I’ve been speaking up much more of late. It had become just too depressing to see how people now actively accommodate and work round those who impose themselves unthinkingly on public spaces, in effect taking them over and diminishing everyone else in the process.

Most of us, thankfully, still have relatively little direct experience of violent crime, but the fact is that everyone but the richest now suffers death by a thousand antisocial cuts: by the petty rudenesses, the incivilities and the transgressions that might not amount to crime but which manage to make us despair, fill us with fear and finally inspire more and more of us to call it a day, pick up sticks and flee in the name of what pollsters call “quality of life”.

Public transport is, I’ve found, a real flashpoint. For example, going around London, it becomes clear that the bus queue, that silent expression of collective social cohesion, is now virtually extinct. No one is happy about this, but it’s been accepted with a resigned shrug of the shoulders. Only in the commercial sector does queuing still seem to thrive – in shops, at cash machines and in supermarkets, where it is rigorously enforced anyway by roped-off areas. But in those areas of life that rely not on a sales transaction of some kind but on a sense of communal identity, consideration and fairness, it has disappeared.