Suddenly everyone wants an iron bar under their bed

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘Where did you get an iron bar?’ she wanted to know, and I told her I’d salvaged it from a towel rail. I think it was that little act of ingenuity which impressed her the most. It’s terrible, really, the hopelessness of the urban middle classes. It’s wonder we still know how to feed.

She’d taken to sleeping with a screwdriver. What was she going to do with a screwdriver, I wondered. ‘What are you going to do with an iron bar?’ she retorted. Swing it, I said. Because there’s a democracy in cudgelling, isn’t there? Whereas stabbing, that’s an art.