Remind me, someone, how much money the Government is pouring into the police to fight street crime It might cheer me up. The trouble with having your purse stolen is that when you tell people about it, hoping for sympathy, all they do is cap it with a much better story of their own. Only last week, they will tell you, they had their entire life savings, which they had just withdrawn from the building society to pay for their grandmother’s heart transplant, stolen at knifepoint by a blind pensioner in a wheelchair. I was lucky, I suppose, because mine was a comparatively unspectacular heist. I was on my way to Selfridges in Oxford Street when a tall man with a cap bumps into me hard.

Minutes later, when I scrabble in my bag for my purse to pay for two metres of striped deckchair canvas, it isn’t there. The galling thing is that it was actually attached to my bag with a chain, which had been neatly spliced.”It happens all the time,” said the assistant. My best bet was to go outside and poke about in the nearest litter bins because they usually chucked them away when they’d taken out the cash and credit cards. Disregarding curious glances, I stabbed fitfully at the contents of half a dozen bins with my umbrella before deciding that life was too short to risk catching diptheria from old sandwiches and rotting nappies.

I didn’t report it to the police, what was the point? My various membership cards would identify me if the purse ever showed up. I once found a wallet on the Tube stuffed with cash, New Zealand credit cards and temporary membership to Tooting Public Library. Instead of handing it in, which was bound to involve time and lots of form-filling, I telephoned Tooting library, explained that I had just found James Davidson’s wallet and could they give me a telephone number for him. Minutes later I was giving J Davidson directions to my flat.I thought he’d be over the moon with gratitude. It was an expensive crocodile number containing more than 300 quid, but all he said when I handed it back to him was “Cheers” Maybe he was lonely so far way from home, I thought.