Alpha Neighbour Theory

(Archive - Thursday 16^th December 2010)

One of my favourite pieces of post of all time was a card sent to me by a Cowgirl.  The card was pretty funny but the best thing about it was the envelope.  It had been a long time since an envelope had meant so much.

Envelopes used to be meaningful in the first year at boarding school.   They were sent to you by girls (or to girls by you) and often they were the only way of communicating with any degree of comfort.  When you met face to face or talked on the phone, both of you would stammer and say ‘er’ a lot and ask the other several times how they were without ever really listening to the answer.  I can understand why, eventually, we all took to kissing with such enthusiasm as it was by far the best way to fill these oh-so embarrassing gaps.  It was probably a hell of a lot easier if you went to a mixed school.

However for the thirteen year old-single sex schoolboy or girl, the only time you had the confidence to unbend was when one of you was in North Yorkshire and the other in South Berkshire and you were writing a letter.  That was when you really let yourselves go in a torrent of adolescent rhetoric that passed for articulacy.  Why say ‘I love you’ just once to that boy you met at the White Thistle Disco when you can scrawl it repeatedly over the page in a manner reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s manuscript in the Shining?  Why confine yourself to, ‘you’re really horny’ (which, by the way, meant ‘good looking’ in those days) when you can get ten of your friends to add their comments on the subject in different colours and angles of writing?  Why send a letter when you can send a ‘work of art’?

The way to identify these artworks was their envelopes.  Yes, there would always be the familiar loopy handwriting with the little hearts over the ‘i’s on the front.  But it was the back that was the masterpiece.  Although the letter had been cunningly cobbled together from half a dozen different sized and coloured bits of paper, there was always a final thought to be scribbled in biro on the envelope, just a little something hurried and embarrassing enough to make the postman’s day and make your housemaster pause to read it before handing it to you, grinning, over breakfast.  Above the thought was always a set of letters, an acronym.  ‘SWALK’ meant that the billet doux had been ‘sealed with a loving kiss’.  ‘HOLLAND’ meant that the sender, who would probably take less than half a term to forget your name, was saying ‘Hope our love lasts and never dies’.  I’m too embarrassed to translate ‘ITALY’ and ‘SWAMP’, and ‘POLO’ was strictly for the older kids, especially the drawing that often accompanied it.

I discovered with a shock, when stalking my agent to find out if she’s still alive, that she has among her Facebook friends a girl with whom I used to exchange such letters back in the late ‘80s.  This girl is probably now one of my agent’s successful clients.  She probably writes enormously sober treatises on macro economics that clever people think are brilliant.  If I wait a couple of years she’ll become a junior member of the Treasury and then rise and rise until I can use one of her old letters to blackmail her into abolishing the tax on petrol or something.  If only I still had it.  Mind you, she might still have one of mine and that really doesn’t bear thinking about.

In those days, a letter with writing on the envelope was an exciting event - a red letter day if you like.  It has been many years since I was thirteen and as many since I received a letter with writing on the envelope and felt that excited little leap that you feel when you know that a girl who hardly knows you is going to get a bunch of other girls who have never met you at all and write a load of things that you know they can’t possibly mean but are still rather lovely to hear and frankly the closest thing that you are going to get to a fulfilling romance in your single sex boarding school without being cursed forever to make the sort of comments about your education that some of Richard Curtis’s characters make.  And yes, I do mean that guy who was at school with the bride’s brother Bufty…

It was also the writing on the envelope that made this letter from Cowgirl exciting to me.  You’re probably expecting it to be an invite to a hoedown or a rodeo or to come and help brand cattle and you would be forgiven for assuming this.  It’s what the name Cowgirl seems to suggest. 

However it’s nothing of the sort.  Cowgirl’s real name is Katherine and she’s from Guildford.  She owns infinitely more headscarves and pashminas than she does Stetsons or ponchos.  She is training to be a private client solicitor and is far more likely to say ‘what ho’ than she is to say ‘howdy’, unless she is indulging me, as ‘Cowgirl’ is a nickname I gave her several years ago and one she hasn’t been able to shake since. 

