On a recent trip to Porto, I found myself offering knowing nods to the elderly sticking their heads out of windows and doors to watch the world go by. Now that I am the proud renter of my own set of street-side steps (the rest of the house is just an added bonus), I number myself among these flagrant front-door snoopers.
Though it is, typically, the reserve of Mediterranean retirees, my housemates and I – all freckled and in our twenties – have taken up the pastime of home-based people-watching with gusto. We treat our Dublin city steps like a set of pitchside bleachers.
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“What is this, the eternal picnic?” a neighbour asked us recently, passing us for the second time that day, the n-th day in a row. He was probably (rightfully) wary of how much intel we were gathering on everyone’s movements. Another neighbour was more sentimental, observing that “there is always life on this stoop”, poetically validating our nosiness.
I always thought that autumn was my favourite season, but I have regretted its arrival now that our step-watching sessions have grown shorter and darker. In an age of doom scrolling and brain rot, it has felt good (dare I say even revolutionary?) to waste time in the real world – to partake in some good old-fashioned idling; the kind that my grandparents would have approved of.
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I have spent more time sitting on these steps than anywhere else over the past year and cannot help but wonder what it is that keeps my housemates and I (and the grannies of Porto) watching snippets of strangers’ lives from these homely perches.
At best, we could dress it up as a wholesome sense of curiosity – a joie de vivre for the eclecticism of Dublin pedestrian life. The view from these sidelines is, undoubtedly, intriguing. Just last week, I witnessed a man guzzling a two-litre bottle of milk on his way home from work while another made shooing sounds into a brown paper bag. Who needs a telly with views like this at the front door?
It has returned me to a game my aunt used to play with us on long car journeys, pointing out passersby and asking us “who are they?”, leaving us to entertain ourselves with made-up stories about them. Sitting at our front door, my housemates and I now build entire worlds around people walking up and down the road, making fully fledged characters of locals who have had the good sense to keep their distance from us.
They give us plenty of material to work with, mind you. We recently overheard two gardaí one-upping each other with how many debs they respectively went to (our city is in safe, corsaged hands), and had no choice but to listen to one side of a fraught phone call when a woman stopped in front of us to shout “No! You! Listen! To! Me!” down the line.
It can sometimes feel like we are sitting on the window side of a one-way mirror – most people do not notice us until the last minute and speak much louder than they probably would have if they knew that we were, of course, listening. “He had this terrible tradition,” I once heard a man explain to his younger colleague, “of touching her breast!”. They kept walking, leaving me with many, many questions.
So I would be lying if I said it was all innocent intrigue – there is, perhaps, a more prying inquisitiveness at play here. But I would like to think that in the anonymity and isolation of city living, such spying is a form of ... community-building?
As with most city dwellers, we are but blow-ins on this little street. And while our desire to become “locals” has hitherto otherwise been futile, this step-watching has offered us an unexpected sense of ownership over the place.
There is a smugness in knowing that people will trip on the uneven break in the curb two doors down, and that others will take pictures with our neighbour’s fancy car across the road, and that no one is ever going to pick up that singular Nike trainer abandoned on the path many months ago. I feel useful informing those about to chance a parking ticket that clampers are out every few hours and take more pleasure yet in watching people’s failed parallel parking attempts along the street. It feels good, grounding even, to know that Garda One’s five debs trumps Garda Two’s mere three.
In a place so transient as the city, in a time so muddled as early adulthood, it is really quite nice to know this one road and its rhythms. Morning commuters, school-goers, dog walkers, they all move like clockwork, and in their regularity they reassure me (and no doubt the elderly of Porto) that in all the chaos – see milk guzzler and brown paper bag whisperer above – there can be patterns. And some great gossip too.
