WE’VE just had a cracking day hosting a barbecue for our neighbours. And it wasn’t all flaccid sausages and cremated burgers either.

No, we pushed the boat out a bit and did fancy stuff with salmon skewers, baby blini burgers and a whole leg of lamb. It didn’t rain, copious amounts of wine were quaffed, the whisky came out, not to mention the port, and lunchtime stretched into bedtime.

So what? Big yawn. Smacks of one of those turgid what-I-did-at-the-weekend essays every school kid has bored their teacher with down the decades.

But stay with me. For what made this a bit special is that although we’ve lived next door to our neighbours on one side for nearly 15 years, until recently we’ve never been in and out of each other’s houses.

Oh yes, we’ve always passed the time of day, had brief natters over the figurative fence and swapped neighbourly Christmas cards, but neither family has been the sort to hang out the bunting, get out the trestles and throw a street party at the drop of a hat.

Nor have we been in to that borrowing-cups-of-sugar syndrome where people use next door’s kitchen as an extension of their own and spend hours gabbing while they’re doing it.

We had the neighbours round on the other side of us as well, who’ve only lived next door for a year or so, but compared to their predecessors we have a ball every time we see them.

Good job too, because if they’d turned out as miserable as the last lot – who we didn’t even know were moving until the removal van turned up – I might have ended up being really unsociable and planted a load of leylandii.

So what’s changed? It wasn’t as if it was the Jubilee that’s prompted this new bonhomie because this new-found neighbourliness has been going on for a few months.

We’ve now all been and had a gathering in each other’s houses and each time have had a good craic, as they say over the Irish Sea. From where, incidentally, the new lot have come from so having a good craic is clearly an extremely welcome over-the-water character trait.

This last time, while we were passing the whisky round the table throwing in the odd toast to the Queen while we were at it, we got to musing about our new found friendship and what’s triggered it.

And we came to the conclusion that it’s down to the fact that two of the households have people living in them that have retired.

We’ve spent so many years focused on family and work and not much else. There just hasn’t been the time. Like whirling dervishes life has revolved around getting up, going to work, coming home, getting fed, putting the kids to bed that’s there’s not been that much of a focus on anything else. So apart from nodding the time of day in passing, getting pally with the neighbours has hardly been on the radar.

All those lost opportunities. All those years when, focused on other things, we didn’t take time out to get to know each other better and just passed each other like the proverbial ships in the night.

And talking of night, that’s how it all began, following a loutish drink fuelled, drugs fuelled disturbance that by coincidence ended up outside our house in the small hours with the village ne’er-do-wells slinging punches and the like.

The police had been called and an awful lot of effing-type shouting had gone on, so we felt honour bound to tell the neighbours the next day why their front lawn looked a bit worse for wear.

They hadn’t been woken up by the racket so didn’t know what we were on about, but it didn’t stop the five-minute next-door-pop-round turning into a seven hour putting-the-world-to-rights session over some rather good white Burgundy.

They reckon the impromptu events are the best and we’ve had a couple since then, mingled with a few planned events like our barbecue. That nearly ended up a disaster though because the freezer died on us in the middle of it, but what did the neighbours do?

Both sides took our foodstuff and packed their own freezers with it until we could get sorted.

Just goes to show that like the intro song of the old telly series, everybody needs good neighbours. And if you can have a great time with them as well then so much the better.

The moral of the story, then? Time and effort is all it takes and I wish we’d done it years ago….