I have a sense that some families are beginning to resemble the landscape of modern cities.

A lot of people living in close proximity to one another, travelling up and down the house, going about their daily business, occasionally saying hello.   Sitting rooms that look more like cyber cafés than places to ‘sit’.  Bathrooms with queues and questionable levels of cleanliness from the person who came before me.  Dining room tables that may as well be called Starbucks – places to grab a quick coffee and a snack before rushing off towards whatever comes next.  Not to mention the ‘tourists’ – the people constantly travelling through – so you hardly know who’s visiting and who was actually born here. 

Is it just me and my family, or has something changed?  Am I the only one to wonder whether to touch the stair banister rail, in case of catching something?  Am I the only taxi driver who seems to be caught in a dead-end 24/7 job, taking these increasingly busy ‘city’ residents to wherever they decide they want to go next?

Ask any city dweller, though, and they all say the same thing: ‘I could not imagine living anywhere else.  I love the drama, the buzz, the fact that the city never sleeps’.

I am not sleeping much right now either.

But, then again, I would probably say the same thing.  I wouldn’t want it any other way.  And, in this respect, I know that I am not alone.

40 years ago, a BBC survey was conducted to look at family life in Britain.  People were asked whether they felt positive about the future of their family and who they were happiest with.

Like me, you might reasonably have assumed that, 40 years on, we have become less positive about family life and less dependent on our family as a source of happiness.  But the evidence (from 2007) seems to suggest otherwise.  Despite the rise in divorce, changes in the role of technology and the fact that both parents often have to work, 93% of us seem to believe that our experience of family life is happy and positive.  75% of us feel positive about the future of our family – even if we are generally more ‘concerned’ about the state of family life in society.  Remarkably, 73% of us even suggest that we are happiest around our close family members – as opposed to friends, colleagues or being on their own.

And as for the taxi drivers, otherwise known as parents, there is also good news. Children are today far more likely to acknowledge the fact that their parents did their best for them as they were growing up.

So despite the mess, the noise and the tourists, it seems we can’t quite give up the idea of modern family life.

Last night, two men were arrested outside our front door in a normally quiet part of our city.  It wasn’t pretty and who knows what had led up to this point.

The last words I heard, as the younger man was bundled into the car stayed with me all evening: ‘Don’t hurt my Dad! Please, don’t hurt my Dad!’

It made me reflect.

Families, like cities, sometimes break down.  The infrastructure stops working and sitting beside those glittering shop windows, with only a box for shelter, you will always find people with untold stories of unimaginable pain, injustice and a lack of love.

Families have untold stories too.  But then, in the end, what is a city except a collection of families?

And yet, it seems, despite its faults and despite the pressures of modern family and city life, we aren’t anywhere close to giving up on either dream now or anytime in the future.