The barista will take down your particulars

Picture: Costa

Until I went to live in America, the meme about US cops "hanging out in donut shops" (to quote The Bangles) seemed something of a cartoon myth. And then I went to live in America, renting a 'condo' in a new housing development with its own branch of Starbucks, and there, every morning, queuing with me for their 'morning joe' would be several representatives of the Sunnyvale Police Department.

Now, in my local Costa in Greenwich, I often see the borough's constabulary queuing for cappuccinos. But the more I think of it, the more such visibility reassures, especially given the latest crime figures, released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. In the 12 months to the end of March there were almost five million crimes committed across England and Wales, an increase of 458,000 offences on the previous 12 months. And although London saw a more modest increase of just four per cent in the total number committed that figure includes a significant rise in violent crime. Indeed, since I've been back in London, barely a day has passed without the Evening Standard reporting another senseless stabbing, as gangs carry out their bloody turf wars. Knife crime has increased in London by 24 per cent. On top of that, the city has been inundated with moped-born muggings, with police seemingly unable - or not allowed - to prevent them for fear of another teenage miscreant losing his life in a pursuit. And now we have the apparent epidemic of acid attacks, with thugs choosing callously and cynically to render their victims with life-altering disfigurement.

It's easy to conclude, then, that London's streets (and, yes, Glasgow's or Liverpool's too) are becoming too dangerous, and that we should cocoon ourselves away. Not so, of course. But there's no doubt that encroaching high levels of street crime, not to mention recent terror events, are impacting the choices people make on where they go out, or even whether they go out. Just last Friday night, and no more than a five-minute walk from my front door, 31-year-old Danny Pearce, father to a five-year-old daughter, was stabbed to death in Greenwich town centre, apparently by thugs on a moped who took his mobile phone and Rolex watch, as he walked home from a jazz club. When it happens right in the midst of where you live, and and in a street frequented by tourists, you can't help take a different perspective on community policing needs. With the Metropolitan Police facing drastic budget cuts of up to £400 million at a time when crime and the terror threat is on the rise, you actually must feel sympathy for the thin blue line, as expectations increase on what they can do, just as they're finding they're less able to do it.

So, to return to the coffee shop theme, the latest idea for community policing is for officers to set up shop in high street branches of the big coffee chains. This is one proposal from London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, as the Met is forced to close more of its actual police stations to save money. Traditional high street stations have been disappearing at a rate of knots over the last few years: in the London suburb of New Malden, where I grew up, the once familiar police station next to The Fountain roundabout (and across the road from a once notorious pub of the same name) has been turned into a pub itself, The Watchman. Oh, the irony of eating gastropub food in what used to be the station's cells...

Khan has said that 40 police stations will be closed along with other local contact kiosks in libraries and supermarkets, leaving around 32 in operation - roughly one per borough. Instead, the public will be encouraged to report crime via the Internet or phone, rather than walking into a physical location. The argument being made is that these days fewer people, anyway, are actually going into police stations voluntarily, either to ask for directions or to actually report crime. The era of Dixon Of Dock Green is well and truly over. The logic, therefore, is that a borough's ward teams get out and about in London's high streets (where coffee shops have proliferated as other forms of employment have disappeared). As a result, the likes of Costa, Starbucks and Cafe Nero have become prominent parts of local social fabric, making them sensible locations for community engagement. But is such visibility enough? Didn't the local nick, with its traditional blue lamp above the front door, provide a more imposing statement of the police's authority in a town?

The mayor and senior Met officers apparently want to see officers spend more time on the beat. The trouble, though, is not so much where as to who and how many: Khan has warned that London's police numbers could fall below 30,000 as a result of government cuts, putting severe strain on the Met's plan to have at least two dedicated beat officers in every London ward by the end of the year.

As the BBC's brilliant recent fly-on-the-wall series The Met demonstrated, London's police do a remarkable job. Along with the fire and ambulance services I really only have absolute admiration for what they do, and the Grenfell fire and the events of June 3 in Borough Market only underline why the emergency services deserve to be resourced properly. Being able to engage the police in my local Costa is probably more of a PR exercise than one that actually prevents or reduces crime. And a coffee shop is no substitute for a police station, anyway. After all, where would you lock someone up?

The tea really does taste better, and other observations

© Simon Poulter 2016

So, I’ve been back in London just over a month, after 17 and a half years living abroad, which is a statement that, I know, carries a whiff of the exotic. However, I'm not suggesting for one minute that I've been off-grid, khaki-clad with a pith helmet, observing still-primitive Amazonian tribes, or carrying out a long-term study of penguins in their natural habitat, or in my wilder moments of Walter Mittydom, living the rock star lifestyle in a Malibu hacienda, occasionally doing something with gated reverb.

