It's easy to get misty-eyed about the passing of an Eden when men and women moved confidently through their world, secure in the knowledge that if a pipe sprang a leak or a shirt lost a button they had the tools and the knowhow to put things right. But read a little further down the list of lost and lamented skills and you pass through the comfy-sounding "making soup" and "growing plants" before you get to the decidedly venal "playing poker" and the surely minority "juggle". What is being mourned, then, is not some sloppy version of the past, but a real sense that once upon a time our bodies were a source of pride - not for how they looked but for what they could do.
This is in sharp contrast to the panic about body shape that has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of our public discourse. Last week not only saw the return of Jamie Oliver and his school-dinners campaign and the continuation of Gillian McKeith and her sub-pornographic obsession with fat people's poo, but the furore over the skinniness of models at the London fashion shows. With bodies reduced in the mass media to their most basic and passive functions - food in, food out - it's no wonder we find ourselves hankering for a time when it was possible to feel justifiably pleased about being double-jointed or able to jump higher than anyone else in netball.
Not being trusted to manage our own bodies might sound like a small price to pay for the benefits that come from having a knowledgeable medical establishment able to dispense targeted advice. Yet, intriguingly, in its latest initiative to prevent a flu pandemic this winter, the government is turning aside from its stockpiles of antivirals and putting its trust instead in the ability of ordinary people to police their bodies.
Last week, Professor Lindsey Davies, national director of pandemic influenza preparedness, announced that the public would be encouraged this autumn to cover their noses and mouths with a handkerchief whenever they cough or sneeze. In this way, germs that would otherwise hurtle through the air for up to a metre will instead be deftly caught in a square of cambric or tissue paper. "If we make it socially unacceptable to cough and sneeze in ways that spread disease, we have a chance of doing something to prevent the pandemic," said Davies, sounding less like a professor of epidemiology than the matron of a boys' prep school circa 1965.
This handing back of agency and power to the individual body seems extraordinarily significant. Poignant, too, since at the top of the list of lost skills so mourned by the survey's respondents came "good manners". At first glance, these manners might appear to be nothing more than remembering the lost art of saying please and thank you. However, filtered through the latest advice from the government, it looks as though taking responsibility for one's body - its leaks, noises, odours and emanations - might not just make for a more pleasant environment, it might save lives too.
· Kathryn Hughes's most recent book is The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton