Harry Lauders walking stick

It's not a houseplant, only tropical plants should be brought indoors. This form of hazelnut/filbert should be planted in the ground and watered until established, they are usually fairly tough. I don't know how dormant they go in your gardening zone, but they usually lose all their leaves in winter and then resprout in spring. I assume when you say Easter you mean this past April. If the leaves fell off before you brought it inside it was probably dying, possibly from improper watering, a root disease, a grafting problem, voles eating the roots or any and all the above. It also might have died if you kept it in a pot all winter and did not mulch the pot to protect the roots from the cold. You can tell if it still has life by scratching one of the branches with your fingernail - if it shows green it is alive, if it brown it is dead. The thing with Harry Lauders is that they are all grafted, so it might be just the graft that is dead. If you see sprouts from the bottom it's the original plant coming back and that would be a straight species hazelnut without the curly branches. Your neighbor doesn't know poop about gardening next time call the place you purchased the plant from for advice.

I bought this plant at a garden centre already potted in a large tall pot and they told me it was fine for the porch as it is kind of a sheltered area over the main door of the house with a sliding door that rarely gets shut and is quite cold in the winter .When i bought this in late october it had lots of catkins and then around April time a yellow dust started coming off them if you touched them then they started to drop of since moving it outside i have noticed small green shoots appearing but then they go brown i have also noticed shoots coming up from under the soil around the base of the plant what does this mean?

The yellow dust is pollen, it's normal. The shoots you see at the bottom of the plant are called suckers, it's the original plant the Harry Lauder was grafted onto. I think the graft is dead and thus no more Harry Lauder. The plant will probably become a straight species filbert/hazelnut. You can plant it off in a hedgerow where beauty is not the first consideration and one day it might even make some nuts.