“A great neighbour is hard to find, difficult to part with & impossible to forget.”
It’s Saturday afternoon and my daily Lockdown entertainment is in full swing right now. The entertainment of my next door neighbours little boy. Whilst everyone else has their gardening, nature, baking, cooking, drawing or even painting keeping them entertained during Lockdown, I have my next door neighbours kid’s daily conversations and garden adventures as my entertainment.
Obviously before Lockdown I heard him talk here and there in his garden to his parents and with his Nan and Uncle John who visited, but whilst being at home majority of the day every day for nearly three months now he has become this unexpected part of my Lockdown life. He spends most of his day in the garden watering plants, splashing in his little paddling pool, eating ice lollies that end up falling on the floor leaving him crying! I know this all through a scene of me sitting in my garden whilst he is in his garden with a big brown fence in between us. It’s so strange because he has no idea how much he has become the talk of my Lockdown conversations either. It’s like an unknown impact of someone playing in your life without them even knowing.
Anyway, I’ve learnt that he loves dinosaurs! Everything is dinosaurs this and that in his conversations and you are guaranteed to hear him ‘rawwwwr’ because he is the dinosaur that everyone has to ‘run away’ from. I know this because he shouts on the top of his voice ‘run away run away I’m the dinosaur’ around his back garden.
And another thing I’ve learnt about him is that his tolerance is literally zilch. His answer to everything is ‘no.' His parents will ask him ‘do you want to come inside?’ ‘can I have a go?’ ‘shall we do this together?' and the one that I remember that made me chuckle was ‘are you okey?’ and his famous answer to all questions is… no! Yes, he answered ‘no’ to ‘are you okey?’ and another thing he likes to say a lot is ‘go away!’ but otherwise I’m sure he is a happy kid!
But it made me think how kids really are naïve with how they express their feelings. As in he obviously doesn’t realise shouting ‘go away’ or answering ‘no’ to are you okey is anything wrong because he’s just said how he felt in the moment. And I think that is one thing growing up takes away from us, wouldn’t you agree? We start to think before we say how we truly feel. How when someone asks are you okey we say yeah fine but really we aren’t. Why do we do that? Why are we scared to really say how we feel? Why do we feel bad to say leave me alone when we want to be left alone? We live in such a world that works to please others that we begin to push our own feelings aside. Maybe this is something you have felt or even done yourself?
But back to my Lockdown entertainment, it got me thinking that as much as we all feel on top of each other at home or feel fed up with what life has come to whilst channelling our own emotions, we might forget that everyone around us even the kids are in the exact same boat. The kid next door must miss nursery, must miss his friends and is probably thinking ‘when are you all going back to work and out the house again?!’ because aren’t we all thinking that really?
So that is my little story about my unexpected entertainment in my Lockdown life that now wouldn’t be the same without the kid next door’s garden adventures. But maybe you’ve had the same sort of experience, maybe not with your next door neighbours but have you had an unexpected someone or something that has become part of your Lockdown life which now wouldn’t be the same without?
