This week, something strange happened. A guy that I vaguely remembered from his stint on The Bachelor made the news. I know. I couldn’t believe it either.

The guy in question is named Jimmy and somewhat miraculously he actually married the girl that he picked at the end of the show. But that is not why he made the news, although it is a tiny bit noteworthy.

No, Jimmy made a TikTok that got everyone talking because he demonstrated an act of neighbourly pettiness. Or was it? You be the judge.

Jimmy was pointing out that at the front of their respective properties, next to the driveway were two small patches of grass with no boundary fence. The neighbour had mown his patch of grass but only up to the imaginary property line, leaving the grass on Jimmy’s side unkempt.

That’s a level of pettiness that suggests there’s more angst in this relationship than Jimmy might be admitting to, but it did get everyone in our office talking.

It seems to me that it’s almost more effort to NOT mow the rest of the grass. It would have taken literally 20 seconds to push the mower across the remaining lawn. Not to mention the fact that if everyone’s lawn looks good, the value of your place goes up.

And sure, you could argue that people should mow their own damn lawns and that they don’t value your time and hard work, or you could just stop stewing about it and spend that extra half-a-minute doing something nice.

I speak with some authority because I allow my neighbour to mow the thin strip of verge out the front of both of our houses on a regular basis. And when I say “allow” I mean, he just does it.

He also planted it and put reticulation in, and it really does look a lot better than the patchy, threadbare offering that preceded it. Like many of my horticultural endeavours, this lawn seems to do a lot better if I’m not involved in its care in any way. And the street looks nicer. Win, win.

The only time you shouldn’t touch your neighbour’s grass is if they are the “lawn guy” type. You know the ones. They’re obsessed with their lawns. Their lawns are works of art. They approach their lawn care like they are curating the surface of the MCG. Don’t you dare touch a blade of their grass. But you wouldn’t anyway, because their lawn doesn’t need mowing. It has invariably been mowed in the last 12 hours.

As a rule of thumb, if their lawn looks better than yours, don’t touch it. Ask for their advice instead and they might take pity on you and work on yours too. Those lawn guys love a challenge and they have to justify all that equipment they own. He’ll be clomping around your front yard in his lawn aerating sandals before you know it. It’s important that you let this happen.

It does speak to the broader subject of neighbourliness though. I have a neighbour that I have swapped keys with, so that if either of us get locked out, we have a solution nearby. This has happened several times, by the way, which perhaps reflects poorly on our ability to function as adults.

We also pool our bins and have a general arrangement that if one of us puts them out, the other one takes them in. This neighbour is also horticulturally superior to me (not difficult) and has at various times pruned my roses, planted out garden beds that my dog has subsequently dug up and sent her husband in to sort out my retic. She is currently rehabilitating a neglected hydrangea that she found in my backyard and rescued while I was on holidays. She is exactly the sort of neighbour everyone needs. Except you can’t have her, because clearly my need is greater.

Obviously this level of neighbourliness should be reciprocal and after thinking for a little too long, I recalled something that I had done for her: I babysat her daughters’ dogs on a couple of occasions, which freaked the dogs out, but was absolutely no bother at all.

I’m also very reliable in the particular skills of “checking on tradies who are working unsupervised” and “witnessing official documents when called upon” so I guess I’ve earned my Good Neighbour badge too.