As I’ve said before, for reasons too naff to go into, I’m in a bad place right now. This doesn’t do much for anyone and so my fuse, which is short at the best of times, is now even shorter.

In the normal course of events I can manage to rein my temper in. But I do have one very big, rather serious flash point. That consists of drivers on the road who think that they can push me around, make me drive as dangerously as they do and generally just splash testosterone about all over the place (even the women). I can’t take it, I won’t have it and in the last two months I’ve had stand up rows with men big enough to crush my head with their fingers because of it.

The worst incident was when I was being followed by a white van man who wanted me to run a red light. I didn’t want to get penalty points on my license and so I stopped. I didn’t make him have to pull up sharply as we were both going slowly at the time. But then suddenly I see in my mirror that he’s yelling at me. I am apparently every fucking c**t in the world and I deserve to die for what I’ve done to him. I rolled down my window and I just let loose. That red mist came down and as soon as he said he was going to ‘come over there and fucking kill you’ I was straight back with ‘well just get on and do it then you bollock!’

Luckily at that point the lights changed and I set off. He pursued me, still yelling and threatening which just made me slow down to almost a standstill just to piss him off. Eventually I stopped and yet more insults were traded until more traffic built up behind him and he drove off. But if he’d got out of his van I would have got out of my car and I would have hit him. I’m not proud of this and I don’t think it’s right. But the buzz I got out of actually having someone to take out my fury on was intoxicating. He was a stupid, testosterone fuelled, sexist man who was getting off on ranting at a woman who refused to do what he wanted her to. But he wasn’t and isn’t the cause of my current precariousness and anxiety.

Later, thinking about that incident, I did have a tiny moment when I was a little scared. Not because I was afraid of seeing him or his van again but because when he was threatening me I just didn’t care. Taking him on was the main thing and my own personal safety came decidedly second to that. When your life goes wrong or out of control for any reason you are prey to feelings of having ‘nothing left to lose’. That was how I felt then and how I do feel quite often now that I just work and go to bed and try not to think about tomorrow in this land of cuts, redundancy and recession.

Don’t get me wrong, I know I live in a soft western country and I will probably not starve to death on the street. But like a lot of people at the moment I am worried for the future and even wonder at times if I can actually see a future at all. So when the red mist descends and summer madness takes a hold my urge is not to care especially about myself. But take heed any nascent road ragers out there, it’s not big, or bold or clever and it does tell the world that you’re in a bad place. Just like your mum and dad said all those many years ago when you were a kid ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say.’

Recently the sale of some home-made cakes as part of a collection for a charity was stopped by Iceland’s zealous enforcers of petty rules and regulations (of which there are many), on health & safety grounds.

This was followed by a minor outcry over the boneheaded EU rules that have to be followed even though Iceland isn’t a member. In reality, the rules that stopped charity cakes being sold were courtesy of homegrown Icelandic officialdom and nothing to do with Brussels, but it was still a gift for the conservatives at both ends of Iceland’s politics.

Iceland has for years been out of step with its North Atlantic neighbours. Unlike the rest of the Nordic countries with their strong Social Democratic traditions, Iceland’s politics have long leaned to the right.

The Social Democrat party makes up part of the latest coalition to run the country, but the true-blue Independence Party have for years been the real force in government and there’s no real doubt that they’ll be back in some from or other after the next elections. They’ve used their first spell in opposition for decades to do everything in their power to block the struggling centre-left administration while it tries to clear up at least some of the mess left behind by the last government, who were..? Oh, yes, the SDs and the grey suits of the Independence Party.

As well as being adrift from its Nordic neighbours, Iceland is also adrift from Europe. While its politics seem to owe everything to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, culturally Iceland is almost an outpost of the US that dates back to wartime occupation and Marshall Aid.

So what is it with Europe? Apart from oil rich-Norway, which can easily stand on its own feet, and Switzerland, the land of the cuckoo clock and discreet banking, practically every country in this part of the world is already inside the EU or on the way in – apart from Iceland. Although the EU accession process is underway, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that Iceland will join.

