My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or four times a year, when the weather warms up, she stands on her doorstep, smashed, and yells at the world. I don’t blame her. Rose has been through the mill. She’s a slight woman and she’s suffered at the hands of predatory men all her life. Perhaps the occasional shouting irritates the neighbours, but it’s only the same monologue most of them paid through the nose to hear Mark Rylance deliver on stage in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem: ‘I, Rooster John Byron, hereby place a curse/ Upon the Kennet and Avon Council,/ May they wander the land for ever…’
During those few deceitful warm days in early March, Rose had one of her doorstep rants. She took a swipe at a security camera, too, then retreated back inside. A neighbour, new to the street, called the police, whereupon three police cars arrived in short order, eight officers leaped out and banged on Rose’s front door. My other friend, peering beadily through the gap in her curtains, said it was like an alien landing out there: strobing blue lights, officers bulked up in bullet-proof vests.
Rose opened her door, saw the scene, and became hysterical with fear. Oddly, the officers of the Met seemed terrified too, said my friend at the window, as if they were facing a bunch of Albanian gangsters, not a tiny middle–aged tippler. No one explained to poor Rose what was going on or made an effort to calm her down.
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