IT’S a weird dislocation. We Brits know — or at least we’re relentlessly told — that bankrupt, stubborn, austerity-crazed continental Europe is in a terrible mess. And yet, when we talk about what it’s like to live there, scorn soon turns to envy. They do it so much better, don’t they?

Here comes a new survey from the charity WRVS — Ageing Across Europe — making exactly that point on behalf of anyone ploughing deeper into old age. Line up the UK against Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, and the differences seem stark. After 65, we’re lonelier, more prey to life-limiting diseases — and poorer.

About one-fifth (21.4 per cent) of British pensioners exist in or near the poverty zone (compared with just six per cent in the Netherlands). We feel more cut off from younger generations, less understanding, more stripped of respect. We do not find much joy in the last decades of life. While, over there ...

The WRVS inquiry is a serious piece of work, and echoes similar studies. For instance, some recent Calouste Gulbenkian research for Grandparents Plus concludes: “The UK performs poorly on experience of ageing.” The old and infirm left thirsty in hospital, neglected for hours on end in uncaring care homes, doomed to live out the last years of life in sad isolation? Sunlit uplands begin at Calais. And it’s true, up to a point.

What isn’t true is taking a general perception and transposing it wholesale. There are millions of individual pensioners in Britain who are reasonably placed. There are millions of Germans, especially in the old east, who complain miserably about what happened when an all-embracing state collapsed.

Remember, too, that Europe is a heady mix of races and cultures. If you want to make Britain seem laggard, compare it with the richer countries of the north — and Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany are the comparisons to choose. Spend more to provide more.

But if, like Grandparents Plus, you’re looking at underlying attitudes as well, southern Europe, still remembering its peasant roots, is the place to start. “In Italy, Spain and Greece, some 40 per cent of grandparents provide regular childcare for their grandchildren, compared with 20 per cent of grandparents in Sweden, France and Denmark.”

And the clue to all that isn’t so much a big society as a series of small ones, the true face of family values. When I go to the tiny, remote Galician village where my son-in-law was born, the mix is simple: a few families stretching down through history and fending for themselves. What happens when, as now, Spanish unemployment in the big cities reaches a grisly level? Then the sons and daughters from Barcelona or Madrid can come home for a while, to exist and see out the storm.

It isn’t easy or necessarily pleasant, but it is a way of life. Across Europe, that way has helped to shape the fundamental attitudes of society, seeing the state not as a replacement for family care, but as an extension of it.

Take grandparents again. In Germany, parents are entitled to up to three years’ leave after a child’s birth. If a parent dies or becomes seriously ill, that entitlement passes to a grandparent. In Denmark, that same caring mix is almost seamless — which is crucial, because care works both ways.

Once people, old people, are part of the support team, they’re also there to be supported. Once you have a role in bringing up future generations, the understanding gap, like the loneliness gap, begins to close. — The Guardian, London