For those of you who do not know, Surrey is an English county that sits between 6 and 730 on the clockface of London. It is crowded, affluent and seriously middle class.
As it is also close to London, various motorways and to Gatwick and Heathrow airports, Surrey is also home to a number of company headquarters. I was at one yesterday working with the UK management team of a tech company trying to find out why they were losing more contracts than they were winning. We found out why (so that was a good day's work) - but during the course of the day I found that one of the managers happened to live in the same village as me, in the next street.
He had lived there ten years, I had lived there eight - and this was the first time we had seen each other.
This is not unusual. People in the UK do not live where they grew up. And when everyone is new, then people don't talk to each other. We are driven paranoid by the papers and the television news, so our kids can't go out to play by themselves or to run round to their friends' houses to ask "..is Johnny coming out to play?" And we drive everywhere, rather than walk, so we don't see our neighbours anyway.
And even if we do - in Surrey, no-one says 'hello' in the street.
Our neighbours are strangers.
So while I was intrigued that my client was my neighbour, I'm afraid that I was not surprised that we did not know each other.
We used to have communities, but someone stole them while we were looking the other way.
- Drib
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