Every not often next-door has a party in its back garden and as I exit my front door at sundown to begin another Desecration Wednesday or similar, I find at our wall a shiny young guzzler wondering how close to the right place they are. Very, I say, and while they ask if I've got any phone credit and if yes can they borrow the phone and some of the credit to summon someone from the next-back garden to the next-front gate, I hoist them like a fat baby over my shoulder and through my cluttered hall and thin kitchen to the back door, where they wonder what I'm playing at and I undo all the locks and plod through the shin-deep weeds and hurl them neighbourly over the fence without warning or apology.
Later, at large, as I thrust the empty bottle of anything-over-five-percent into the municipal waste-heap, I feel a vague sense of community.
