Everybody needs good neighbours... so why not pay for better ones?

Music mogul Simon Cowell has been having a spot of bother with the neighbours after a furious, golf-club wielding local was spotted hurling abuse at his palatial £10 million Kensington home on Tuesday evening. The man was heard screaming that he had “had enough” and threatening to “smash up” Cowell’s luxury cars in the wake of an ongoing dispute over parking. Police were summoned. Interviewed next morning, this well-heeled have-a-go hero issued the immortal words: “Do not park near my frontage.”

Elsewhere, the Faulls, a couple selling the home next to theirs on Poole Harbour’s chi-chi Sandbanks peninsula, have declared that prospective buyers will have to face an interview to check that they are suitably PLU (People Like Us). No riff-raffy Premier League footballers will be permitted, ditto snooty types with inherited wealth. Instead, “normal” families will be favoured, especially those with a dog (this latter qualifier being entirely right, of course).

To secure these paragons, the pair are content to sell at a lower amount than the £4 million asking price, noting sagely: “Sometimes having money is not enough.”

The Faulls are no fools: for those who can afford it, what better way of ensuring one’s quality of life that cherry picking one’s neighbours?

Actors, old flames, and die-hard allies Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley have long boasted of the benefits of occupying next-door houses on the same leafy London street. Television presenters Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly have gone one further and are not only neighbours in Chiswick, south-west London, but holiday side-by-side on the Algarve.

It is the lesson of every great British sitcom and soap opera that a good neighbour is a pearl beyond price, a bad neighbour a constant thorn in the side. Keeping up with the Joneses is the nation’s established provincial pastime; occasionally yearning to biff the Joneses still more so.

Our neighbours provide our first rivalries, as well as our first crushes. Before the global village took form, the exhortation to “love thy neighbour” was taken literally: the majority ending up with the boy or girl next door or, a few houses down, at least. Still, one in three of us find love within a five-mile radius.

Those who have lived their lives in central London may have little inkling of this sort of malarkey, the capital being a place where – if someone so much as establishes eye contact – the assumption is that they’re a serial killer. Anonymity is all. My hulking Northern brother once spent a day blithely beaming at passers-by, as he does in his native Sheffield, only to have several members of the public actually do a runner. Although this could have been the Ribena stain lingering about his mouth.

During my Birmingham childhood – that comradely haze of bike rides and babysitting, barbecues and bonfires, endless p----ups and races to A&E after inadvertent suicide attempts (I was one of five; we were in casualty a lot...) – the best neighbour we ever had auditioned us for the part.

Dr Martin Cole was the pioneering sexologist who had outraged the nation with the notorious educational film Growing Up, shot in what later became our attic. By the time we vetted Bettses moved in, Martin – or “Sex King Cole”, as he was known to the tabloid press – was using his premises to run a surrogate sex clinic. Were you to have a problem with the act, some kind soul would show you how to do it. A certain neighbourly understanding was required, not least regarding the News of the World journalists permanently in residence in our hedge.

We adored MC, who would descend daily at teatime for heated political debates. At Christmas, he presented us with scent, vodka and £20 notes, and we strove to lose our keys so we could find ourselves on his doorstep. Martin died shortly before my mother, as if these two old muckers could only imagine clog-popping as the neighbours they had long been. 

The key is to be close, but not too close; amicable, yet with firmly shutting doors. We’re not foreign after all, and the pain of an over-intrusive neighbour is a pain indeed. I once occupied a flat next to a chap who would make Rigsby-esque moves when I returned home in the small hours, sidling oilily out of his flat with offers of nightcaps. When I left, I hid to escape his farewell, only to be discovered crouched in a cupboard à la a Restoration Comedy or Brian Rix farce.

What is wanted is a compromise between conviviality and detachment, a hovering so near and yet so far. Indeed, I extend this principle further and maintain that the dream living conditions would be to make a neighbour of one’s partner and take up the practice of LATing, or Living Apart Together. A neighbourly distance could only benefit this most intimate of relationships.