Love is growing delightfully dotty together

A daft private language. Silly jokes no one else gets. And bizarre shared obsessions. Sound familiar? They’re all proof that . . .

our first neighbours were a long- married couple in their mid-60s. From the beginning, my husband roger and I found them extremely odd. We exchanged sidelong glances when they first came to us for a drink as they kept finishing each other’s sentences and correcting one another over small, inconsequential things. They kept jumping in, interrupting each other, saying things like: ‘No, it was a Tuesday when we were introduced.’

They were horribly alike. If he was reading, she would be reading as well. If she had a biscuit, he had a biscuit, and so on.

Stranger still, they shared a private vocabulary — using words and sometimes whole phrases that only they could understand. One: ‘There’s no don’t-change dust for that,’ caused me to ask for an explanation. It was from when their children were small and so adorable they wished they could sprinkle fairy dust over them to keep them that way.

The more we got to know them, the weirder they seemed. They had a small brindle whippet and were obsessed with it. We’d see them walking past our house twice a day with that dog, come rain or shine.

Their other passion was trees and they kept urging us to go and visit the local woods for a restorative walk. When the bluebells were out, they were quite vociferous.

We also overheard a lot of their mundane conversations, because they bellowed at each other. They were both hard of hearing and the most common word was: ‘Pardon?’

They also owned a lot of gadgets. I remember an olive-pitter and contraptions for poaching eggs which seemed mad. Life was too full to worry about the consistency of eggs and too busy to pit an olive. They also had a little grabber thingy that squeezed teabags they dunked in mugs.

And they were prudish and told us they always switched over if there was anything steamy on TV. We left that house 20 years ago and we’ve moved several times since, most recently in the spring, which triggered my memories of those strange neighbours.

As I’ve thought about their many eccentricities, a troubling realisation hit me: over the decades, roger and I have slowly morphed into them.

Perhaps because so much time has passed — I’m now 57 and he’s 67 — we didn’t see it creeping up on us. We grew really fond of our neighbours and as I look back on them know I feel fonder still, realising that what seemed so odd when we were young now seems a normal development of a shared life — for us and for our friends of a similar age.

The first thing I had to admit is that roger and I, too, now share a private lexicon. For example, when we apologise, we say ‘solly’ because that’s how our son Tony said ‘sorry’ when he was an infant.

If my husband has a bad hair day he’s ‘bushy bushy bon’. ‘ Bushy bushy blond hairdo’ is a daft line from the Beach Boys song Surfin’ USA. We played it over and over in the car one summer on holiday and it tickled us, imagining what that hairdo might be like and it stuck.

When my mood turns sour, roger asks who has ‘twisted my biscuit’.

This is a reference to my attempt at my roman Catholic primary school to draw the human soul, complete with sins, to please the nuns who taught me.

It looked like a chocolate chip cookie, a round thing with irregular edges. It was how I imagined the soul, that part of us, independent of the mind and the body, that lives on after death. We were taught that the soul is stained by sin and so I drew the sins as black marks, some big and some small.

When I told roger, he thought it was so hilarious that it has passed into our marital dictionary.

This language only we can understand is an index to our life and history. I have now discovered that a couple’s shared vocabulary is so precious to them that it’s one of the things people miss most when a long relationship ends.

Now we, too, have the dog obsession. Ours is William, a big, daft, yellow labrador which we’ve had for four years. Just like our first neighbours, we talk to and about the dog — all the time.

We walk him twice a day, rain or shine. How did that happen when we didn’t even want a dog in the first place? Our 16-year- old son Tony wore us both down, pestering for years until we gave in.

Dogs are about as intelligent as 18-month-old babies, according to the scientists. For a long-married couple, a dog fills the gap when there’s no baby in the house.

And like babies, dogs are happy, loving creatures who never sulk or refuse a cuddle. And, unlike babies, you can go out and leave them alone in the house. It’s perfectly natural to be obsessed.

Now, we drink our tea from dogthemed mugs and enjoy browsing catalogues of dog toys and beds. I have noticed people exchanging sidelong glances when we wax lyrical about the dog.

I think the love of trees probably goes hand-in-paw with the dog. The dog loves nothing more than a walk in the woods and we love to oblige. It means we spend a lot of time gazing up at trees.

We just can’t help admiring how gloriously permanent they are, how wonderful the contrasts between the shapes and hues.

This has reached its peak quite recently now that we’ve moved within striking distance of some of the great Victorian parks in Warrington, Manchester and Liver- pool. The Victorians appreciated trees and our dog walks now feature spectacular specimens planted by professional landscape artists just to create a magnificent effect.

I even bought an app for my smartphone to help with tree identification. We spent a trip on the motorway the other day, looking out for all of them.

Sitting in the back of the car, Tony was rolling his eyes to heaven — as I once did when confronted with the old married couple.

The reasons we shout, finish each other’s sentences and interrupt each other correcting unimportant things are easy enough to fathom.

At our age we just can’t hear as well as we did, especially when there’s any other background noise to compete with — it’s easier to communicate with a raised voice.

I think our brains are like computers with a very full hard drives; it takes longer to retrieve things than you’d like, so you help each other out a bit. You’re so surprised when you easily remember any small detail that you can’t help blurting it out, even if it’s of no consequence.

We have also recently begun to acquire gadgets — silicone pods for poaching eggs were among the first, believe it or not. The most recent is a cherry-pitter. You can have a lot of fun with kitchen gadgets when you work together — really.

Which brings me to our prudishness: even though we are liberated baby-boomers we regularly exhibit what we refer to as the ‘sheep dog trial effect’.

I’ll have to explain: I saw an awful lot of sheep dog trials on television in my early teens. One Man And His Dog seemed always to be scheduled against the steamy dramas broadcast on the other side.

I was fascinated by the sex scenes in those dramas, but as soon as my dad caught sight of them, he switched over. As a result, I am perhaps the only woman in Britain who associates the command ‘Come By’ with sex.

Yet these days, when roger and I watch TV, we tend to reach for the remote if the characters get frisky. We are genuinely uninterested — what we don’t know about sex by now, we don’t want to know.

I accept that ‘sheep dog trial effect’ is a double dose of dottiness — absurdly prudish and identified by a strange shared name.

It’s harder to fathom quite why we have become so horribly alike. When we first got together, roger was an early bird and I was a night owl. He was tidy; I was messy.

At weekends I loved to garden and cook, while he would read. These days we both wake at six, get up and make the bed. And we garden, cook and read together.

I’m really tidy, even when roger is away. I think this is partly to do with enriching each other’s lives. I love to watch the morning sun come up into a pink-streaked sky — and roger has brought me that.

If you still really enjoy each other’s company, what seems eccentric to outsiders is really rather wonderful, it’s how you’ve cherished and preserved the best of what you’ve achieved together.

Your shared dottiness is the outward sign of being so in tune with someone else. If people roll their eyes at you, it doesn’t matter.

Always understand when choosing a mate that if you opt for someone who shows guinea pigs you must expect in the fullness of time to find yourself a member of the British Guinea Pig Society — just like my brother-in-law, Dave.

All of our new neighbours are long-married couples and we get on really well. Just this weekend at 8pm, I rang one of them to arrange a dog walk (what else?).

She told me they were in bed watching a TV programme about apples — they’re thinking of buying their own cider press. None of this stuck me as remotely strange.

I suddenly realised we’d turned into our eccentric neighbours It doesn’t matter

if people roll their eyes at you