Judith Woods on the delicate art of snitching on your neighbours

Snitches get stitches and wind up in ditches. That’s one playground life lesson you never forget, especially when it’s accompanied by a Chinese burn. If that’s not considered racist in this wide a-woke era.

Tell-tale-tits – another phrase from my childhood that prompts social justice warrior outrage – are having a Covid-19 moment. The new normal demands that we tell tales, spill the beans and blow the gaff on anyone disobeying the rule of six. I say anyone – I only wish it were anyone – but specifically our own neighbours. The people we have to live beside forever and on whose goodwill we rely not to make our lives utter hell.

Sorry, but that sort of argy-bargy is arguably more nightmarish than a bout of coronavirus, and I say that as someone who threw up, went blind and felt as though molten steel was being pumped into her legs. Worst of all, there is no established Snitches’ Charter etiquette. We are being expected to make it up as we go along, which is both egregiously unfair and out-andout terrifying.

Have our politicians forgotten what it’s like to live on an actual residential road alongside a load of random people? A street crammed with noisy multi-occupation flats? A cul-de-sac where recycling infractions can precipitate a bristling stand-off that makes the Bay of Pigs look like Centre Porcs?

A neighbourhood is a fragile ecosystem inhabited by people you chat to and those you do not. There are best friends, unspoken rivals and frenemies, inveterate gossips and poor souls. And yet this Government seriously seems to imagine all of them – any of them – will take kindly to me knocking on their door of a Friday night to have a quick busybody word about social distancing. Take the family with the feral kids who will laugh in my face. Will they then seek retribution by slashing my tyres and keying an Anglo-saxon epithet down the side of my Skoda?

My elderly neighbour is hoping his family will visit from Ireland – am I supposed to stand at the window and do a headcount as his greatgrandchildren troop into the house? What kind of person does that make me? A pariah, that’s what.

What this calls for is a Covid hotline, à la John Major’s Cones Hotline, launched in 1992 for concerned members of the public to report traffic cones deployed on roads “for no apparent reason”.

I think complaining about anything on the grounds it is happening “for no apparent reason” is a sentiment we can all get behind. So bring on the unmanned Rule of Six phone lines, where we can leave details and let off steam without fear of reprisal. Then, at grass-roots level, we can apply more traditional diplomacy on errant neighbours refusing to toe the line: passive-aggressive smiles across the fence, loud sighs and tutting.