Tales of the City: The season to be angry

Anger, my God we've all got so angry these days. The scenes from Moscow of plastered football fans torching cars in the street (presumably Toyotas) after losing to Japan was a startling reminder of how much culture and civilisation we've given the world. Watching the veins standing out in Roy Keane's neck as he argues furiously with referees, it's hard to tell if we're regressing back to sabre-toothed tiger days or advancing to a new future in which our strong human emotions, once tamped down by stiff upper lips, will be written all over our bodies. And there's now a form of street theatre in London, as you watch murderous theatrical rows break out.

In Acre Lane, Brixton, yesterday, I sat in a traffic jam and watched an epic barney between a seated young beggar and (presumably) his ex-girlfriend. She was shaking with rage. She haled him up and down, complaining about his selfishness, his stupidity, idleness, tactlessness, treachery, even the poor quality of his membrum virile. Her body language was dazzling, all balletic gesture and flailing arms. She danced right up to him, screeched in his face, then took three steps back as he tried to get up, jigged to his right, then his left, yelling all the time, then jumped up and down on the spot with fury, like Rumpelstiltskin. The young beggar had a bad leg, so he couldn't chase her to shut her up; he couldn't match her for rhetoric, so he comforted himself by flinging his lunchtime sandwiches at his fuming ex-beloved's head. At which she grabbed a single courgette off the display outside a vegetable shop and hurled it, with thrilling accuracy, at his groin.

In a side-street off the Old Kent Road, I sat five cars back in the queue of motorists who were waiting to turn left, while the driver in front – a big, comfortable-looking Rasta – wound down his window to chat to two passing friends. They were so glad to see him. They had such a lot of news to share.

Minutes ticked by. Seeing the two cars in front of me starting to quiver with frustration, I silently mouthed, "Please don't honk your horn. Please don't..." Then somebody did. All the chatterers' smiles disappeared. Rather than drive off, the big Rasta got out and went looking for the guy who'd honked him just because he was talking too much. He remonstrated with him, in picturesque fury, through the Volvo's closed window. Nobody went anywhere for 10 minutes. They all sat as still as rabbits in a stalag, waiting for the onslaught to be over.

David Letterman, the amusing talk-show host, said last year: "New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move." He was seriously under-estimating London at the height of its rainy, tearful, traffic-jammed, bad-tempered, Jubilee, World Cup summer.

Dark knight

The news that Mick Jagger may be knighted in the Birthday Honours has caused much head-shaking among old Stones fans. To think of Jumping Jack Flash, the Midnight Rambler, the Beggar's Banquet Supervisor, getting dubbed on the shoulder by Her Maj, and joining the polite ranks of Sir Cliff Richard – well, it just goes against nature. It's the final nail in the coffin of Sixties Youth (actually it's not quite the final one – that will be when Sir Keith Richards rises arthritically from a kneeling position and asks the Queen if she's got any Marlboro Reds) and it hurts a little. But I cannot join in with the bleating in the papers about how Mick shouldn't become a knight because he's spent his life enjoying himself, avoiding paying tax, fathering children, misbehaving with young women and – most crucially – doing no charitable work. I read an atrabilious piece by Philip Norman, author of the classic Stones biography, in which he bitches at the "selfish, sneering" Jagger for failing to go in for "good works". He never, Norman points out, helped a charity, gave a cent to an aid fund, endowed an arts centre or masterminded a charity concert. Therefore, we are to infer, he doesn't deserve a knighthood.

When did this become accepted wisdom, that famous men become knights once they stop doing what they're most famous for doing (whether it's making money, making laws or making Exile on Main Street) and start dishing out funds to Christian Aid? Didn't we used to think of knights as rather dashing individuals, courtly and insouciant descendants of the Camelot tradition, independent-minded swordsmen who represented various shades of English heroism? Was Sir Walter Raleigh knighted because he handed over chests of swag, stolen from Spanish pirate ships, to distressed Home Counties gentlefolk? Or was it because he left the Queen slightly breathless with admiration at his cheek?

If Mick accepts a knighthood, we might wonder what happened to his sense of rebellion. But if it happens, let it be seen as a reward for making everyone in Britain dance in a certain way (pout, hand on hip, waggle finger) for decades, rather than for being prevailed on to write a cheque to Help the Aged.

Stop all this magic mumbo-jumbo – except when Argentina play

By the time you read these words, it should be all over. By 9.20 this morning, England should have trounced the hapless Nigerians 4-0 and there will be dancing in the streets and necking in the car parks. If, however, we have been buried 14-0, if Michael Owen has been struck down with a mystery ailment in the penalty area with no Nigerian player near him, if David Seaman is turned to stone at the start of the second half, and Trevor Sinclair took to running around the stadium perimeter instead of up the left wing – you'll know what's happened. All the stuff about ju-ju was true after all.

Every news report brings fresh intelligence of sharp practice in the sorcery department. Sellers of voodoo stuff on the streets of Buenos Aires have been doing a roaring trade in flannel dolls wearing England strip; you stick a photo of Beckham or Nicky Butt on the front, and jab it mercilessly with a pin when the player seems about to execute some alarming manoeuvre. Even Argie TV presenters have bought them. Middle-class City types soberly told the papers that they were personally responsible for Argentina's beating Nigeria, because they speared an effigy of the goalkeeper at just the right moment.

Then a crackpot Indian mystic, named PC Sorcar the Younger, stepped in. He was incensed that India has never made it to the World Cup finals (except once in 1950, but they withdrew because Fifa would not let them play in bare feet) and threatened to conjure up the figures of football gods like Pele out of the blue, and have them dance before the eyes of the England side, before de-materialising. (Surely conjuring up a pissed-off Roy Keane would intimidate the team more effectively?) Now a team of witchdoctors has been drafted in to occupy key seats in Osaka Stadium, to spread bad ju-ju across the greensward and cast spells the way other football fans cast loo rolls....

This magic rubbish must cease. We are intelligent, rational, post-religious human beings who should not stoop to discussing nonsensical mumbo-jumbo about spells and the like. But if you were to check out the viral.lycos.co.uk website and find this image of Gabriel Batistuta, the hairy Argentine striker whose vicious tackles nearly crippled our boys last week, and if you were to shove a few daggers into this picture – well, I suppose I couldn't stop you....

A leap too far

On a recent school trip to Germany, I hear, one of the boys had an accident that left him in a coma with a fractured skull and a lot of metal pins sticking out of his leg. What happened? The scholars had wandered around the town until they found two adjacent buildings with flat roofs. The 16-year-olds shinned up drainpipes, dared each other to jump the 10ft gap that separated the buildings, and watched as their friend missed the mark and fell three storeys.

I'm told it's a new teen-male craze called "doing the roof", the successor to riding the top of Tube trains, and whacking your playground friends around the ears in emulation of the Tango TV commercial. But the roof jump is a TV-derived phenomenon, too – the boys are allegedly imitating one of the BBC's new continuity mini-films, which shows a man running up and down walls and sprinting over rooftops in order to get home to watch his favourite programme. The Beeb failed to screen a sign saying, "Kids – don't try this at home". All I can say is: God help the children when Spider-Man hits the movie houses...