The word “community” is widely misused. Nowadays it is taken to mean “any group of people who have a common interest”, from a professional interest in health and safety to a sexual preference to a love of model railways. Local geographical areas are regularly assumed to be communities by definition, even though modern urban social systems tend to work very differently. A friend once described city life as overlapping anarchist villages – you choose your community, and they rarely live next door. I’ve done village life too, and one powerful community value appeared to be a dislike of city folk. So that worked well for me.

But, and I hope you’ll forgive an unusually personal post, the strongest community I know is meeting this weekend. When I was at university in St Andrews a friend there was doing a year abroad from Trinity, a small New England liberal arts college (actually a pretty conservative university, but there we go).

She told me about her support network at home: Cleo Literary Society. It’s not exactly what the name suggests. Until recent memory it was the AX chapter of the national American fraternity network called DKE (pronounced Deke – both Presidents Bush were Deke brothers, incidentally). In the late 1960s it went all anti-Vietnam and very counterculture, and the men decided women should be allowed to join as equal members, including sending a female rep to a national gathering. That’s the kind of thing that tends to mean you have to leave national fraternity networks.

So I went over and joined, a decision which has changed my life and one which rubs up hard against my desire to live a low carbon lifestyle. I was studying anthropology at the time, and when I joined we’d just looked at initiation ceremonies. It’s the only formal ceremony I’ve ever been an active part of (on both sides), and despite a good working knowledge of the effect of liminal periods, it had the bonding effects the ethnographers had described, and I still count many many Cleo siblings as amongst my dearest friends (thank goodness for the internet). It also wasn’t an easy process to go through. As a neophyte you spend more than 72 hours in the hands of the active members, going through a mentally and physically demanding experience, albeit one which doesn’t include any forced intoxication or any hint of the humiliation beloved of many actual fraternities and sororities. I could tell you more, but I would have to kill you, of course.

I spent a day back at the house in September meeting the current crop of kids, and was made to feel instantly more than welcome. And I wasn’t the only “alum” there, or even the oldest – there were four of us, just stopping in for meeting and to say hello. At one initiation I was at back in the 1990s, the oldest member present graduated in 1951, and he told epic tales involving motorbikes and bb guns. The other houses don’t have this effect, typically – people come back a year or two after they graduate, then it all fades away.

Cleo’s a support network, it’s a social structure, it’s a physical space for creative use, and it’s the truest community I know, albeit one with pretty fluid and loose values. The house sifts each year’s intake of new students ruthlessly for the creative, for the idiosyncratic, and ironically for the non-joiners. There are an awful lot of negatives around traditional community – the Royston Vasey effect – but we’ve also lost a lot with the transition to modernity. I’m not advocating initiations for all, of course, and I know others find a similar unity in a platoon or a band or a place of worship, or even in their village, but if it hadn’t been for Cleo I’d never have had it, nor would I have really known what I was missing.

From everyone who wants to be at initiation this weekend and can’t be, to all those that are: we love you.