I worry neighbours don't like me and plot against me

I think good fences make good neighbors, but I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. I currently live in a neighborhood where we don't have privacy fences, and honestly I never spend time in my yard now. I LOVE privacy.

They do.

Here's a concise explanation of what's going on from heavy-weight philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: "Hell is other people."

I assume you live in in the UK. As someone who was born and grew up in the USA, one thing I've always found unpleasant about living in Brtain is how people are crammed together so densely. Something like 1% of the total land area of the British Isles is actually built-up, but there's this ridiculous notion that allowing people a decent amount of personal territory is evil because the countryside is sacred or some such shit.

From what you say, you've landed in the middle of a little society where the power dynamics and relationships were all worked out long ago. It's really not that different to going to a new Secondary School when you're thirteen years old or starting a new job. If you want to fit in, you need to put some effort into that. The odds are that there will be some arseholes who never accept you, but as long as you aren't an arsehole yourself, there's also a good chance there will be at least a few people you can at least tolerate. If you don't make an effort to get to know the members of your new society, then you'll never know who is which of those, and you'll always be seen as an outsider. That's a perfectly reasonable choice to make, but you have to accept the consequences.

As it happens, we bought a house just over a year ago, but fortunately it was only one of our neighbours who was a total dick. Unfortunately, it was the berk who lived in on our side of the semi-detached next to ours, so we shared a common garden wall, and his house is literally four metres away from ours. We made the effort to be friendly at the start, but after he criticised me for things that were none of his business a couple of times, I politely told him that talking to him was clearly a waste of time and I wouldn't do it any more. After that, I just completely ignored him.

We heard from other neighbours that he was bad-mouthing us, but we really didn't give a shit. As far as we were concerned, if people believed everything he said, then that mainly indicated they weren't the sort of people we wanted to be friends with in any case.

(Amusingly, the jerk sold his place a few weeks ago, so things are looking brighter for us and all the other neighbours he pestered and whinged to.)

I think it's important to put down boundaries - in a civil sort of way - when you come into an existing little society so that people don't feel they can walk all over you. But living in close proximity to others always requires compromises, you can't allow yourself to believe that your rights trump those of everyone else and you have to be aware of how your actions are perceived.

To take the shed incident you mention as an example. It's not entirely clear what exactly happened, but there's a whole range of ways that you could have handled those guys checking out your bikes. You running over with a cricket bat in one hand and the straining lead of a baying pit-bull in the other while you shouted, "What the fuck are you fucking bastards looking at?" would be very different to you casually wandering over with a smile on your face, your hands in your pockets and saying, "Whatsup, guys?"

You also need to be aware that it's very easy to slip into thinking that everything done by neighbours you don't get on with is always all about you. We fell into this trap with the obnoxious neighbour I mentioned above, and every time we saw him outside talking to a neighbour, we wondered if it was about us. From what we heard from other neighbours, that was indeed what he was doing some of the time. But since we knew we'd done nothing unreasonable, that just demonstrated what a pathetic, small-minded, obnoxious little twat he was. Him talking about us didn't harm us in any concrete way, challenging him was pointless and it would only create tensions between him and the neighbours who told us about it, so we just let it go.

Are you a traffic warden?