Tonight:
5°c
The starving victims of the ninth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno gnaw at each other's heads while their bodies are frozen in ice.
Dante clearly thought he'd nailed ultimate suffering; but he knew nothing of it, for he had never been to the Savile Row branch of Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothes shop being sued for discrimination by a former member of staff.
Last Christmas I made the mistake of going to A&F because my daughter longed for one of their hoodies.
It was the most unpleasant retail experience of my life, including the shop in China with frogs squirming in a pit and snakes sliced open with hearts still beating.
The queue was 200 yards long. By the time I got to the front of it, my parking had run out so I had to plead with the Russian security guard to let me fill up my meter without going to the back of the queue again.
Inside, the shop was like a 1970s school disco: it was dark, thumping with music and the air was saturated with cologne, so I could neither see, nor hear, nor breathe.
The place was packed with wildly excited teenage girls and furious mothers bumping heads as they dived for the same item of overpriced clothing.
Beautiful half-naked shop assistants drifted around failing to assist the customers, so it took an hour to pay.
The only impressive thing in the place was the price tag: I had to acknowledge that a shop that could charge £60 for a hoodie which looked as though it had cost about 50p to make in a factory in southern China really knew its business.
The massive disparity between the cost of producing cheap cotton clothes and the price which customers are prepared to pay for them explains why Riam Dean thinks she was unwelcome on the shopfloor of A&F.
Ms Dean is an exceedingly pretty woman but she has a prosthetic arm. A&F spends several multiples of its production costs on employing beautiful people in its shops and on plastering billboards with pictures of muscular men displaying more flesh than clothes.
All of this is designed to fuse its name with the idea of physical perfection. Ms Dean felt she failed to live up to that.
A&F is just an extreme example of what's happened to fashion retailing as a whole. It is not in the clothes business but in the branding business.
The advertising, the pong of cologne, the thumping music, the pretty people are all designed to persuade consumers that purchasing one A&F polo shirt (production cost probably 20p, price £50) will buy them membership of an exclusive club of beautiful, happy people. Millions willingly pay up.
In a way, this is depressing, for it tells us what suckers we consumers are. We don't buy clothes any more, we buy ideas of clothes.
Yet that's just as well, for our gullibility keeps an awful lot of us in work. Most of the value in the modern economy is added not in producing goods but in designing and marketing them.
Making clothes creates jobs in China; building brands - logos, lighting, music, shop décor, market research, advertising - creates them here.
These are the sorts of businesses that keep this city in work. If the world was happy to wear 20p polo shirts, we might all be purer, but London would be poorer.
Even celebs deserve sympathy
Michael Jackson's death was big news less because he was a great singer than because he was a hopeless human being.
I suppose it's understandable that we take comfort from the unhappiness of the wealthy, for it justifies our failure to get rich.
But the relish with which people watch celebrities crumble into despair, disaster and drugs is even more depressing than the freaks themselves.
Start small to save money
The papers were furious about "£1 million to send one family home", as the Sun put it - a pilot project in Kent designed to reduce the number of children of failed asylum seekers being locked up in detention centres. The scheme was not a success.
I am generally happy to throw the first stone at wasteful public spending but the press has got this one dangerously wrong.
A million pounds is a drop in the £650 billion ocean the public sector spends.
Piloting schemes - trying them out in a small way to see whether they work or not - is a good idea. Most are bound to fail. But you need small-scale failures to avoid wasting money on a grand scale.
Green boxes don't make roads safer
Do you observe ASLs? Of course not. You probably don't have any idea what they are, and if you do, you don't notice them.
They are "advance stop lines" - the green boxes painted on the roads near traffic lights which have a picture of a bicycle painted in them but, as I find every morning when my bicycle and I try to stop in one, they are usually occupied by cars.
I like the idea of the traffic authorities doing things designed to make the roads bicycle-friendly. But I rather doubt that ASLs - or, come to that, cycle lanes - do much good.
Many drivers ignore or don't notice them and they therefore lull cyclists into a false sense of security.
The only way to bike safely in this city is to have all your wits about you all the time.
Reader views (1)
a bike whizzed past me from behind today whilst walking along a narrow pavement, i had no idea he was approaching me until he passed me at considerable speed, if for any reason i had suddenly moved to the left by as little as 6 inches there would have been an accident possibly a fatal one. it wasnt a child riding the bike it was an adult man with a brain the size of a pea and that's being generous, motorists may well be justified in their attitude on cyclist's rights.
- Petesake, chelmsford uk, 30/06/2009 18:04
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