There’s a strong lobby, spearheaded by the Social Democrats, that wants to be part of that flawed, corrupt, incompetent, bumbling economic club. There’s also a noisier lobby, consisting bizarrely of the far right and the far left as uncomfortable bedfellows in their crusade to keep Iceland out of Europe.

Iceland’s pro-EU lobby isn’t making a great deal of noise, while the anti-Europe side is making too much. There’s no informed debate taking place, just plenty of hollow rhetoric and misinformation flying around in an argument that is being played out largely on emotional lines.

Some of the arguments being put forward hardly ring true. As EU members, Icelanders wouldn’t see a fleet of Spanish trawlers scooping up cod the day after accession, as anyone with even a passing understanding of Europe’s lunatic fisheries politics can figure out. But the Treaty of Rome’s principles would allow in canny investors from mainland Europe with chequebooks at the ready.

As for the idea that joining Europe would be a disaster for Iceland’s already hugely subsidised agriculture, Icelandic agriculture, primarily sheep farming, is already a disaster area with farmers hamstrung at every turn and unable to break out of the Soviet-style system of monopolies that governs every aspect of their businesses.

In truth, it’s not Iceland’s agriculture that the debate revolves around, and the rights of sheep farmers to battle doggedly against the odds as they are kept close to the poverty line by the middlemen who skim off the cream of everything. It’s about culture and the perceptions of independence. There’s a terror that the Icelandic farmer will disappear under the EU yoke, but the reality is that the farming community is already set to vanish inside a generation or two. There’s only a precarious living to be from ‘woolbugs.’ But Iceland’s urbanites hold dear the thought that there are still sturdy farmers in wool sweaters and shapeless hats out there keeping alive the traditions that they or their parents abandoned for the convenience of city life.

There’s every likelihood that Iceland’s farmers would at worst be just as poorly off under Europe as they are under the Icelandic nanny state with its addiction to complex legislation, pettifogging regulations, endless exemptions and derogations, as well as the establishment being firmly wedded to groups with valuable interests to defend.

The food security argument is also pretty flawed. Icelanders don’t live on mutton and haddock any more – they live on pizza and coffee. The idea that this little island can live in isolation as it did a century ago is absurd. As part of the EU or not, Iceland is already firmly shackled to Europe.

After a slew of referenda on the ludicrous IceSave debacle that still rumbles on, the Europe decision is undoubtedly one that deserves to go to the electorate as a whole ahead of many of the other issues that many people would like to see voted on.

If it happens, be prepared for more of the same. The hysterical shrieking over the evils of Europe will become shriller and the swathes of misinformation will undoubtedly become even more lurid.

Or maybe there’s something here that Icelanders have twigged that hasn’t dawned on the rest of us Europeans? It’s doubtful, somehow. But what’s certain is that for once, the buffeted and ill-served Icelandic electorate deserves to see a genuinely reasoned and informed debate, just for a change. But the entrenched vested interests are doing their best to make sure that’s what they don’t get.

British Prime Minister David Cameron recently invited Tracey Emin, a
purveyor of work which is shit even by the standards of contemporary art, to
produce something – they probably call it “an installation” – for Number 10,
Downing Street.

Emin, who won the Turner Prize for exhibiting her own used-condom-strewn bed
some years ago, is a fan of Cameron. Yes, can you believe it, an artist
supporting the fellow who abolished the Arts Council. She has been quoted as
saying that his government is “the best government at the moment we’ve ever
had.” Which shows that she’s as much of a political analyst as she is an
artist.

Now, I don’t know why they’d need any new “art” in Number 10. Surely the
place is chock full of Nineteenth Century paintings of horses. And at a time
when the government is cutting back every ministry’s budget by at least 25
percent?

So what did Emin do for Cameron? A neon sign emblazoned with the words:
“More Passion.”

