The good news is that few incidents were reported to the police. The bad news is that statistics are kept only of the incidents that people tell the police about, and not of those annoyances that people don't report, even though they may have been a real pest, or even a threat.
One incident outside Envy night club involved two girls fighting, but because they were both too drunk to know what they were doing they were not prosecuted. So that's all right, then.
It reminds me of what my grandmother wrote about her time as a young bride in the slums of east London:
We were surrounded by railways and railwaymen and very poor people and I used to sit at my window and watch the people on Saturday nights going in and out of the pawn shop. I have seen free fighting in the street, once two women. It was an awful sight.That was in 1897. After the postwar decades of my youth, when things were relaxed and peaceful, at least in the part of south east London where we lived, we seem to have slid back to the bad old days. Then, people at least had the excuse of extreme poverty and a grinding round of toil which needed some respite on a Saturday night. Now it seems to be excess money, ineffective control (parents? police? government?) and inadequate inner resources.
Street used to have a bad drink problem in the early days of Clarks, and influential people got together to build the Temperance Hall (spot it in the High Street, its carved name above some shop fronts) and encourage a better use of time. What will be the 21st century response?
The government isn't listening to the nation's leading experts on drink-related disease and drink-related crime. Who will do something about it?
