How to get stabbed: you, too, can be knifed in a public place

Been stabbed yet? Give it time. The latest weapon of choice for our go-getting and imaginative young people, apparently, is the ‘cat skinner’, a thin and very sharp device properly used for removing the plastic jackets from electrical cables. But also for skinning cats, I assume. And — increasingly — stabbing, or more likely slashing, people. From the pictures I’ve seen, if you’ve bought a cat skinner with which to stab somebody, you’ve bought the wrong tool for the job. No use complaining later.

In the last year for which figures are available there were 64,000 knife crimes committed in Britain — the figures have been rising with great vigour over the last eight or nine years. Some 17 teenagers have been stabbed to death in London or its environs this year alone, and we are in high summer. Stabbing is muscling out shooting as the violent crime du jour, despite a Scotland Yard knife amnesty in 2006 and a possible four-year sentence just for being found with a knife (unless you can convince the court you were intending to use it to fillet a halibut, or slice a piece of foie gras in half prior to searing it).