“I was 21 in the Hendrix era, but I was already past the hippie stage,” he recalls “By then the look was very grown-up. I had a hand-made, pale pink, single-breasted suit with red hand-made python boots I got called some terrible names. Old men in the street would come up to me and shout, `LOOK AT YOU! YOU LOOK LIKE A WOMAN! YOU SHOULD BE PUT IN A DRESS! I FOUGHT THE WAR FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU…’ I was fairly dandyish at that point.”

A master of understatement, Paul Smith smiles reminiscently. The next time that someone complains to you about loneliness, or insecurity, or stress, or the breakdown of society, ask just one question: where do you shop?Faith & Reason is edited by Paul Vallely. Thirty years ago, he couldn’t walk down the streets of his native Nottingham without being mobbed in a different way.

Poor Paul Smith. He cannot walk down the street in Tokyo these days without being mobbed by fashion fans They treat him, he shyly admits, like a rock star. But when you have no fewer than 160 retail outlets across Japan (that’s at least 150 more than you’ve got in Britain), it’s hardly surprising to find the besuited groovers of modern Nippon wanting a piece of you. His successors struggle on, our friends and teachers, as vital and as unnoticed as oxygen. We can destroy them within a generation, if so we wish: the choice is ours Let us at least be clear what we are choosing. We have been called to communion, because our true vocation is friendship, with God and with our fellow-creatures.

A friendship that needs to be learnt.Mr Hastewell, God rest his soul, is long dead. Each time that we succumb to the tawdry illusion, we betray our better selves For our deepest desires are not material, but social. That is why our oldest political traditions are based on the common good. We want, desperately, to be part of such a community, and we are frightened by symptoms of its decline.

But to reverse that decline requires a great deal from all of us: attentiveness, imagination, patience, courtesy, generosity and trust.Big business tells us that what we want most of all are bargains We act everyday as if we believe it. When we say we want self- fulfilment or freedom, what do we mean? An unlimited choice of soap-powders? Why did the murder of Jamie Bulger strike many not as anomalous, but as symbolic? What is it that we fear?Biggar argues that all communities are based upon friendship, and that to be part of a community is to be bound to others in a relationship of trust and care. The local children as they shop are being incorporated into, rather than alienated from, their community. They are learning the virtues that ground community.What is it that we value today? Nigel Biggar’s excellent new book, Good Life (SPCK, pounds 12.99) reflects on the question. As neighbours we may not be intimate, but we are soon predisposed to mutual care. The undergraduates seemed unanimous that communities no longer exist I ventured to object, citing my own experience.

I was met with incomprehension, and something surprisingly like hostility: what right had I to such privilege?Communities do survive, and not only in rural Cumbria. I moved to suburban Leeds, and have settled quickly into the neighbourhood where in the local shopkeepers – the grocer’s and the baker’s and the newsagent’s – we know and are known That is where we learn each others’ names. A few years on, I was among a group of theological students discussing the notion of community. Before buying something, I needed to pause and remember that the curt self-absorption of supermarket manners would here be interpreted as rudeness. As I trotted to the sweetshop, I did not know that I was learning what would one day be called “PSE” (personal and social education) or “citizenship”. But when old Mr Hastewell served me, passing the time of day as courteously as if I had been the bank manager, I was being schooled in civic friendship.