It’s Friday night and my boyfriend and I are arranging balloons from Moonpig in the shape of watermelons in the communal garden of the block of flats I live in. The wind makes them bend like pole-jumpers over a bar and we’re both quite sure it’s about to pour with rain. We’ve arranged a table with a very large amount of booze next to a small barbecue, lit a fire pit and covered the lone bench with rugs and cushions as though it’s still alright to sit outside near September.
“What if no-one comes,” I grimace at Gregor, my partner. “They’ll come,” he says, then looks less sure. “Rose will come,” he edits. I look at the table of alcohol, which contains two beer kegs, twelve bottles of wine, canned cocktails and more spirits than a Catholic church and wonder how safe it will be for said 84-year-old neighbour to try to help us consume them.
Post-pandemic, most of us have gone back to our lone and, or lonely lives in flats and only speak to our neighbours when we pass them on the stairs. But having moved 12 times in seven years in London alone, and now — aged 34 — found myself a beautiful (rented, of course) flat that I don’t want to leave, I feel I’ve finally found a home. The question of how to make more of one in a former tenement block of eight flats of very different people several of whom aren’t talking to each other — has been on my mind all summer. Partly because the large communal garden usually lies void of life and maybe it wouldn’t if this house of people felt less like strangers.
Over 90 per cent of over 65s consider loneliness to be a significant problem among their age group
Over 90 per cent of over 65s consider loneliness to be a significant problem among their age group, according to a recent Specsavers study of 1,000 people, with 54 per cent saying they go days without interacting with anyone else and the same proportion feeling so lonely they keep the TV or radio on all the time for noise. Yet we also know loneliness to be a rising problem for generations of young professionals who work from home, often freelance and spend too much time online. When single I have also gone days without speaking to anyone and I’m familiar with using a TV not to feel alone.
Among us were the matriarchal Rose, 84, who wasn’t talking to the younger, heavily pregnant couple opposite her, Sam and Alex. I got on very well with both sides but they’d never quite recovered from an old row about post. Then there was Eva — a high-flying, pretty, gym-type who I was terrified must hate me because of my violently-creaking floorboards. I’d been walking on tiptoes for 18 months straight. Opposite Eva were two male friends. In truth I couldn’t tell them apart when I moved in but later understood that Craig was another high-flying, early-40 something and his housemate (according to Rose) was the only other person to hang their washing up outside in 34 years.
I was on the second floor, opposite The Silent Gamer (I guessed), who had once given me some excellent advice about bins but was otherwise invisible. He was also potentially behind a police ‘tip off’ that I was running my flat as a brothel. I mean, yes I was dating a fair bit back then, but a brothel? Even the police laughed when they saw me in my pyjamas, glasses, no-makeup and looking about as far away from a Madam as was possible. They didn’t even want to check the bedrooms.
On the top floor lived a very cool and arty Polish couple with their school-aged daughter and across from them, Boozy Mike. Boozy Mike I’d met twice and he’d liked the fact that I smoked roll-ups because he thought that meant I wasn’t a vegan (I’m not).
“What unites people?” I asked myself, and aside from the unfortunate truth that free alcohol usually does, I realised that barbecues had a special power to do the same. I was going to hold an end of summer garden party, partly because why did we all have to come together only in disasters like pandemics? Couldn’t we just come together for the joy of it? I decided to run the idea past Pat, our postman (for real) and he loved the idea.
“The number of times I ask people to accept a parcel for their neighbours and they look terrified and say they’ve never met them before,” he said, of other blocks of flats. Clearly, we weren’t the only ones. “Please come!” I begged him, seeing as he was a proper big name who could, I was sure, unite anyone with conversation. A late shift prevented him, so I persuaded him to take a load of cocktails anyway. “My wife may not be speaking to me by the end of the weekend,” he said, gleefully taking away an armful of Betty Booze’s sparkling tequilas.
Rose and I had become friends at the beginning of the summer and it was Rose’s catchphrase that was her first thought on my idea. “Uh-huhhhh,” she said, which meant she wasn’t sure at all. Luckily, she was the first to walk through the back door to the garden that Friday — my saviour.
“Oh my goddd,” she said (catchphrase number two) when she saw the alcohol and the balloons and everything else I’d arranged and reporting that she’d asked “the nun she takes for a walk” to join (Air-fryer Ann) but Ann hadn’t wanted to gatecrash. I poured her a drink and Gregor decided to crack on with the sausages.
Rose hadn’t been out in thirteen years, since her partner died, and she was telling me nothing like this had ever happened in the close before. “Whose birthday is it?” called a scowling but quite lovely old lady from her window at that moment. She was too immobile to leave the house so drank Sauvignon Blanc from the window after that. The helium balloons ran away on their strings and Rose “oh-my God”-ed every time I poured her a drink.
Then Boozy Mike finished work and poked his head around the door — he’d got the party invite (invitations made it seem like a thing, I thought) but still looked very surprised to find us out there in the drizzle. He sat down on the bench and it immediately sunk into the wet earth. Eva came and had a cider, but was going to her mum’s that night, so couldn’t stay long, she said, looking forlornly at the table of free drinks. Compared to the last girl that lived in my flat, she couldn’t hear a thing from mine, she said, as I basically fainted with relief, wondering if my tiptoe tendons would ever recover. The idea your neighbours must hate you is perhaps more common amongst renters. Then Craig arrived, with gift-bagged Prosecco, and I thought maybe it didn’t have to be so.
It poured, finally with rain and luckily top-floor Michal arrived with his daughter, bringing their borrowed dog out for a wee, and felt so sorry for us that he went to a garage he kept many streets away, to fetch a tarpaulin we could drape over the washing lines for cover. It was camouflage and made us look like we were drinking in an army camp, but somehow added to the appeal.
Sam had now joined us — Alex was giving birth to their new baby, Zadie — in a week and so she’d come to the next one, he said, taking a fizzy water (good man). Rose and Mike, their faces now covered in ribs from Gregor’s barbecue seemed to wonder whether to take issue. But instead Rose started talking to Sam about the baby. She’s since given him and Alex a card of congratulations and says Sam is being very kind if he sees her wincing with her old spine issue. She lives constantly in pain. When I’d escorted her home at 11pm she’d said it was “the best night” of her life. “I’m so glad I met you,” she said cutely. “Me too,” I told her. “Now drink this or you’ll have a hangover from hell,” I said, giving her a pint of water.
By 2am Agata and Michal, who’d finished work late but didn’t exactly have far to come for the party (three flights of stairs) plus Craig, Gregor and me were still sitting outside talking like a garden party had been the most obvious thing to have in the world. We’d lived side by side for years, so it was about time.
The only person not to make an appearance was The Silent Gamer — but it turned out he’d been trying to gather ‘evidence’ on half the people in the block for years and was disliked by most. You can’t win them all. Plus, we had a new common enemy and that was as bonding as a barbecue.
I did wonder however, if we possibly we didn’t need two new enemies. “Could you not have used your own garden!” someone shouted from one of the flats in the neighbouring property. I looked at Rose. “That one’s ours,” she said pointing across the path to a completely different green: “I thought you knew?”
