The price of a phone call

Gratuitous, I know...

One thing that has irritated me for ages now is the practice of British Transport Police of putting large notices in tube stations saying, basically, that using a mobile phone outside a station is an open invitation to any would-be thieves and muggers. Similarly those adverts about how, if you don't buy three deadlocks, an alarm system and an expatriate South African armed with an AK-47 you clearly deserve to be burgled. Frankly, if the police can't maintain basic law and order on the streets, then they should be re-assessing their methods - and not relying on us walking about in suits of armour.

So I feel rather sorry for Bryony Gordon, who was bopped on the head and relieved of a mobile phone this morning in Ladbroke Grove. The right of women to have mildly inane conversations with their mothers is, and always must, inalienable. Given that everyone, quite rightly, gets into a palaver if it is suggested that, by drinking half a bottle of vodka and wearing skirts shorter than Gordon Brown's nails, women are 'asking to be raped', the same should hold for petty street crime.

Sadly, of course, online commenters being what they are, sympathy has been in rather short supply. Well, on the admittedly vanishingly slight offchance that she's reading this, I think it's jolly unfair. On the other hand, at least she did get a column out of it...