Her husband’s name, to a gratifyingly increasing number of people, is Hank (although it says Martin on his birth certificate) and that’s mainly my fault too.  I’m afraid the two of them are victims of the strange compulsion I have which prevents me from being able to call people whom I like a lot by their proper names.

I can’t help it.  It’s not my fault.  It’s simply that, as someone who over the course of his life been known variously as ‘Nico’, ‘Curly’, ‘Spooky Joe’, ‘the Pook’, ‘Count Nickolai’, ‘The E’, ‘Lensen’, ‘Leonardo’, ‘The Leopard’ (gosh I loved that one), ‘Lenny’, ‘Spliff’ (I had a pale face and used to daydream a lot, okay), ‘George Leonard-Leonard’, ‘Nick-Nocks’, and (to the delight of my flatmate Carl whom my mother mistook for me on the phone that fateful day) ‘Nickerbocker Glory’, I feel I have the right to impose the odd minor variation on people’s names.  No one minds.  Ask any of them.  Ask Cowgirl, Hank, Guido, Ezzums, Ian the Fijian, Fifa-fifa-fifa-fi, The Chomp, Spongecake, El Jeffe, Crimson Jihad, Schloss the Flopps…  Ask Koodle-Doodle-With-Hair-Like-A-Poodle.  They love it really; Cowgirl particularly.

Cowgirl has always been good at indulging me my peculiar ideas, especially when we lived together in Number 29 for two happy years.  She embraced the first phase of Amish-geddon when we eschewed all technology at home and spent a month listening to the radio and Shakespeare talking books over jigsaw puzzles by candlelight while the TV slumbered silently without its fuse which had been sealed in a signed envelope and lodged with my brother over the road.  She indulged my desire to pretend to be Italian while cooking spaghetti and even supplied me with an opera CD to lend verisimilitude.  Most significantly, she instantly grasped the point of Alpha Neighbour Theory and helped me to practise it and to perfect it.  And, four years later, the envelope which puts such a smile on my face shows that she is still practising it.

Alpha Neighbour theory probably started at university.  I had an awkward relationship with the mother of one of my housemates, known to me (and practically no one else) as the Vibester.  I was terrified of her – Ma Vibester, I mean.  I was slightly frightened of her daughter too but that’s a different story.  Ma Vibester had this knack of making me feel like I was the worst kind of slovenly carbuncle on the face of decent society - a wastrel and a scrounger and a layabout.  All this, she could convey with a single raised eyebrow. Not only that but she always managed to catch me at my worst possible moments, like coming out of the shower in my dressing gown at four in the afternoon and would cement my disgrace with a throwaway comment like, ‘Oh, I hope you didn’t get up especially’ before I could explain.  She would walk in when I was standing in the bathroom doorway, threatening to use pages from the phone book in an attempt to persuade someone to go to Safeway’s and buy some loo roll.  She would catch me telling a weak joke, made even weaker when the disconcerting effect of her appearance made me forget the punch line.  Every time I saw her, something conspired to make sure she saw me at my worst.  Of course, it would be easy to say that that was me in those days - that I was always telling awful jokes and getting up mid afternoon and combining the Yellow Pages with our plumbing.  But I’m sure that’s not fair.  She only saw a part of me and, with unbelievable consistency, she always saw the very worst part.  I’d love to go and explain this to her now but I don’t think her restraining order would allow me that close.

Imagine though (and this is what I said to Cowgirl) if someone could only see your best part.  Imagine if, whenever they saw you, you were doing something good, positive, impressive, interesting.  Imagine if you were doing something that showed you to be an alpha human being.  Cowgirl imagined it and could see what I meant.  Imagine, she said to me, if you could do all this in front of your neighbours.  Thus Alpha Neighbour Theory was born.