Yes, indeed. The artist whose works evoke only negative passions (in me, for
one) urges the starchy Old Etonian and his coterie of distant, heartless
nobs to show more passion. No doubt she intends for them to throw caution to
the wind when wielding the red pencil over university budgets and healthcare
costs for old people. Show some passion; cut another million quid.

Here’s the true irony of Emin’s neon nonsense: politicians always claim to
be operating on the basis of passion and so do contemporary artists. Yet
both are clearly more interested in cash and have a corrupt ability to
manipulate others into swallowing their feigned feelings.

I’ve always thought of art as going directly to your heart or your stomach.
Which is why “contemporary art” leaves me so cold. Art which requires
explanation before impact isn’t art. It may be “design,” but most likely
it’s faddish and aimed to shock. Take passionate Tracey Emin’s famous tent
installation onto which she attached the names of all the people she’d slept
with. Makes you think, eh? Well, no, actually it doesn’t. Unless it makes
you think that it’s a waste of time and that you’re lucky your name isn’t
there.

As with contemporary art, I hold similar opinions – and there’s a similar
irony – about so-called literary fiction, as opposed to crime fiction.

I’ve long since ceased to care when people say to me, “You’re a fine writer,
so why don’t you write a real novel instead of crime novels.” These are
well-meaning people who don’t know what it takes to write a novel of any
kind.

But here’s the comparison with Emin’s codswallop: literary fiction aims to
tackle big themes, to show passion; but it ends up being pedestrian and
soulless. Crime fiction, however, takes readers to places where people are
in extreme situations. Murder and violence, desperate neighborhoods, the
lives of people who don’t live in Hampstead. Literary fiction always seems,
by dint of its distant Number 10-ish intellectual perspective, to be outside
looking in. Crime fiction is right there. It’s the difference between
reading a list of Emin’s former lovers and actually being in bed performing
the act of …passion.

I have reached the Duke of Wellington’s ‘publish and be damned’ phase of writing. My book is off my hands and at the printers. But danger lurks, in the form of earnest interviewers. ‘What did I think,’ one asked me the other day, ‘about the fact that food is replacing sex as the recreational activity of choice in crime fiction.’

This is a theory that has been bandied about by recently by people who read crime rather than write it.I have not given it much thought as I find wrestling a plot into a semblance of coherence enough. The last thing I need is my heroine slacking off and eating strawberries in bed with handsome men. I am not paid to write Joanna Trollope novels, after all. I have tension to build, innocents to kill, killers to catch. Food in my experience, is like sex. It needs a bit the languid leeway of time, wine and the possibility of seconds to be a pleasure.

That said, it is obvious that crime fiction and the never-to-be-dismissed pleasure of the quickie have a long and entwined history. You only have to look at the covers of early crime classics – the gumshoe with a cocked gun, the bottle-blonde with the heaving bosom in the background – to know that. Crime fiction depends on big-hearted good-time girls. From Damon Runyon’s sassy broads to the high-heeled, wasp-waisted film noir blondes, to the easy lays who smoke their way through the Elmore Leonards. Much of the sex, sadly, has been of the pounce-and-thrust variety. The act itself,  a knee-trembler with a new girl every fifty pages or so, never takes long. The etiquette of foreplay and after-cuddle must never get in the way of our hero from putting his fedora hat back on his head and hunting down the bad guys.

All very manly and easy for the male ego to manage, but I can’t imagine that it did much for the women. Does that explain the sudden interest in  food? Did the blondes get sick of amateur sex with amateur sleuths and decide to seek more reliable pleasures elsewhere? Food certainly is important in crime fiction and some of it is getting better. This is partly due to the fact that we read so much crime fiction in translation now. Take the Italians, for instance. Who would not get distracted by prosciutto and genuine Parmesan, or lovingly made pasta marinara? Although it might be best never to think about how many corpses the Italian mafia feeds to the pigs, if they haven’t tossed into the sea around Sicily. That said, the Cosa Nostra seems about as intractable a problem as our Government Tender Nostra, so those crime writers have my sympathies. They do need something to fill up the pages of a hopeless case, and the food is good. I’d chose good Italian food over fast food any day, but just as we inherited the American equivalent of the knee-trembler with the genre, so we inherited fast food.

