Diary – 31 December 2005

The other day in Whiteley’s shopping centre in Queensway — somewhere I usually try to avoid — I suddenly found myself engulfed by a gang of over-exuberant and oddly menacing adolescents. ‘Hey, you!’ their leader, a well-fed girl of some 12 summers in expensive sportswear, addressed me. ‘I like your umbrella — where d’you get it?’ My mumbled response to the effect that the lurid lime golfing number happened to be a present from my bookmaker failed to ease the strange tension. ‘Give it to me,’ she commanded. ‘Show some respect.’ Her male minions took up the Blairish chant: ‘Respect, respect, respect!’ I edged my way towards the exit and instinctively, like Jeeves’s cab-addicted aunt, hailed a taxi. My jeering persecutors made an elaborate ritual of handing me into the back. Through the open window, the girl said, in a chillingly throwaway tone, ‘Hope you die soon.’

I am still brooding upon esprit de l’escalier.