It's become a commonplace that life is getting worse rather than better. Such a view was (seemingly) reinforced earlier this week with a BBC-sponsored survey on community breakdown. The survey compared census data from 2001, 1991, 1981 and 1971 and concluded that such breakdown is getting worse. So far, so predictable. Except I'm not sure it is true.

Or at least, if communities really are breaking down, I don't think this survey proves it. What first aroused my suspicions was that, according to the analysis, Edinburgh is now the “loneliest” place to be in the UK and Stoke-on-Trent is the least. And yet my intuition is that many of us would rather take our chances on a solitary existence in the Athens of the North than be even the most popular guy in the Potteries.

A research team at the University of Sheffield used what it called “loneliness indices” (already we see a value-judgment creeping, or rather, barging, in) to identify where people had “a feeling of not belonging” (there's another one). These indices turned out to be based on mundane data concerning the number of single people in an area, the number living alone, the numbers in privately rented accommodation and the number who had lived there less than a year. The more people there were in an area belonging to each of these categories, said the academics, the higher the level of loneliness.

So the methodology seems to be: measure some facts which you have already decided indicate loneliness, and the more those facts occur in a place, the lonelier people in that place will be. It's a textbook example of the naturalistic fallacy, deriving an ought from an is, something which, about 250 years ago, in Edinburgh as it happens, David Hume showed cannot be done.

To be alone is not necessarily to be lonely. To be married is not necessarily to be part of a community. To pay rent to a landlord, as opposed to being mortgaged to a bank, is not necessarily to suffer from anomie. And to be old and housebound is much more likely to make for a lonely existence, even if you have been in an area all your life, than to be young and mobile and out on the town having lived somewhere for a week.

Who's lonelier? The confident, independent student at Edinburgh university living on her own in a rented bedsit, seeing her boyfriend and her mates four nights a week and spending the others on Facebook? Or the infirm 80-year-old with barely any education and a monosyllabic husband who's lived on the same estate in suburban Stoke for the past 50 years? I know who I'd rather be.

Eyecatching

Following on from David Aaronovitch's point yesterday that the southern Punjab nurtured many of the young men who became murderers in Mumbai, and that this fact is almost certainly related to the high levels of misogyny in the region, I should like to offer two crumbs of optimism from closer to home. Both were spotted on my way to work through Whitechapel in East London, an area that has a large, in parts almost exclusively, Muslim population. The first is that Muslim women - poor, working-class, recently arrived Muslim women - are learning to drive.

Five years ago I barely saw any Muslim women at the wheel of a car. Now I see lots. And, contrary to the received right-wing angry-white-male website wisdom, none of them wears a burka that impedes her field of vision. This is excellent news, for the obvious emancipatory reasons, and because women drivers tend to be less dangerous for other road users than men, of whatever colour.

The other development is less tangible, but even more welcome. When I draw near a Muslim woman, it has long saddened me to note, they are at best overly deferential, at worst scared. For instance, if I arrive at a gate as the same time a Bengali woman approaches from the other direction, she will go out of her way to let me through first. It isn't politeness: her body language, verging on occasions on a cower, suggests something more primitive.

And yet in the past year or so this cowering has decreased. Spines are slowly, but surely, straightening. And yesterday morning, I achieved a real breakthrough. Not only did I establish rare eye contact with a young mother in a headscarf, but after a great deal of supplication, I persuaded her to take precedence. For which I was rewarded with a smile.

Millimetric, but a smile nonetheless.

Road age

My wife witnessed an ultra-low-speed rear-end shunt on Monday. She waited for the usual ugly scene to be acted out, the shouting, the expletives, the claims and counter-claims. Instead, with exaggerated caution, both drivers' doors opened and two little old ladies emerged.

They tutted over the (extremely minor) damage and then, recognising a mutual need, gave each other a big hug. What's the opposite of road rage? Road chill, perhaps. A lesson to us all. Or maybe they were lonely.

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