From solidarity to snitching, even the friendliest neighbours can turn into curtain-twitchers

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Katie Law @jkatielaw29 September 2020

The question is: to snitch or not to snitch on our neighbours? As tougher regulations about quarantining and social distancing come into force, that’s the question my friends and I have been discussing in the west London street where I’ve lived for the past 15 years.

We neighbours are a pretty friendly bunch, arranging plant sales for charity from each other’s front gardens, feeding each other’s cats when we go away, helping to jump start each other’s cars when batteries are flat and keeping an eye on each other’s homes. But being encouraged to rat on each other’s self-isolation habits threatens to put a bit of a crimper on all that goodwill, doesn’t it?

On day 12 of our 14-day quarantine after a holiday last month — we spent three weeks in a secluded farmhouse in a region of France that had almost no recorded cases of Covid at the time — the man who lives opposite spotted me standing in the front garden holding a bag of shopping in one hand. “Breaking quarantine? Naughty!” he tut-tutted, shaking his head.

He couldn’t know whether I had just been to collect the bag from my car or popped down to the shops, and yes, strictly speaking, I should not have stepped outside my front door. “I was only joking,” he continued, crossing the road to talk to me. But as we know, no one is ever joking. After a friendly chat about how bad the second Covid spike might be, he confessed he is worried about rising rates of infection because his wife is asthmatic. I sympathise. But I am also worried. I am especially worried by the thought that he had been ardently curtain-twitching, diligently counting the days since our return and I went indoors feeling slightly sick.

Had he been diligently counting the days since our return from France? I felt slightly sick

I’m worried that had the new Government guidelines been fully in force then, he might actually have picked up the phone. And I’m even more worried that if he had, it would not have been because his wife has asthma. There is something much darker at stake here about human nature.

I am reminded of the neuroscientist David Eagleman, who made a fascinating TV documentary series about the brain a few years ago, in which he talked about genocide as a “neural phenomenon”, something we are all capable of committing in the right circumstances.

Eagleman interviewed Hasan Nuhanovic, a Bosnian Muslim translator for the UN, whose immediate family had been murdered during the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. What haunted Nuhanovic most, he told Eagleman, was “that the continuation of the killings, of torture, was perpetrated by our neighbours, the very people we had been living with for decades”.

It may seem like a leap too far to imagine that snitching neighbours could morph into genocidal murderers, but that was precisely Eagleman’s point. My partner remains sceptical, but my friend — whose Jewish father left Berlin in 1936 to come to the UK — isn’t.

It’s not the Covid marshals or the police turning up on my doorstep that I dread. It’s the neighbourhood watch gone wrong, where we cross the road to avoid each other. I’ve read articles suggesting this is all fantasy. Is it? Another neighbour agrees and says he wouldn’t dream of reporting his next-door neighbours who regularly throw parties of more than six. I’m not so sure. I hope it won’t happen, but I’m thinking that the next time we go to France, I’ll tell everyone that we’re staycationing in the UK for a change, and have rented a house in Cornwall.