Neighbours can drive you to distraction. Some are noisy, some are dirty, some are dangerous and some are just plain unreasonable.
Often if you can afford to, the only option really is to move from that particular neighbourhood and hope you don't end up in a worse one.
But more often than not, and if you are a country instead of a person, you can't move and so you try to find ways to keep out the unpleasantness.
And so we build walls. But then walls can cause more trouble than they solve.
I was witness once to a dramatic example of a domestic wall causing unbelievable tragedy.
Courtroom shoot-out
I had arrived in Addis Ababa on a reporting trip and met up with the soft-spoken journalist who was the stringer for the BBC African Service.
He had managed to report from Ethiopia for us and one other western news agency throughout the difficult years of Marxist ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Our reporter lived next door to a general in the Ethiopian army.
I forget now which of the two of them built the wall; but the other claimed the wall was blocking the sunlight into his kitchen.
Twice the wall was demolished by the person who found it offensive and twice it was rebuilt.
The matter was taken to the Kebele, the neighbourhood court, to be settled and during the hearing, one thing led to another and our reporter shot the general dead.
The general's bodyguards then turned on the reporter and shot him.
Luckily for him he did not die and I found him critically wounded in hospital under the guard of armed soldiers. With the overthrow of Mengistu, he ended up being freed from jail and disappeared in the ensuing chaos.
Apart from the shock of having to come to terms with the reality of this most erudite and calm reporter shooting somebody, never mind an army general who was his neighbour, I couldn't work out how a fence wall could generate so much passion.
But in truth, it would seem walls have always been contentious structures.
We build walls to divide and keep out and therein lies the problem.
Recently Tunisia announced it was going to build a wall along its borders with Libya to counter the threat from jihadist militants.
The wall would stretch 160km (100 miles) inland from the coast, and be completed by the end of 2015.
This is the Tunisian response to the crisis it is facing in the light of the massacre of tourists on its beaches.
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