Being neighbourly

When I saw our neighbours arriving home on Saturday afternoon with boxes and boxes of grog I asked (very innocently!) if they were having a party that evening. They were. Apparently a very noisy all-nighter, mates coming who were DJs who didn’t finish work ’til late and might be bringing their decks. However, instead of inviting us, he said he’d pay to put us up at the Duxton Hotel all expenses paid!! We felt rather embarrassed and declined and took his phone number … although it seemed that his preference was for us to go to the hotel rather than ring him in the wee hours and ask him to turn down the music. If we weren’t arriving home ourselves with a DVD and armful of supplies to create an experimental meal … duck, tamarillos, orange, kumara, coriander … we may have accepted.

In the end we invited ourselves over to a friend’s house to cook and share our cooking in exchange for a night’s accommodation. Was lots of fun, the duck worked very well considering we had neither experience nor recipe, the DVD was very strange (Shop Girl), the car spent a night outside and we got to experience flannelette sheets!

I left our neighbour a note – thought he might as well know he could party hard without worrying about disturbing us. I’ve been accused of giving him the guilts and that he’ll feel like he ‘owes’ us, but honestly, I was just being neighbourly.