When you buy a house in a completely new neighbourhood and spend six months employing an army of builders and handymen to knock it about you need neighbours with patience, a good sense of humour and, ideally, not quite perfect hearing. Our neighbour Dorothy had all those attributes and many many more as she and her husband Wilfrid made us extremely welcome incomers to Suffolk.
So it was with enormous sadness that we learned yesterday that Dorothy passed away in the early hours of the morning. She had not been well for several months and moved into care in Ipswich towards the end of 2013 - a temporary arrangement which tragically turned out to be permanent. We will never forget her smile and the way that her face lit up when we came round for a chat with a pot of tea and we are sorry that our time as neighbours turned out to be so desperately short.
The plight of the elderly and of good neighbourship has been and will continue to be a major topic especially in rural communities such as this with an ageing demographic. Other neighbours speak highly of Dorothy's kindness to others in the years that she lived here. When we last visited her, as usual, she was thinking of others and not herself and she asked that we made sure that Wilfrid was okay. We can only hope that we can emulate her kindness by making sure that, like her, we keep any eye out for others who are less fortunate than ourselves.
Goodbye to a lovely person.
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