LONDON: The hoodie who mugged me came off worse

The hoodie who mugged me came off worse

It is just after nine o'clock in the morning and, unusually for someone on their way to work, I have a spring in my step as I leave my flat.

It's the autumnal nip in the air, I think. It makes the normally polluted London atmosphere feel quite fresh, and the sun is beginning to burn through the clouds.

It is just after nine o'clock in the morning and, unusually for someone on their way to work, I have a spring in my step as I leave my flat.

It's the autumnal nip in the air, I think. It makes the normally polluted London atmosphere feel quite fresh, and the sun is beginning to burn through the clouds.

As I pass along my busy street and reach the bus stop, I call my mother to relay this information. She couldn't give two hoots, but we always talk about nothing in particular at this time of the day.

She says, "OK Bryony, that's nice Bryony, by the way Bryony, I bought a new shirt in Zara yesterday, it's really rather lovely you might like it, and are you coming for Sunday lunch this weeke –"

THWACK!

My banal conversation with my mother is brought to an abrupt, but not entirely tragic, end. I am no longer in possession of my phone. My phone is in the possession of some kid, who I think has just hit me round the back of my head, and who is now running at speed around the nearest corner.

I let out a stunned yelp but nothing seems to happen. The boy has disappeared around a corner and no one has done anything to stop him. Not the five other people at the bus stop with me, not the commuters stuck in gridlocked traffic, and certainly not the big burly bloke cleaning the steps of the house in front of the bus stop, who looks at me, as a tear starts to trickle down my face, and says: "Sorry love, I thought he was a friend of yours."

I beg your pardon? A friend of mine? I hate to sound snobby here, love, but do I look like the kind of person who would be friends with a youth in a hoodie? (A hoodie - really, you couldn't make it up.) Especially a hoodie who just hit me round the head.

I call my editor before I call the police ("Richard! I've just been mugged! Yeah, I'm fine, think it would make a good Notebook though!") and only then because I need a crime reference number to get myself a replacement mobile. I don't for one minute think that they will find the phone, or the oik who took it.

But it is, in the end, the futility of the crime that makes me pursue it; that makes me really quite angry. What was the point of that kid taking it? Of thwacking me while I was having a nice, mundane conversation with my mum? Now barred and blacklisted, the handset is of no use to him. Perhaps it was just because he could.

And no one seems to bat an eyelid when a crime takes place right before their eyes. It used to be that you got mugged late at night as you tried to dodge infected needles strewn around your feet in a dark alleyway, not during the morning rush hour on a main road full of pedestrians.

But such occurrences are now obviously so commonplace that people feel powerless to do anything about them.

It's funny, or not so funny, that David Cameron lives a short stroll from where I was robbed yesterday. Perhaps Dave, and politicians like him, might think a bit differently about suggesting that we hug hoodies had they actually been mugged by one.

My mugger will have discovered that he has stolen the worst phone in the western world. It switches itself off seven times a day, deletes texts and numbers at random and is falling apart. In a way, the hoodie has done me a favour relieving me of it.

I called up Orange to report my phone stolen, and was told that, because I paid £5 in insurance every month, I was entitled to a new handset.

However, they would only be able to do this once I had paid my bill (which isn't due for another two days) and once they had done it, they would have to charge me a £15 fee for "administration purposes".

Who'd have thought I'd end up enduring two daylight robberies in one morning?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/10/04/do0404.xml