We targeted two particular neighbours, the ones in the house next door.  I had unfortunately lost all credibility with both sets of neighbours in my building when my old Christmas tree had blown off my balcony, smashed half the tiles on my middle neighbour’s roof and then had to be retrieved from the garden of my downstairs neighbour.  A reasonable accident, you might say, and one that could happen to anyone, but the thing that lost me credibility was that it happened in June. 

So our Alpha Neighbour exercise was aimed at the couple from next door.  I’ll call them Des and Daphne.  They feel like good names for neighbours. 

Cowgirl and I kept a mental tally of occasions where we looked ‘alpha’ - when we passed them early in the morning wearing gym gear, when we were able to tell them we were jetting off somewhere exciting on holiday, when they saw us saving small children from runaway horses on the street.  ‘Gosh, look at us,’ we’d say to each other with glee, covered in mud from head to toe while returning from a British Military Fitness class. ‘I hope the neighbours see us.  We’ll get so many alpha points’. 

Every positive occurrence or small achievement in our lives - getting signed by an agent, getting engaged, making it home from Kilimanjaro, etc – became an opportunity to display evidence of alpha-dom to the neighbours.  And conversely, every time we were caught leaving the house scruffy with baseball caps pulled low over hungover brows or coming home with Lidl’s shopping bags straining with own brand cider, we would be horrified with ourselves and deduct rafts of alpha points from our imaginary totals.

It got silly. We struggled to find new ways to win points.  Every postcard we sent each other from every holiday we went on would be written with half an eye to how it would be interpreted were it accidentally to be delivered next door.  Instead of bigging up the après ski carnage from Villars, I found myself reporting imagined skiing triumphs with records and achievements listed in an attitude of faux modesty.  Cowgirl’s naughty weekends in rented cottages with Hank became sojourns at Lady So-and-so’s country seat, with imagined messages of love and respect from the greatest and most glamorous in the land.  We knew that, in the unlikely event of even one of these postcards going to the wrong door, our neighbours would be far too polite ever to read them but we hoped that one word, one star-studded name might leap out and command their attention, their respect, the alpha points they would so unwittingly bestow.   Hank moved in and joined in and wilder and wilder schemes were hatched.  Constant debates were held over the question of who, if you could hire any look-a-like, would be the best person to send to their door looking for you, claiming to be a close friend of yours or to be in need of your urgent help.  Who?  Bob Geldof?  George Clooney?  The entire Nobel Prize Committee?

Cowgirl moved out four years ago but I’m thrilled to see that she still practices Alpha Neighbour Theory, at least as far as Number 29 is concerned.  She still sends cards like the one above and just like those breathless excited school-girl letters, their envelopes are scribbled with last-minute messages from well-wishers.  But instead of ‘my friend Jo says you’re horny’ and ‘Tanya wants me to say hi’, these ones say things like ‘Madge and Guy said their party wasn’t the same without you’ and ‘very well done saving those orphans – what with attending BMF, the opera and training polo ponies I am amazed you had time’.  Instead of making my housemaster grin, these have a more serious purpose.  They are to ensure that my next door neighbours think that Cowgirl and I are still interesting people; that we lead exciting and positive lives; that we are Alpha Neighbours.

The Alpha Neighbour campaign is coming to an end as I’ve sold the flat and in January we will move out of there.  The experiment has been a complete success and although something like this would usually be hard to measure, I think the evidence here is pretty incontrovertible.  So consistently Alpha have we shown the Number 29 lifestyle to be, that Des and Daphne have found it impossible to resist and have voted with their feet to give the campaign their ultimate seal of approval.  Des and Daphne have bought my flat.  A mantle has been passed over.  They will become the new Alpha Neighbours.  Cowgirl and I wish them luck.

I don’t feel ready to give up the campaign just yet though.  Surely one last act of alpha neighbour-dom is called for?  Imagine if, on their first day in Number 29, Des and Daphne were to answer the door to a certain someone.  Just suppose that certain someone claimed that he was a friend of ours, that he was looking for us, that he’d lent us a couple of dining chairs or his lawnmower or his spare football boots?  How alpha would that be?

Has anyone got a phone number for David Beckham?