I am not a takeaway girl. Proved, I think, when I found a Freudian typo that slipped, as they do, into my new book. One of my favourite characters, Rita Mkhize, is hungry, so she stops off in town only to return to the cop car with bad of takeaways. My eagle-eyed editor restored the takeaways to their greasy bag.

My relationship with fast food has been perfunctory to say the least. I had a MacDonald’s burger in 1989, and I sampled some KFC in 1992. That was enough. Fast food – like fast cars, fast women and fast sex – is one of the constraints of crime fiction that is only partly to do with a failure of the gastronomic imagination. One solution is to send one’s characters to eat out, which means that many fine Cape Town establishments feature in my novels.

Although I never get pizza and I bake my own cakes, I have been unable to pass any of my cooking skills onto my lead character. Clare Hart is of necessity a woman with anorexic tendencies. Not, mind you, from bad body image so much as from sheer busy-ness. This is the problem with good food. Crime writers make their poor, hardworking characters rush about like maniacs. You tell me when the hell you get to bake biscuits when half the gangsters on the Cape Flats are trying to you?

Anyway, too much slow food would lead to slow sex. And all of that would produce way too much of the feel-good hormone, oxytocin, for a thriller. Although I’d love to write a book that had the space for my orange and polenta biscuit recipe.

There are lazy writers, writers who can’t say no, and then there are
creative people who are able to combine their muse with their media.

I’ve discovered this in recent months a couple of different ways. First, on
a recent book tour, I spent a week at a book festival where I was together
with the same bunch of authors all week. I asked many of them if they’d
agree to be interviewed over email for my blog. All said yes. Some very
significant writers, including UK bestseller Tony Parsons, wrote swift
responses to my questions, and you can read them on
themanoftwistsandturns.com.

Others agreed to do the interview only to prevaricate when I sent the
questions. They suggested that they’d be able to get to the interview once
they’d finished a current freelance project or completed a three month
writing fellowship. Now, I don’t believe it takes long to write the answers
to my questions, so either they were blowing me off or they harbored deep
reservations against….work – or they think a blog interview is a more
serious thing than I do…. Several others gave me email addresses which
turned out not to exist, but they were all somewhat elderly ladies, so I’m
prepared to ascribe that to forgetfulness and lack of internet savvy rather
than a desire to throw me off the scent.

More recently, I asked Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling US thriller writer
whom I also met at a book fair, if she’d read my (forthcoming in the US,
currently available in the UK) historical mystery MOZART’S LAST ARIA and
perhaps supply a comment on the book – favorable of course – for my
publishers to post on the cover. In the business, it’s called a “blurb.”

Even though she embarked last month on three months of daily readings to
promote her excellent new novel THE SILENT GIRL – a strenuous schedule that
includes no fewer than two book readings a day in its UK stretch – Tess
zipped back her blurb double-quick. “Mozart, music, and murder seamlessly
blend together in this fascinating historical mystery. A perfect read to go
with a crackling fire and a pot of hot chocolate,” Tess wrote.

I’ll admit that Tess is a self-confessed super-hardworking Chinese-American
brought up in something approaching the Tiger Mommy style (Gerritsen isn’t,
as you may have noticed, Chinese; it’s her married name). Nonetheless I
noted the contrast between my approach to blogging, say, or Tess’s
responsiveness — and the attitude of the other authors who shall remain
nameless (because while they mightn’t have time to answer my questions, they
no doubt spend hours roaming the blogosphere aimlessly…)

Having written last week about how writers oughtn’t to be churning out
novels the way doctors dig out babies on time with a Caesarian, I realize I
may be opening myself up to accusations of a double standard. And of course
I reject such accusations by saying: Object if you will, but I’ll simply
delete your comments or make fun of you online.

That’s the great thing about blogs. I don’t have time to be consistent. I’ve
got blurbs to write.

