Neighbourhood Watch Quotes

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.

DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.

As we drew nearer we could see that the three men fishing seemed old and solemn-looking men. They sat on three chairs in the punt and watched intently their lines. And the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters and tinged with fire the towering woods and made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds. It was an hour of deep enchantment of ecstatic hope and longing. The little sail stood out against the purple sky the gloaming lay around us wrapping the world in rainbow shadows and behind us crept the night. We seemed like knights of some old legend sailing across some mystic lake into the unknown realm of twilight unto the great land of the sunset. We did not go into the realm of twilight we went slap into that punt where those three old men were fishing. We did not know what had happened at first because the sail shut out the view but from the nature of the language that rose up upon the evening air we gathered that we had come into the neighbourhood of human beings and that they were vexed and discontented.

Lukumon, please tell your family why you made me sleep with another man for money, but treated me like a leper when I returned. Explain why you refused to take the job the man offered you, but you insisted that I took the money, rent this house, and buy you that stupid watch. Tell them why you have refused to touch me but you’re sleeping with every girl in the neighbourhood. Why did you say yesterday that you don’t think Kitan is your child?

In Lebanon, we have the ‘neighbourhood watch’ too, but here they’re watching you! This watchful community spirit is not formalized as an institution with meetings and action plans, but it runs just as effectively if not more so than any official body.

Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ I combined that with another refrain, ‘May the road rise with you’. When I was growing up, that was a phrase my mum and dad – and half the surrounding neighbourhood, who happened to be Irish also – used to say. ‘May the road rise, and your enemies always be behind you!’ So it’s saying, ‘There’s always hope’, and that you don’t always have to resort to violence to resolve an issue. Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better. When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there. Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.

neighbour. He is a retired major and now runs the local Neighbourhood Watch group, Lower Toddle branch. It is a collection of oldies who have joined forces to keep an eye out for burglars, but Mr Parker uses it as an excuse to spy on everyone. One person he has got his eye on particularly is Ben. The nosy neighbour had been convinced the boy and his granny had stolen the Crown Jewels, but nobody had believed him. Now Mr Parker is out for revenge!

One of Their Gods When one of them passed through the forum of Seleucia just as night began to fall, young, tall, perfect in his beauty, with the joy of imperishability in his eyes and his aromatic black hair, the passers-by would stare, asking each other if they knew the man: was he a Greek from Syria, or a foreigner? But some, who watched with greater attention, understood and drew aside for him to pass; and as he vanished under the arcades, amid the shadow and light of evening, proceeding to that neighbourhood which comes alive only at night, with orgies and debauchery, every kind of drunkenness and lust, they wondered which of Them he might be, and for which of his suspect passions had he come down to the streets of Seleucia from the Venerable and Sacred Abodes.

The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. ‘These grapes are brown,’ I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. ‘What is wrong with that ? I am brown,’ he replies. ‘I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,’ says a maid, answering the telephone. ‘I am a Jew,’ begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bookshop. ‘Would you care to see the synagogue?’ Almost any Venetian, even a child, will abandon whatever he is doing in order to show you something. They do not merely give directions; they lead, or in some cases follow, to make sure you are still on the right way. Their great fear is that you will miss an artistic or ‘typical’ sight. A sacristan, who has already been tipped, will not let you leave until you have seen the last Palma Giovane. The ‘pope’ of the Chiesa dei Greci calls up to his housekeeper to throw his black hat out the window and settles it firmly on his broad brow so that he can lead us personally to the Archaeological Museum in the Piazza San Marco; he is afraid that, if he does not see to it, we shall miss the Greek statuary there. This is Venetian courtesy. Foreigners who have lived here a long time dismiss it with observation : ‘They have nothing else to do.’ But idleness here is alert, on the qui vive for the opportunity of sightseeing; nothing delights a born Venetian so much as a free gondola ride. When the funeral gondola, a great black-and-gold ornate hearse, draws up beside a fondamenta, it is an occasion for aesthetic pleasure. My neighbourhood was especially favoured this way, because across the campo was the Old Men’s Home. Everyone has noticed the Venetian taste in shop displays, which extends down to the poorest bargeman, who cuts his watermelons in half and shows them, pale pink, with green rims against the green side-canal, in which a pink palace with oleanders is reflected. Che bello, che magnifici, che luce, che colore! - they are all professori delle Belle Arti. And throughout the Veneto, in the old Venetian possessions, this internal tourism, this expertise, is rife. In Bassano, at the Civic Museum, I took the Mayor for the local art-critic until he interupted his discourse on the jewel-tones (‘like Murano glass’) in the Bassani pastorals to look at his watch and cry out: ‘My citizens are calling me.’ Near by, in a Paladian villa, a Venetian lasy suspired, ‘Ah, bellissima,’ on being shown a hearthstool in the shape of a life-size stuffed leather pig. Harry’s bar has a drink called a Tiziano, made of grapefruit juice and champagne and coloured pink with grenadine or bitters. ‘You ought to have a Tintoretto,’ someone remonstrated, and the proprietor regretted that he had not yet invented that drink, but he had a Bellini and a Giorgione. When the Venetians stroll out in the evening, they do not avoid the Piazza San Marco, where the tourists are, as Romans do with Doney’s on the Via Veneto. The Venetians go to look at the tourists, and the tourists look back at them. It is all for the ear and eye, this city, but primarily for the eye. Built on water, it is an endless succession of reflections and echoes, a mirroring. Contrary to popular belief, there are no back canals where tourist will not meet himself, with a camera, in the person of the another tourist crossing the little bridge. And no word can be spoken in this city that is not an echo of something said before. ‘Mais c’est aussi cher que Paris!’ exclaims a Frenchman in a restaurant, unaware that he repeats Montaigne. The complaint against foreigners, voiced by a foreigner, chimes querulously through the ages, in unison with the medieval monk who found St. Mark’s Square filled with ‘Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and other monsters of the sea’. Today it is the Germans we complain of, and no doubt they complain of the Americans, in the same words.

