I have disconcertingly started to walk about town with what can best be described as a sneer on my face. 

Well, not so much a sneer as an expression that falls somewhere between Miss Piggy and Tammy Faye Bakker in one of her more demented evangelical performances. 

Remember Tammy Faye? Never has one woman ‘Praised the Lord’ with more thickly applied peach blusher.

But I digress. The reason for the change of face is because a whole bunch of neighbours seems to have taken off and I’m having the devil of a job keeping up with the new lot. 

Trouble is, you can take the permanency of the old guard for granted. 

From the bottle shop bloke with the gammy leg on the corner to the frizzy-haired woman who drives the Hillman Minx at the bottom end of the street, you get to know the who’s who of the hood. 

Then one day you realise they’re not there anymore. They’ve either departed the scene for parts unknown, decamped to a Sunny Smiles retirement condo or shuffled off this mortal coil. It may have taken you years to pin them down by name and now they’ve done a runner on you. You’ve got to learn a new lot of names and memorise a new lot of faces. 

Here’s where the dilemma comes in. For those of us old enough to remember Tammy Faye, the powers of recognition aren’t what they used to be. 

You don’t want to be rude but who the hell are these strangers walking briskly past your unkempt front garden? Where’s bottle shop man? Where’s Hillman Minx woman? 

So, in order to be neighbourly and not come to be regarded as that nasty woman with the unkempt garden I’m adhering to the cunning strategy of smiling at pretty well everyone. That includes dogs. And children. That way I offend no-one. All bases covered. Pleasantness guaranteed. 

The only ones who might have a problem are people who find the fixed smile a bit manic

I will occasionally chirrup a little greeting of sorts. Here again, it’s general rather than person-specific. 

A smile, a chirrup of indeterminate nature and, when I feel on safe ground, a merry quip in passing and I’m home and hosed. 

Unfortunately, once I’m on neutral ground, say, down the main street, in the dog park or shuffling through the checkout, I tend to drop my guard. Neighbours previously greeted with enthusiasm are totally ignored. At best they get on the receiving end of the kind of sickly grin adopted by people desperately trying to remember who they’re looking at.

It won’t do. Already I’ve snubbed the man who moved into bottle shop’s house, the lady with the backpack and a perfectly pleasant young woman with a child in a pusher. Retreat into total disregard is not an option. Strapping on the smile at all times seems the only way out. What with the turmoil of neighbourly reconstruction and in order to avoid social disapprobation it's the least I can do.