I have been nit picking my way through page proofs for my new book, a task that makes sticking pins into one’s eyes seem fun. Be that as it may, a pivotal scene that recaptured my attention is a riot. Riots, I discovered during the writing, are hard things to construct. They appear to erupt suddenly and without warning. The riot itself is chaotic, adrenalin-pumped and terrifying, there is no centre to it, and there is no form. Riots leave one dazed, confused and, all too often, ashamed of how one behaved during the event. But riots, like all storms, do not come out of nowhere.

Thanks to the British riots I have my favourite punk band, The Clash, doing a permanent rerun in my head; ‘London Calling’, ‘Police and Thieves’, all those great anthems to anarchy composed in the late 1970s, when Mrs Thatcher school-marmed her way into power. She presided over some exemplary strikes and riots that changed British society forever.

When I lived in London in the late 1980s there were the Poll Tax riots. London surged with East End impis armed with dustbin lids and bricks. There was the standard standoff with the cops, a couple of people were clobbered then everyone went home and had cups of tea. Oh yes, and the Thatcher’s poll tax, a very unfair one, was scrapped.

In the late 1990s there were riots against global capitalism. Again, dustbin lids, bricks, Bobbies, beatings; then it was done, order was restored and it was back to business as usual. Global capitalism seems to have done itself in over the last decade, but who knows, maybe it needed that helping hand with a half-brick.

These latest riots seem to be something new, a feral, formless explosion that is not boundaried by the familiar fault lines of race and class. The symptom perhaps of a malaise that is not easily cured, even as it is contained by police action and phalanxes of good citizens poignantly marching with their clean-up brooms.

England, when I visited in April this year, seemed to be short-tempered, short of cash and short of answers about what to do about the discontent, the desperation that, to my South African ears, was bromming like angry bees in the streets, in the subways, in the pubs where people drink so much, so fast.

There has been a great deal of finger-pointing and name-calling (the left blame, the right blame the left) about whose fault the latest London riots were. But looking at who has been convicted for looting, for affray, for arson and grievous bodily harm, it seems to me as if people from across the spectrum of privilege are to blame. Fuelling the riots, as I watched them, was not anger or exclusion, not politics or a cause, as I understand them. So, what was the origin of this orgy of devastation?

The riots seemed to me to be driven by the agitation of addicts who desperately want another fix. The promise of satisfaction remains perpetually elusive in a culture whose only purpose is to consume. Perpetual consumption erodes an individual’s sense of purpose, their sense of their own value and the value of others. Frantic consumption – materialism – has unravelled the social fabric, but it drives the desire for adrenalin, for expensive, useless, replaceable things, for the reality-TV spectacle of fire and mayhem.

My 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, spent some months in London earlier this year. Her first impressions of the ennui that comes with this addiction to buying seemed prescient when I re-read her letter after the riots.

‘I made the error of going to Oxford Street, which is utterly, brain-gratingly mad,’ she wrote. ‘So, so many people, who seem to have no idea at all who they are or what they are on this gracious earth for, and so instead they all buy the things that everyone else is buying in a vain attempt to convince themselves that if they wear the things they ought to wear, they might find in themselves a small grain of something sparkly and vaguely akin to an identity. Or lets start small, rather. Maybe something vaguely akin to a personality. The whole experience is made odder by the fact that this massively long street is filled with all the same shops, so it becomes a surreal, abusively bright hall of mirrors.’

Fortunately I came through last week’s riots in London completely unscathed. All except once, I always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. The only exception to this was when the police cleared everyone out of the supermarket I was in because ‘they’ were coming. As it happened ‘they’ didn’t actually attack the supermarket concentrating instead on trying to heave the cashpoint machines out of the wall outside. ‘They’ eventually went away empty handed.

But who were they and what were they doing? And why? The riots started originally, in response to the death of a young Tottenham man who was shot by police. He was thought to have been armed, but now it appears he was not. Friends and relatives at the time wanted answers and didn’t get any. People became angry and frustrated and this was totally understandable. More people joined in the protest and then, suddenly, everything went out of control.

