I have always been a fan of British restraint. I revere it. I love the fact that someone in the throes of peritonitis will murmur vaguely about having “a slight tummy ache”. An elderly friend, recently out of hospital, cancelled supper a few weeks ago. She was clearly not feeling well. Asked if there was anything anyone could do, she said: “Oh no. I’ll just go to bed with a glass of water.” This sort of thing makes me nearly explode with admiration.

It follows that I deplore the erosion of the whole stiff-upper-lip thing by the US-born (but enthusiastically UK-adopted) trend for emoting wildly all over the place, and for volunteering all kinds of dull information, using vaguely psychobabbly vocab to add heft. As far as I am concerned, the correct response to a polite “How are you?” remains “I’m fine”, not “My candida’s really out of control, which I put down to stress. But I’ve been self-medicating with food, and now I’ve put on 5lb” etc etc. I wonder whether people who do this – and there are an awful lot of them – realise how boring they are.

Suffering in silence is, however, admirable only if the suffering is one’s own. What was especially impressive about old-school restraint was that it was coupled with the most gargantuan appetite for gossip. Everybody knew what everybody else was up to, and merrily discussed it. This was all very jolly, provided you weren’t the subject of the gossip – though being gossiped about can have its advantages: someone I know, whose husband beat her up, would find random dinners on her doorstep, left there by anonymous neighbours after the husband had left for work, the neighbours being aware of her suffering and wanting to help in whatever unintrusive, non-aggravating way they could.

When the husband eventually left for good, she found that, without her saying a word, an entire support system had built up around her: one person would walk her children to school, another would pick them up or someone would drop round because they were on their way to the laundrette (this was in the 1970s). I suspect the husband’s leaving may have been related to being shopped by the neighbours.

In recent weeks I’ve been pining for a return to neighbourly nosiness. We may no longer live in close-knit communities where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but we still all notice stuff. If we see a child who is covered in bruises and wearing a T-shirt in freezing November weather, we will ask ourselves why. We may go home and say, “I feel anxious, because I saw a child covered in bruises”, but we are unlikely to do much about it: who would discreetly follow the child home and jot down the address? Who, if they knew the child in question, would call social services to voice their concern? I wouldn’t, though it embarrasses me to say so. I would lie in bed thinking up comforting excuses: the child ran out of a cosy home before his loving mother had time to put a coat on him; bruises mean nothing – my daughter runs around wildly and sometimes bangs into things, and how incensed would I be if someone reported her bruised shins? I wouldn’t make anybody else go through that. And so on.

We have come to value our privacy so much that we also perhaps set too much store by other people’s. I’ve mentioned Baby P three weeks in a row now, but the burning question remains: failures by understaffed, underpaid, undervalued social and medical services aside, did no “ordinary” people clap eyes on this child and wonder what was going on? I find that impossible to believe. And say they did – did they pick up the phone or make their anxieties official? No. Not one.

In the grotesque case, which came to court last week, of the British father who raped his two daughters and fathered children by them, did no one at any point think anything was amiss? The daughters went to school. They went to the shops. They sat in the pub. Babies arrived, but not boyfriends. And apparently no one, at any point over three decades, ever found the set-up peculiar enough to pick up the phone to the police or social services.

Nine-year-old Shannon Matthews was kept in a flat, surrounded by other flats, for 24 days. A massive police search was taking place (it cost the taxpayer £3.2m); the story dominated the news. Did no one think: ‘That’s funny – the man in that house doesn’t have children, but I can hear a child’s footsteps, and we all know a girl went missing half a mile away?” They did, as it happens, the police were later told. But, you know – you mind your own business and keep your nose out of other people’s.

And where do you redirect your appetite for gossip? To the stars of reality TV shows or the girlfriends of footballers; to Britney Spears. In the days when women used to lean over the garden fence, nattering about how so-and-so was no better than she should be, there were three television stations, no gossip mags and no internet, and “stars” were treated reverentially. People lived their own lives, not other people’s; what they talked about was real.

Today we all know far more than we need to about people who don’t seem real at all – massively privileged, rich, famous or infamous people we’ll probably never even see in the flesh. People we know nothing about, save for the tiny aspect of their (constructed) personality that their publicists or the paparazzi choose to make public. We’ll wonder whether Spears will ever get full custody of her two sons again, while pretending we don’t notice that our friend’s kids are depressed because their dad doesn’t turn up for contact visits. Couldn’t possibly mention it, of course – none of our business. Single mother with a drug habit? Well, she seems to be coping. Screams coming from next door? We’ve all had rows that were real humdingers.

Meanwhile people are perfectly happy to dial 999 because their goldfish is looking a bit peaky. There is, surely, a happy medium between an all-seeing eye and ever-present blinkers. Those old communities prided themselves on keeping an eye out for each other. That may sound charmingly retro if you live deep in the urban jungle – but there is no reason it shouldn’t still apply. Keep an eye out for other people, and maybe they’ll keep one out for you.

+ Heston Blumenthal, chef and owner of the three-Michelin-star Fat Duck restaurant at Bray, in Berkshire, has teamed up with the Little Chef chain and overhauled its menu.

Blumenthal is as much a chemist as a cook: his signature dishes, such as bacon and egg ice cream and snail porridge, owe much to his interest in “molecular gastronomy”. The Little Chef chain was rescued from the brink of collapse last year – punters had tired of its 1970s-style menu.

I wonder what they’ll make of the revamped version, which includes slow-cooked ox cheek in red wine, rope-grown Scottish mussels and trifle made with green tea.

Those are all things one would be delighted to eat in a restaurant – but Little Chef isn’t a restaurant. It’s a pit stop when you’re feeling tired from driving for three hours and the children are playing up in the back and all you want is a toastie and a cup of tea.

Perhaps I’m terribly out of touch, and knackered people halfway down the A3 are in fact crying out for Scottish mussels, but it would have made more sense to me to reinvent the dishes one expects of Little Chef – bacon butties, burgers, chicken in a basket – using top-quality ingredients than to turn the whole experience into some kind of gastrofest.

Sometimes you just want chips – and not pommes allumette, either.

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