What a shocking bad hat!' was the phrase that was next in vogue. No sooner had it become universal, than thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat shewed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the war-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats. He was a wise man who, finding himself under these circumstances 'the observed of all observers,' bore his honours meekly. He who shewed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice. The mob soon perceive whether a man is irritable, and, if of their own class, they love to make sport of him. When such a man, and with such a hat, passed in those days through a crowded neighbourhood, he might think himself fortunate if his annoyances were confined to the shouts and cries of the populace. The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed, in the pauses of their mirth, 'Oh, what a shocking bad hat!' 'What a shocking bad hat!' Many a nervous poor man, whose purse could but ill spare the outlay, doubtless purchased a new hat before the time, in order to avoid exposure in this manner.

Neighbourhood Watch to me is checking my neighbours aren’t outside their house before I leave the flat, to avoid getting into long discussions.

He fished a sky blue burqa from the bag. The yards of pleated cloth spilled over his knees when he lifted it. He rolled up the burqa, looked at Mariam. "I have customers, Mariam, who bring their wives to my shop. The women come uncovered, they talk to me directly, look me in the eye without shame. They wear makeup and skirts that show their knees. Sometimes they even put their feet in front of me, the women do, for measurements, and their husbands stand there and watch. They allow it. They think nothing of a stranger touching their wives' bare feet! They think they're being modern men, intellectuals, on account of their education, I suppose. They don't see that they're spoiling their own 'nang' and 'namoos', their honour and pride." He shook his head. "Mostly, they live in the richer parts of Kabul. I'll take you there. You'll see. But they're here too, Mariam, in this very neighbourhood, these soft men. There's a teacher living down the street, Hakim is his name, and I see his wife Fariba all the time walking the streets alone with nothing on her head but a scarf. It embarrasses me, frankly, to see a man who's lost control of his wife." He fixed Mariam with a hard glare. "But I'm a different breed of man, Mariam. Where I come from, one wrong look, one improper word, and blood is spilled. Where I come from, a woman's face is her husband's business only. I want you to remember that. Do you understand?

Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.

The neighbourhood is a social construct that enables people to live, work and play together in close quarters with a feeling of engagement and security beyond their existence as individuals. (...) a sense of scale and community that is manageable, more village-like than urban. The most attractive neighbourhoods [are] the ones where there’s a palpable sense of an open, rather than closed community. Being a good neighbour is not about watching from behind your curtains and reporting any suspected misdemeanour to the police - it’s about inhabiting your neighbourhood beyond the curtains, bringing life to your street with open arms, not closed minds.

Jews are never practising, devout or religious (or unreligious) but observant, like private detectives or a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.

Aamir, recalling back to the idyllic days of his college youth, pictured himself once again sitting quietly on a familiar neighbourhood rooftop. He often enjoyed relaxing there, alone or with friends, while watching the colourful fluttering prayer flags on rooftop poles, especially in the warmth of an early evening breeze, as wispy clouds drifted against the jagged Himalayan backdrop. He has oft times wondered, ever since his childhood, if the prayers to the spirits of the dead, flying out from those slowly tattering rags, will ever really be answered. Perhaps it will be in another place, in another time, when we’re living another life that we shall finally know. Aamir had calmly thought at the time. He was that sort of philosophical guy.