In spite of the dead man’s family pleading for calm, Tottenham kicked off and soon people in other parts of London joined in too. Quite when it went from being about the dead man to being a free for all, I don’t know, but looting started and then all hell broke loose. Shops, homes and cars were set on fire, looting on an industrial scale took place and while the police tried to contain the situation as best they could, our politicians reluctantly returned from their various villas in Tuscany. Then via Twitter, Facebook etc., the unrest became viral and other cities including Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham experienced unrest. In Birmingham three young men were deliberately run over by rioters as they tried to protect their community. The father of one of them very bravely called for no reprisals in his son’s name and from then onwards the streets began to regain some of their previous calm. Monstrously the spilling of innocent blood can sometimes have this effect.

So what, apart from the death of one man at the hands of the police in Tottenham had all this been about? Of course it was, originally, about anger at the shooting of an unarmed man but the streets of our towns and cities had to be ready to ‘go’ in order for such widespread unrest to take place. People outside Tottenham hadn’t known the man, so why all the fury across the country?

In part I do agree with the government that much of the looting that took place was to do with greed. Tellingly, shops selling electrical goods, mobile phones and fashion items were targetted. From the CCTV images that have emerged since the riots it’s easy to see that many of the rioters were clearly rather jolly looking middle class people having a bit of a ‘laugh’. We are a nation in recession, like the rest of Europe, but people rarely go hungry here and so looting is inexcusable. This aspect of the riots was about greed, but the events as a whole are about much more.

In order to save money to ensure that this country retains its triple A credit rating, our government has cut public services, killed off projects and given employers across the country carte blanche to get rid of ‘excess’ staff while working staff they do have into anxiety and depression. Nobody feels safe, everyone fears for the future and the young, particularly, feel as if they have no prospects. I’m lucky, I have a job but my husband – a middle aged man with 30 years IT experience and knowledge – is now unemployed as well as my son who has a PhD! Those without qualifications and even those who are our brightest and best are being sacrificed in order to help big business stay big and to ensure that the rich carry on trouble free. Every day our children watch the comfortable blingy lifestyles of the rich and famous on the TV and they want some of that. Well wouldn’t you if you lived on a rotting housing estate blighted by endemic violence and hopelessness? So ‘trinkets’ are dangled but are utterly unattainable and, more importantly, politicians actually tell you ALL THE TIME that you are going to have to absorb a lot more pain before the recession is over. What hope is there for you and what the hell do you have to lose by going out and helping yourself to an iPad or whatever?

I am truly sorry for the poor people who died, had their businesses and homes burnt out or looted in the riots. They were entirely innocent and what happened to them was completely unjustified. The people who committed these crimes will be punished. But, I ask myself, would I feel the same way had the rioters attacked the homes of the bankers, industrialists and politicians who actually caused this recession? I don’t think I would. I wouldn’t want anyone to die but those behind all the joblessness we are experiencing now, who still sip champagne and eat caviar should be brought to book. Young people riot and loot and grab the things they see these people get oh so easily and they think ‘if they can do it, why can’t I?’ And I cannot argue with that. Responsible behaviour comes from the top. After all what kind of idiot expects a toddling child to act as a role model to its parents? Come on!

Our esteemed PM, David Cameron is now talking about closing down social networking sites during times of unrest. Nice one, Dave, blanket censorship in a democracy. Busy punishing and getting ‘tough’ he still isn’t listening to any voices that talk about inequality and unemployment. I think he does this at his peril. If someone doesn’t listen to the ‘great unwashed’ soon then they will repeat last weeks performance and the police, who are also in line for cuts in staffing, won’t be able to control it. A start would be for our super rich to pay some tax. Our very comfortable and employed politicians should stop being the pot that calls the kettle black and engage with the majority for once. After all there is only so much time anyone, surely, can spend with Prince William, David Beckham and the bosses of our high street banks. Or is there? How the hell would I know.

