Time to shop till you’re copped...

THE FRIDAY THING: IS it rioting, is it criminal behaviour like robbery, burglary and vandalism? Or is it the new shopping?

Riots are usually (not that there is necessarily anything usual about riots) associated with politics, wrapped up in the huge comfy blanket of some perceived social grievance or, as viewed by our sociologist friends, the only way of drawing attention to the fact that those taking part are not upper-class, middle-class or even working class (that least of all, I have to say) but the underclass identified by an American professor well over a decade or so.

So what happens now? Chubby Dave has promised that those involved in the mayhem in London, Manchester, Birmingham and West Bromwich (of all places: is there anything worth stealing there?) will feel the full weight of the law. I bet they are trembling in their brand, spanking new, still price-tagged Nike Air Max and Asics Nimbus trainers (a snip at £115 a pair) as they sprawl surrounded by bottles of booze while watching their newly acquired 10ft wide TV.

One of the groans from a bemused and some cases battered public is that there were not enough police on the streets. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The cuts in police numbers, accompanied by the abandonment of community safety teams right across the country, means that there will probably never be enough police on the streets when mayhem breaks out. We have sold off the right to protection to balance the books.

I wonder what the European Court of Human Rights will make of all this. Will they support what is described euphemistically as “more robust police action” (water cannon and rubber bullets, not, sadly, the SAS and a tank regiment)? Or will they do what they usually do and come down on the side of those who, one way and another, cheat us, steal from us and shake our way of life to its core?

Maybe they will decide that everyone has the right to a 12ft wide home cinema; 45 new outfits in different colours and sizes and their own 50 gallon haul of cheap vodka and expensive whisky.

Can you not just see the human-rights lot saying that if the Government (that’s you and me when it comes to financing these fancy projects) had given these feral ogres a Blackberry each, a new bike, holidays abroad and promise of a car in 10 or 12 years’ time when they are eligible to drive (not that eligibility or lack of it would stop them driving and probably wrecking someone else’s car in the meantime) they would have felt more engaged with society?

In other words it will all be our fault that these rogues and ruffians have wrecked our towns and cities and shaken our everyday lives to the core. Maybe if we had left our doors and windows open and the keys in our cars, they would not have needed to trash shops, burn vehicles and attack the police with bottles, bricks and iron bars.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the forces of law and order to get to grips with this problem. Will they, as they surely should, call on the probably thousands of parents who were “surprised” to find the back bedroom full to the ceiling with clothes, shoes, home cinema kits, computer games, mobile phones and the product of a distillery or two? Perhaps they thought it was from Santa who had got his dates wrong.


AS a diversion from anarchy on the streets and the plunging value of the pound, let us look at (in a figurative sense) bottom-patting, which has suddenly found itself in the news.
Some people — men and women — are touchers, just as some are pretend kissers — you know, where you pucker up, touch cheeks (facial, I hasten to add) with your pretend-kissing victim and make a kissing sound. She, or indeed he in these enlightened times, reciprocates and conversation can commence.

But could you start a conversation by bottom-patting? And if you happened to pat an unwilling bottom, how would you eat your supper with broken teeth, the result of a deft punch from the, as it were, patee?

The actor Jeremy Irons reckons that “any woman worth her salt” could cope with having their bottom patted, and seems to go around patting bottoms at will. I am told that there are women who go around pinching men’s bottoms as part of office camaraderie, but it has never happened to me. I don’t know whether to be relieved or sorry about this omission on life’s path of crazy paving.

All I can say is that I would defy even Jeremy Irons to have bottom-patted some of the women who have worked here over the years. Stroking a wild tiger’s head would have produced a similar outcome.

My only bottom-patting experience was in childhood when a rather boisterous aunt used to tap and pinch the bottoms of everyone in the room at family parties. Maybe she had lost something. Whatever, it was excruciatingly embarrassing to a teenage boy, for I was a teenager once.


FINAL WORD: Headline of the week in the Chronicle this week, and already a contender for headline of the year, was the excruciating ”Copper-wire crooks pylon the misery”. Fabulous.