7 pence an hour

They didn't really riot of course, that's just typical Evening Standard bollocks. But I'm told things got pretty foul.

This evening, the sort of noise that in the print media would be described as 'a sickening thud' and the bus driver dropping anchors and swearing loud and panicky. 'Ah f ck we jus run summon over y'know.' the girl behind me remarks.

The mildly uncomfortable feeling of being on a bus that is on someone. Though arguably more agreeable than being the someone under the bus, I'll grant you.

Due to the height involved only the gathering crowd, briefly distracted from London Lite, Blackberries and Foot Locker, gives a clue as to what is happening directly beneath the windows. Hands over mouths in a dismay sort of way, but not actual wincing. Then a sort of quasi-religious reaction, gaping and widened eyes and actual smiles. She is risen.

Seems she'd fallen into the kerb by the vehicle, and was tucked into the gap between bus and pavement. Brief glimpse of her standing unaided looking down herself in wonder, all still there.

And off we go again, I'll be off in ten minutes, the driver's got no break until Golders Green. Had it been me I'd have turned out the passengers and parked up on Portman Square for an hour to cry or punch the seat cushions or just hit the pub. I don't know how they do it. Not just the near misses and actual hits - Oxford Street full stop. The collision took place at low speed, between lights, short of precognition what can you do?

You don't get a much bigger frontal profile on a moving object. 14 feet high, 8 wide, bright red. It doesn't exactly test the peripheral vision. But just try the view from the front up top, Centrepoint to the Arch. It's a series of masterclasses in making attempted suicide look like an accident.

Shoppers, they're not all there. Drunks have better coordination and spatial awareness. Free-range psychotics display more concern for their own personal safety. Like toddlers transfixed by the brightly coloured objects they blunder across the spaces between shops without regard for what they may meet on the way. Could be a river running between the pavements, boiling with snapping crocodiles. Or a chasm without floor until the flaming pits of Hades. They'd still step off the kerb without for one moment taking their eyes off the opposite window display.

In the suburbs the shops open at eleven on Sunday mornings. In Oxford Street they don't switch the tills on before noon. The creatures from Burb World forget this. By 11:15 the pavements are crawling with whimpering staggering zombies, pawing and beating at the closed doors, scratching at the windows with their credit cards. At the request of the London Ambulance Service many shops relent at half-past, giving the junkies thirty minutes of product fondling before they can finally start Chipping and Pinning.

A fine bloody recession this is turning out to be.