ETCETERA / Home Thoughts

I KNOW that this has been said before, and there's nothing new about it, but I'm going to say it again anyway. Living in London is really quite horrible. It's not just the grottiness of the Tube, and the drifts of litter that are blown across the streets. It's not only the dirty air and the dirty parks. It's also the random acts of violence that lurk around the corner, and the endless traffic jams, and the sense that your daily life is out of control.

Take last Sunday. It was Mother's Day, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I felt full of the joys of spring. We decided to drive to Regent's Park to look at the blossom and the ducks and the squirrels. Soon we were in the middle of an enormous traffic jam, which of course we had contributed to (but try riding five miles on an ecologically sound bicycle when you're almost nine months pregnant, accompanied by a four-year-old).

When we finally reached the park, there was nowhere to park. (Quite why there should be so many double yellow lines on the broad avenues surrounding Regent's Park remains a mystery to me.) Eventually we found somewhere to leave the car and went to meet a friend at the cafe - where, incidentally, an ice-cream cone with a mingy dollop of emulsified vegetable oil on top costs pounds 1.20. In the cafe was a sad, mad lady, who was asked to leave after approaching a child in a vaguely threatening way. She left, shouting that she was criminally insane, and was going to kill herself outside. So much for care in the community.

Then we set off for the playground, only to find ourselves approaching a large number of mounted policemen, who were charging into a crowd of angry Muslim demonstrators. It was unclear why they were all converging on the playground, but anyway we gave up and went home, inching through yet another traffic jam.

Once we had finally got home, there was a plaintive phone call from a friend who was supposed to be coming to tea. He was stranded in Raynes Park, one of the quietest and most sedate south London suburbs, because someone had smashed his car windows with a brick on an otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon.

Needing money to buy chocolate, I decided to go to the local cashpoint; it was closed after a bank raid the previous day, when a robber escaped after threatening to knife a three-year-old in her pushchair. This happened round the corner, in an equally quiet, leafy, north London suburb.

I know it's not so dismal all the time (in fact one of my neighbours attributed these various disasters to a bad conjunction of planets on 13 March). But it is nevertheless an oppressive way to live. Perhaps life is like this elsewhere in the country, but I do hope not. Otherwise there will be nowhere to escape to.-