Tonight:
4°c
If you like high fashion, hoods are good. Hoods and snoods are “in” this autumn: the catwalk tells us so.
At Paris fashion week earlier this month, girls wore their cashmere hoodies slopping over the back of their Rick Owens leather jackets, teamed with ankle boots and a pleated mini. Why, you can buy a hooded mohair jacket from Marc Jacobs for £1,460.
Meanwhile, over in Tottenham, students are being banned from wearing their hoods up in an initiative that, it is hoped, will help to cut gang crime.
I suspect, unless gangs have had a particularly fruitful year selling bags of crushed-up leaves to 12-year-olds, these hoods won't hail from Marc Jacobs.
Down my way, the kids who hang around outside the tower blocks wear standard-issue grey hoodies, pulled up not so much in defiance of the weather (they wear them even in June) as anyone who might want to pick them out in an identity parade. It's a brilliant tactic. I've employed it myself on bad hair days.
Never has a garment been more maligned than the hoodie, that scoop of fabric in which all our double standards breed.
Westfield shopping centre banned them months ago: from being worn, that is, not sold within its hallowed halls.
Strange, isn't it, how kids at both ends of the social spectrum seem so strongly to favour hooded tops: the ones who terrorise my local street market (“them bloody Somalians”, according to one charming shopkeeper) are barely keener on them than the public school teens who parade the streets of Chelsea at half term.
This latter group's hoodies might hail from Jack Wills and cost a fortune but what's the difference?
It isn't the hood that threatens but the number of hoods, their locale, the time of day, and the manner in which their wearers act.
Most teenagers like to hide behind a mask of some sort, and David Cameron's now-famous comment that hoods are “more defensive than offensive” is probably true.
Life can be ugly: the urge to shield yourself from it can be strong.
We all use clothes to conceal as well as reveal, and in this respect a hoodie is only the cloth version of an iPod.
But if gang and gun crime, both markedly on the rise in London, can be stemmed by the simple act of asking students to wear their hoods down, it is a sartorial sacrifice worth making. Unless, of course, you have really greasy hair.
The BBC's clapped-out Austen
Poor BBC1. First Strictly loses out in ratings to The X Factor (no surprises there), and now its other great white hope — the autumn costume drama — appears to be tanking, too.
Sunday night's Austen adaptation, Emma, only gathered a paltry 3.3 million viewers, compared to the six million that past classic dramas have attracted.
Can the curse of The X Factor be blamed once more? No, because its Sunday night slot is 8pm to 9pm, hardly preventing viewers from switching over to watch Romola Garai in Emma, which starts directly after.
I blame Jane Austen. She's rubbish! Just kidding. But after 2005's Bleak House, surely the best TV adaptation ever penned, the current Emma feels old and tired.
Note to the BBC: you can't just stick Michael Gambon in a pair of breeches and hope for the best. And you can't beat a nice bit of Dickens.
Crime mapping is pushing my house price up
If “have a break, have a Kit Kat” belonged to the Nineties, then “have a break, have a look at some spurious website that tells you nothing of any use other than that you clearly don't have enough work to do” is surely its less tasty Noughties equivalent.
This week, office drones all over the city will be breaking off from the task in hand to peruse the new crime map website that purports to tell you the probability of having your telly nicked according to where you live.
Despite dire warnings from estate agents that such freedom of information could wipe thousands off house prices in crime-blighted areas, I'm not so sure.
I just typed in my postcode: though I live in what a cabbie once blithely told me was “the murder capital of north London”, its crime rate is flagged as “average”: exactly the same as the postcode of the very posh area where I work. Lies, damned lies and statistics, eh?
Take this health warning with a pinch of cheese
Some stuff in life makes sense: ice cream makes you fat; mung beans make you slim and hungry. But news that white wine rots your teeth more than red? Shurely shome mishtake!
Everybody has a grey-toothed friend, their wintry November smile the result of a long affection for rioja.
But now we hear that Mr Pinot and Mr Grigio are even more damaging, stripping teeth of their enamel.
That is, unless you accompany your chardonnay with a generous lump of cheese, in which case you'll be OK, because the alkaline neutralises the acid.
Alternatively, for those without a degree in chemistry, there is a simpler solution: beer.
Granted, this season's cinched waists might be a no-no, but nobody will notice your beer gut once you flash that lovely smile.
