What we need is a bloody good war. We could all spend our nights in air-raid shelters, rough army blankets over our shoulders, singing songs of defiance and fretting alongside neighbours or even perfect strangers.

Perhaps that would bring us all back together in comradeship, uniting against the common enemy.

We've lost our way somewhere and until we face a real threat we continue our petty tribal squabbles. We all need to join a gang so we can find an enemy to square up to.

Even if there is no logical reason for our choice of which side to be on, we pledge our allegiance and let battle commence.

Black against white (like a chess game), school against school, town against town, we'll find some reason for the 'us and them' split.

Take football. Boys - aged 11 to 50 - will adopt a football team for no other reason than they like the colour of the shirts, and suddenly they claim ownership.

"WE'RE playing Nottingham Forest tomorrow. WE spent a fortune on OUR new striker," says an Aston Villa fan from York who has never been within a million miles of Birmingham. His loyalty is fierce and unswerving. If a Nottingham Forest fan - who has probably never set foot in Nottingham - is in the local pub when the match is on, he is suddenly the enemy, even if he lives next door to the Aston Villa fan-atic. And then it gets bloody.

It's the herd instinct and we need to belong. Years ago I got the herd instinct and joined a camera club. We had vicious photo battles with other clubs but in the winter months when the competition season was over, there was infighting, the stags with the biggest Nikon antlers fighting it out for leadership. I was eventually banished from the herd for disloyalty.

We used to have the occasional evenings where we hired nude photographic models (purely in the interest of art, you understand) and we would all stand or squat around clicking our shutters while she grew goose pimples sitting starkers and unabashed on a stool.

The keenest cameraman of them all, who we thought must have shot at least 200 frames, admitted he had no film in his camera. But then came the day when two teenagers wanted to join the club. What would we do about the nude evenings?

Someone had a bright idea: Let's censor our evenings like at the cinema. We'll have U-rated and X-certificate nights.

I accidentally mentioned this over a drink with a friend (who happened to be a News Of The World reporter) and that Sunday it was splashed all over the paper.

I did not know that an extraordinary meeting of the camera club committee was called that Sunday and it was decided to excommunicate me because, as a newspaper man, I had to be the source of the leak. "What's the problem?" I asked when confronted. "It's good publicity for the club."

The problem, they said, was that none of them had told their wives nude models visited the club; one wife had threatened divorce.

Her husband was the one who never bothered with film in his camera, even though he insisted on close-ups. Another angry member intent on banishing me was the man who yawned and feigned boredom, not bothering to take a single photograph while the model was sitting naked on her stool. But when she disappeared behind a flimsy curtain to get dressed and he glimpsed her in her undies, he started to get really excited.

Nowt so queer as folk.

The upshot was that when I turned up for the very next meeting after the Sunday newspaper expose, I was first sent to Coventry, then told I was unwelcome as a member.

I hung my head in shame and shuffled out. The pain of expulsion was only eased by the two fat cheques I got from the News Of The World for the two stories (because the paper followed up the next week with the story of a member being banned for leaking the lurid secrets of the 'raunchy' camera club). And I was able to splash out on a whole new outfit of expensive camera equipment.

Updated: 10:20 Tuesday, September 27, 2005