So I feel what I'm missing now in my middle aged isolation. Each nod they receive from a neighbour counts towards their RDA of Vitamin T' Solitary elderly people trying to survive on a state pension are amongst those most in need of such informal neighbourhood contacts. In our evolutionary past, we lived in small groups of 50 to 250 or so people, and we still need that intense level of inter-communication and sense of place and neighbourhood. For kithlessness is, I believe, today's most unrecognised feeling. Almost every urban dweller feels it deep in themselves, but hardly anyone recognises or verbalises the feeling.
Some people even go to great lengths to keep apart from their neighbours.
They believe that their tribe consists of those who share the same interests as them, in however far flung places they may live, or just the people they work with, or just their cosy nuclear family. No doubt in the past people could feel very trapped in their isolated, stultifying village culture, but now the pendulum has swung the other way, and we have only too many ways of escaping from our locality, through travel, work, holidays, telephone, television, the web. A strong social network is a predictor of long life' Doubtless Vitamin T is essential for our health too. In the future that's rapidly arriving, where computer programmers and web designers and their ilk will be the aristocrats lording it over the rest of us, who will be either out of work or providing them with their luxuries, it will be ever harder to feel part of society, and it is only within cohesive neighbourhoods that we will be able to receive recognition for who we are as people, whatever our job or lack of one may be. The questions only address encounters in your neighbourhood or at work which take place within this 15 minutes' range and which are outside your nuclear family.