It’s been a long, hot summer already. August just couldn’t be more ripe for a little rioting, or, as I’ve heard it described, ‘aggravated night-time shopping without the bother of paying.’

British cities have been coming apart with pent-up aggression over the last few nights, in the wake of the shooting by police of a man who may or may not, depending on the source, have been aiming a gun at police officers.

Out here in southern England’s dull suburbia it seems as if we’re as far from the riots in London, Bristol or Birmingham as we are from events in Syria or Libya.

Violence and burning buildings are presented to us to tut-tut over in a clean and sanitised manner by serious newsreaders with facial expressions that border on the gravitas all-out nuclear war or a death in the royal family would warrant.

We’ve been here before. There were riots in the 1980s that I missed out on completely, having spent the entire span of the Thatcher years living abroad. Come to think of it, I also missed out on yuppies, Sloane rangers, Duran Duran, a couple of royal weddings and Blind Date, so it wasn’t as if it was a bad thing, spending a decade within spitting distance of the Arctic Circle.

Are the latest round of riots a vivid symptom of a complete meltdown of English society as we know it, as doubtless the Daily Mail would have us all believe? Probably not. Dammit, it’s August and the middle of the silly season. Every media outlet has been telling us for weeks now that the economy as a whole, worldwide, is set to crash us into a second Great Depression.

Taking into account that like everyone else, we’re seeing the people supposedly running Britain hell-bent on the usual policies that boil down to making us pay more in taxes for fewer and skimpier services, so it’s hardly a surprise that we Brits are a gloomy bunch these days, especially after a few decades of having the joyful message rammed down our collective throat by the apparatus of business, advertising and banking that not only can we have what we want now, it’s our right to acquire stuff so that we can all keep up with the Joneses. All Joe Public has to do is sign on the dotted line, take the money and spend it, and pay it back later. (Terms & conditions apply. Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up repayments…)

As for the unrest in urban Britain that appears to have mysteriously died away in those cities blessed by a decent downpour of rain, there’s a feel to all this that sets the bullshit detectors buzzing.

The Poll Tax riots of the 1980s, Greenham Common, the Miners’ Strike – go back further to the riots that followed the First World War when demobbed soldiers found not much waiting for them when they came home from the trenches, and before that to the food shortages and unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars – there seemed to be reasons for those. Maybe not great reasons, depending on your point of view, but people felt they had something to be angry about. What’s happening today seems to be more about making a grab for some classy consumer electronics through smashed windows.

Maybe humans just aren’t made to live in the cities that so many of us prefer to inhabit. It’s arguable that the human animal is hard-wired to co-exist in smallish tribes or townships, with explosions like these being a natural by-product of people not living in their natural environment.

Alternatively the riots could be a symptom of our runaway consumer ethos in which the rich become seriously rich, the poor become poorer and those in the middle get squeezed harder. I’m not a social scientist, or an economist, but then you don’t need to be a plumber to diagnose a blocked sink, and there’s definitely something smelly in the U-bend here.

Is this anger, or greed, or a desire to be in front of a camera, or a wish to be able to sit as yet unconceived grandchildren on knees and tell tales of the riots of ’11? Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to have any real grievances behind it. Admittedly, certain sections of British society do get an arguably disproportionate amount of attention from the boys in blue, but setting fire to the corner shop as a reaction to being asked to turn your pockets out once in a while can be seen as taking things a little far.

Right now there’s every shade of opinion vying for attention – mine included – from those who would like to see birching and compulsory cold baths for under 16s to the other extreme calling for dialogue and empathy with these troubled communities. Neither one extreme nor the other will get what it wants and by the time the schools go back in September, the whole thing will have blown over while government encourages courts to hand down a few token heavy sentences.

Nothing much will change, in that the government machine that runs public services from law enforcement to education and healthcare will continue to starve those essential services while setting them ludicrous targets. Expect a few cosmetic token gestures, then the schools go back and the retail and advertising machine can start winding up for Christmas and four months of constant reminders that it’s the British public’s duty to acquire more overpriced tat than it wants or needs – back to business as usual.