the local elections, when council candidates pointed out the changes between those settling down in the suburbs today compared with their parents’ generation. While 30 years ago, couples saved up to move to the suburbs, buying a house and voting right, today’s housing crisis means there are more people like me who come dragging our feet, bringing our politics with us. In this thread on Nextdoor, the conservatives were debating with the less so’s, and all in the shadow of posts about a new holistic healing workshop and whether or not to report a suspicious van.
Part of the beauty of this website is that I can engage on my own terms, ie eating cereal braless with a sheetmask on. But mainly, its value is as a gentle democratiser, bringing together neighbours at the top of a highrise with a sprawling family down by the park, those whose role it is to soothe the woman who posts daily warnings of distant crimes, and those that will absolutely burst if they don’t recommend a good tiler. These have become my bedtime stories, the badly spelt desires of people in my postcode, the domestic chatter that hovers one floor up, and it adds a dull but glorious texture to my Aldi shop, to my walk to school, these maps of items wanted: “Retirement flat for quick sale”; “Trying desperately to find a man called Des”; “Missing Dog / found dead”.
One more thing…
It’s the 50th anniversary of the country hit Harper Valley PTA, pop’s best ever response to slut-shaming, and my favourite song as a ball-breaking child. The song’s lyrics tell of a snooty PTA letter written to one Mrs Johnson, accusing her of ‘drinkin and runnin round with men and goin wild’. So our heroine replies by listing their hypocrisies one by one ‘...And Mr Baker can you tell us why your secretary had to leave this town?’ Soundtrack of 2018.
My favourite scandal this week: the ongoing debate about the sexuality of Sesame Street’s Ernie and Bert. On one side, they weren’t written that way, on the other, well, so what, they helped spread acceptance of same-sex relationships. And on the third side, all puppets are gay so there.
Since Stormy Daniels’s memorable description of Trump’s penis leaked (oh dear) online from her upcoming memoir, searches for ‘toad porn’ have seen a 310% increase. Goodbye.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