London in those years was a thieves’ paradise. There was no citywide police force: The London Metropolitan Police Department would be established only in 1829. The patchwork of local watchmen, marshals and constables that patrolled the city in Wild’s day proved eminently bribable: Thieves often sold their plunder directly to them, at an attractive discount, which kept them safe from the hangman’s noose. Capitalizing on prevailing conditions, Wild began to gather London’s foremost thieves around him. He set up shop in the parlor of a London tavern, where he presided over the boldly named “Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property.” Suppose an English gentleman awoke one morning to find his gold watch and silver snuff box missing. Calling on Wild in his “office,” he would be informed that Wild “had an idea where the goods might be found, or at least who it was that had possession of them,” and that they could soon be returned to their rightful owner—for a fee. “If the person questioned Wild’s integrity, or asked how he should know so much about the theft, Wild answered ‘that it was meerly Providential; being, by meer Accident, at a Tavern, or at a Friend’s House in the Neighbourhood, [he] heard that such a Gentleman had his House broken open, and such and such Goods Stolen, and the like.’ ” Needless to say, Wild knew exactly where the goods were, because they’d been stolen by one of his own employees. What he’d done, in short, was to perfect a kind of property-kidnapping for ransom. The system proved so effective that he did not hesitate to target some of the country’s wealthiest men and women.

As Lynley watched her, he thought how ironic it was that he had come to depend upon having Havers as his partner. Initially he had believed that no one could possibly be less likely to suit him. She was prickly, argumentative, easily given to anger, and bitterly aware of the enormous gap that existed between them, an impassable chasm created by birth, by class, by money, by experience. They could not have been more antithetical, Havers struggling with a fierce determination to rise out of a working-class neighbourhood in a grimy suburb of London while he moved effortlessly from his home in Cornwall to his town house in Belgravia to his office in New Scotland Yard. But their differences went far beyond mere background. Their perceptions of life and humanity occupied two opposite ends of the spectrum as well. Hers was ruthless, without sympathy, suspicious of motives, and based on distrust of a world that had given her nothing. His was laced with compassion, rich with understanding, and based almost entirely upon a guilt that insisted he reach out, learn, expiate, rescue, make amends. He smiled at the thought that Superintendent Webberly had been absolutely right to put them together, to insist they remain in partnership even at moments when Lynley believed it was an impossible situation that could only grow worse.

It’s a great place, baby. A great neighbourhood. It’s got a huge garden,” he says, nodding to the right. “There’s a two-bed guesthouse in the garden, which is where Stuart will live.” “Stuart’s not going to live with us anymore?” I pout. “Well, we talked, baby, and we decided it was time he move out and get his own place. He’s all grown up, ready to face the world. We have to let him go sometime. We can’t keep him forever.” Jake gives me a grave look, clearly taking the piss. “You’re an idiot.” “Takes one to know one.” “That it does.” I smile warmly. He rubs his nose against mine, Eskimo-style. “I just thought it would be good to have our privacy, and Stuart gets his too. Also, I no longer have to run the risk of catching him making out with a dude.” “You love it really.” “What? Catching Stuart making out with a guy?” Pressing my lips together, suppressing a smile, I nod. “Sweetheart, nothing could kill my hard-on quicker, believe me. I like the person I’m with to be soft and warm.” He runs his fingertips down my bare arm. “I want her made to fit around me.” “Like me?” I scratch my fingernails over the denim covering his pert behind. “Exactly like you.” Jake bends his head down to mine and kisses me softly. “Will you miss him?” “Are we still talking about Stuart?” “I’m just worried he’ll think my being here is pushing him out.” “Sweetheart, he works for me, and it’s not like he’s going far.” “I know he works for you, but he’s your friend too. You guys have lived together for such a long time. You’re like Joey and Chandler. Except you’d probably have been Joey, and Chandler was never gay. Oh God, would that make me Monica or Rachel?” “What the fuck are you talking about?” He laughs. “Friends.” “I’m gonna have to watch this show, aren’t I, just so I can figure out what the fuck you’re talking about half the time.” “Yes, Pervy Perverson, you are. Honestly, I have no clue how you haven’t. I’ll buy the first season on Blu-ray and we can watch it together.” “Can’t wait.” “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Wethers

It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters in them—as I did—and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones—which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of Voyages and Travels—I forget what, now—that were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees—the perfect realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price. The Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears boxed with the Latin Grammar. I did; but the Captain was a Captain and a hero, in despite of all the grammars of all the languages in the world, dead or alive. This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse.

The Umbrella Ion Bulbuk has bought an umbrella. “Knock-knock” – it is a neighbour at the door. “It is going to rain, Ion. Give me your umbrella, please.” “It is not in the house,” lied Bulbuk. It rains… Bulbuk is walking wet in the yard, for the neighbour to see that the umbrella is not at home. But the neighbour is not watching. He went in the village for his business.