Trust in strangers
How would you feel about finding that strangers had been living in your house while you were away? Sleeping in your bed? Using your things?
I was delighted.
My family has been house swapping for many years now - arranging a deal through the internet with another family we have never met to exchange homes. Effectively, we walk into each other's lives.
So for half-term we were in the Lake District - taking care of ducks, rabbits, a tank of African land snails and a farmhouse north of Bassenthwaite Lake. They came to London and took responsibility for our guinea pigs, stick insects, goldfish, home and possessions.
It is an exercise in mutual trust.
Trust is a precious commodity. And not just because it can save the cost of accommodation.
It is the currency of successful societies. In Britain, inter-personal trust has been in long recession leaving us with one of the weakest trust economies in Europe.
The historical decline in trust leaves our resilience exposed to the cancer of cynicism.
Just read this weekend's papers and there are endless stories which play to the prejudice that those with power are inevitably on the make. On the flimsiest of evidence it is assumed that most of our elected representatives are motivated by personal greed rather than the common good. Our fascination is with politicians not politics.
It all plays to a dreary and destructive national narrative that everything is getting worse, that our society is heading for hell in a handcart. We refuse to believe the evidence of falling crime rates or improving lives. We are losing our faith in other people.
The Lake District was a breath of fresh air for a journalist exhausted by such urban suspicions. Walkers met your gaze and smiled. Shoppers offered a cheery word about the weather. Publicans trusted you to settle up at the end of the evening without a piece of plastic security. And our invisible hosts trusted us to put the ducks to bed at sundown.
A survey three years ago found that people who lived in villages and hamlets were generally more trusting than those in [pdf link]. The choice was whether, generally speaking "most people can be trusted" or "you can't be too careful in dealing with people" - the traditional measure. While just 36% of people in urban England (outside London) picked the first option, in rural villages it was 51%.
But this is more than a simple rural/urban comparison. How does one explain the [pdf link] which shows that "Londoners display a significantly higher level of social trust than those in urban parts of the north and west"?
The samples sizes are not huge and it seems unlikely that within four years of relative social calm there would be huge changes in trust (why should trust have fallen ten points in the non-urban south and east?) but the scores for busy, diverse, metropolitan London do not suggest I live in 'cynical city'. In fact, for 2002, London scores higher than any other part of the country.
The researchers scratched their heads and concluded: "This difference is likely to reflect the distinctive socio-demographic and economic profile of Londoners compared with those in urban parts of the north and west. We know, for instance, that levels of social trust are highest among graduates, those in professional and managerial occupations, and the affluent; all groups which are more common in London than elsewhere."
More suggests trust in strangers is causally linked with "outward exposure" to strangers. So, those with strong family ties - it is argued - are less likely to trust strangers because they are less likely to interact with people they don't know.
"Factors that limit exposure, of which strong family ties is one among others, limit subjects' experience as well as motivation to deal with strangers and learn from the interaction; by contrast, we find evidence that factors that promote exposure increase trust."
This might explain why London scores so well. It is a city in which it is hard to avoid exposure to strangers.
Knocking the Cumbrian mud off my walking boots back in the capital, I am not convinced trusting communities are defined by wealth, education or professional status.
Trust, it seems to me, is viral. If someone shows their trust in you, you become more trusting - and so it spreads. But cynicism is a virus too, incubated and cultured by social isolation. How we weather the recession will depend, as much as anything, on the battle between the two. We need to get out more.
I'm 
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