Global warning | 16 June 2007

I was sitting in a train recently, wondering why everyone’s mobile telephone conversations, except my own, were so utterly banal, when a young black man sitting two rows behind me answered the irritating wail of his instrument of the devil. He began to speak, and I wished that I had learnt shorthand.

‘Hancock’s definitely put in a plea,’ he said. ‘Moran’s in the early stages. I’ve got to go back next week, but for the moment I’m on bail.’

As is often the case, his telephone rang non-stop.

‘There was a lot of negotiation going on while we worked out a plea bargain,’ he said.

He was quite well-spoken, more Nigerian swindler than Jamaican mugger, I should imagine; and since he seemed so little ashamed of whatever it was of which he stood accused, and had clearly done, I was half-inclined to ask him what it was. Since he had so pleasant a manner, I hoped it was something of which I could approve, or at least not disapprove.

It is a sign of the times, I suppose, that there are crimes of which I approve.

The train on which I was travelling was from a formerly prosperous and even rather grand industrial town whose centre had been comprehensively ruined, architecturally, by the construction of a strategically placed ring road, as so many English town centres have been so ruined; and ruined economically by failure to adapt to changing world circumstances. The smell of fast food hung over it like a pall: vinegar and stale fat that had launched a thousand chips.

A lot of men appeared to have nothing to do in the town, except prop up the walls of 1960s public buildings, including a College of Design so hideous that it reminded me of the psychological technique of paradoxical intention.