When the Queen said, in her Christmas address, “I have lived long enough to know that things never remain quite the same for long”, it will have struck a chord among older people. Not only does their experience teach them that life is always in a state of change, and what seems amazing or horrific today will take on a different perspective next week, next month or next year. But there is something else too: events are always in a state of change, but there is also a continual state of renewal, so that age brings that odd feeling of having seen it all before. The French phrase “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” — the more things change, the more they stay the same — may be hackneyed, but it is hackneyed because it is often true.

This reflection can be comforting. Some of the gloom and doom foretold turns out to be ill-founded, because of the constant factors in the human condition. No, the family is not “finished”, as is often claimed. Quite the contrary — the family has undergone, and continues to undergo, remarkable renewal.

In the 1970s, there was a cult book called The Death of the Family, by one David Cooper, a misanthropic shrink who was a sidekick of R. D. Laing, in which the family’s demise was confidently announced. The family, the late Dr Cooper believed, was responsible for causing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Thirty-five years on, it is impressive how durable kinship links have proved to be. To be sure, families have altered, and there is justifiable concern about the number of children growing up without stable family environments. Nevertheless, most people spent Christmas with their families, most people care for their families and, as any funeral, wedding or other rite of passage will reveal, family attachment remains strong.

Indeed, I am bemused by the number of old feminists with whom I marched in the 1960s and 70s — striking a blow against “patriarchy” — who now send me doting photographs of their grandchildren as greetings cards. Any reunion of old feminists produces competitive and indulgent conversation about grandchildren, even sometimes including a few yearning allusions to the need for a bit of patriarchy, particularly when it comes to raising boys and getting more male influence into the teaching profession.

Experience — and age — so often bring this sense of things having come full circle, and sometimes in a most unexpected way. The extraordinary success, this year, of gay civil unions — more than 15,000 homosexual couples undertook a civil partnership — is in a paradoxical way a tribute to the enduring element of family structures. Gay people not only wish to affirm their rights to a family life, but also, in some cases, to children, either by adoption or by assisted conception: the aspiration represents a remarkable triumph for “family values”. It is quite the opposite to Cyril Connolly’s thesis, as outlined in his Enemies of Promise, that the main advantage of being a homosexual was that you were free from tiresome and bourgeois institutions such as marriage, and emphatically, from the tyranny of “the pram in the hall”. Now we hear a positive clamour for the pram in the hall. This is not quite a matter of having seen it all before, but a surprising way in which circumstances change but human desires remain familiar and consistent.

Dramatic social and political changes around us are often merely part of a cycle of action and reaction: and there are many passing fancies. Some Conservatives this week note with dismay that the Tory party has omitted from its list of “great Britons” both Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. It is silly and perverse to have done so, but it’s just a phase: presently, another reaction will set in, and both Winston and Lady T will be restored to their natural position in history. Oldies will again see the wheel turn full circle.

The senior’s philosophical attitude to events shouldn’t, of course, lead to complacency: mellowness must be tempered by judgment. It is poignant to come across instances of German Jews who, in the 1930s, did not take the rise of Hitler seriously, arguing that bursts of anti-Semitism had occurred before, and it had all “blown over”. Because something has happened before doesn’t always indicate that we should accept it passively. It is right to be concerned about the alarming amount of violent crime we now see, or about binge drinking among young women. These phenomena are not new — there is a rich 19th-century literature about the catastrophic impact of cheap gin on women: all the more reason to consider some of the remedies that worked before, including successful religious temperance movements.

Oh, yes, this is the year we were told, rather frequently, that God was a dead delusion — Richard Dawkins’s book was a bestseller and The Guardian was pleased to announce just before Christmas that 82 per cent of people polled now consider religion a bad rather than a good influence. That’s as maybe, but didn’t Nietzsche and Dostoevsky wrestle with similar themes? And yet such theories don’t always square with personal experience. You couldn’ t get near Canterbury Cathedral for the Christmas services — packed out and ticketed in advance.

Predictions about the death of religion usually turn out to be misbegotten, placing too much emphasis on rational science and not enough on the human condition’s ability to renew its core values. The Irish patriot Wolfe Tone predicted that the French Revolution would kill off the Catholic Church because such an authoritarian institution could never survive the rise of democracy and the rights of Man. Actually, the age that followed produced a flowering of faith, notably in France, and the “rights of Man” were incorporated seamlessly into religious language.

You never know what’s coming next, although the experience of age generally tells us that it is likely to include quite a lot of what went before.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone