Lockdown has turned us into spies – and fantasists | Kitty Drake

Successive Covid confinements have left us free not just to surveil our neighbours, but to project our dreams on to themThere is an upside to being locked in your house for a year: your neighbours are locked in too, and it has never been easier to spy on them. Curtain-twitching is an ancient national tradition, but coronavirus seems to have made us even nosier. My life has shrunk to four walls and a window, and although my own habits are now ugly and familiar to me, my neighbour’s are a daily mystery. I see her making snacks and feeding her dog and making things on her sewing machine, and I wonder about her. What is she thinking? What is that snack? Should I, too, invest in a sewing machine?More than 194,000 people reported their neighbours to the police in the first five weeks of the lockdown last spring, and neighbourhood-based social networks such as Nextdoor – where you might typically have shared a photograph of a lost cat in pre-pandemic days – now crawl with amateur sleuths; activity on the site increased sharply during the first lockdown. In one post from March last year, a woman describes obsessively counting the number of times her neighbour opened the front door and then emailing that number to the police. Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/25/lockdown-turned-spies-and-fantasists-covid-neighbours #coronavirus #communities #society #uk_news