No, for most of those years away I've been sat in an office. Furthermore, I've hardly been cut off from my homeland. Frequent commando raids to visit family, friends, Stamford Bridge and carry out sundry business commitments, more or less in that order, have kept me in regular contact. That said, there is a substantial difference between weekend trips to the home island and living somewhere day-to-day (or, simply, "living", as I had been doing exclusively in Britain before being coaxed elsewhere).

Of course, moving to the Netherlands - and subsequently California, back to the Netherlands again and then France - as I did, wasn't exactly volunteering for the first manned Mars mission. These countries do, I established quite quickly, have flushing toilets, and if you know where to look, shops selling Marmite. But coming back has thrown a spotlight on things I had missed, or more importantly, didn't know I'd missed.

With worldly-wiseness comes additional awareness of your home country and recognition of things you'd never have been conscious of before moving abroad, or that you suddenly become aware has become a thing while you've been away. Here, I offer my first observation: cars pushing into traffic from side roads. I honestly don't recall this ever being a custom (interestingly enough, in Holland cars coming out of a side road have right-of-way, which I didn't know until it was almost too late…the first time). During my driving lessons I was taught to wait until there was a break in the traffic and then pull out. Now the norm seems to be to simply stick the nose of your car out, forcing others to stop. And often the driver in question is actually trying to blag his or her way onto the other side of the road, forcing traffic on both sides to stop. I don't know when or where this came from, or why. It's possible that it is simply a consequence of Britain's roads becoming ever more congested, as property, demographics and population increases - including net immigration - have put more cars on the streets. Another good reason for me to eschew car ownership and make use of public transport, a trait I warmly embraced in Paris, and am happy to continue as I base myself in south-east London.

This brings me to my second observation: the sense of entitlement. I blame Simon Cowell. For many things, actually. At risk of committing the most middle-aged thing I've ever written, Britain has, in the years I've been at large, developed an assumption of on-demand, instantaneous everything, from Cowell's drive-through fame culture to 18-year-old footballers skipping the traditional cleaning-the-stadium-toilets-with-a-toothbrush apprenticeship and going straight to Range Rover ownership. And don't get me going on compensation.

With this entitlement comes an erosion of civility, something the Brexit referendum seems to have accelerated, with social media becoming the prime medium to tell complete strangers exactly what is thought of them. There is some credence to the argument that if Gary Lineker or Lily Allen tweet about refugees they are putting themselves out there, and that their freedom to express themselves is rightfully matched by those who dare to troll them. But, as I’ve blogged before, spend any time on Twitter and, much like the bubbling stream of bile that is the Daily Mail and its unhinged, tin-foil hat-wearing, demonstrably illiterate readership, you will succumb to both madness and despair at how people, shielded by their keyboard and the semi-anonymity of their handle, feel entitled to say whatever the want without consequence, and without any basis of a relationship to so.

This manifests itself, post-Brexit, with Polish community centres being vandalised, hijab-wearing Muslim women being verbally abused in town centres, and knuckle-dragging thugs staging protests about claiming their country back, not that I ever noticed that it had been taken away from them. And, guess what? After Tuesday's presidential earthquake, it's happening in America, too. Let right-wing populism win, and all of a sudden there are those acting like it's 1933 Germany, when brown was the in-vogue shirt colour.

When I left Britain in 1999 there was no such thing as social media. If you wanted to complain you either wrote to Jimmy Young, Points Of View or The Times. If you wanted to rant at complete strangers there was always Speaker’s Corner. Now, you can meltdown, Basil Fawlty-style, on Twitter. Which I did, without remorse, recently when trying to get broadband installed. Broadband providers go to great lengths to draw you in with slick marketing: TV ads with Hollywood celebrities and websites that connect you to directly via chat to experts helping you pick the right package. And then the horror begins: after handing over a large sum of money, you then wait for the service to begin. Except it doesn’t, so you connect by online chat again…where it takes half an hour for someone to take up your case, only to inform you that another department handles your type of package and you should call their helpdesk. Which you do, and you then spend an hour on hold due to “a high volume of calls”. In my case, I clocked up a full three hours on hold trying to find out why BT had arbitrarily cancelled the visiting installation engineer, and then cancelled my order altogether. Here Twitter comes into its own. It’s amazing how responsive companies become when their reputation is challenged publicly. It shouldn’t be like this, of course. You should just be able to call a number and someone answers, more or less straight away. Britain’s population may have grown in recent years, but not so much that some of a telecommunications provider’s substantial profits can’t be invested in extra customer support personnel.

There are many more line items I could complain about the Britain I’ve returned to, from London’s choked, gridlocked traffic, to those Estuary accents where each sentence ends with a rising pitch like a question?, to jogging bottoms as workwear, young women wearing make-up applied by an industrial sandblaster (and eyebrows which may have been drawn with an extra thick Sharpie), to Nando's. But that could sound ungallant about my return, which would be wrong.

Throughout my time abroad I’ve eulogised about my adopted surroundings. Amsterdam remains an adorable village masquerading as a national capital. California will always be where I go for sunny people and sunny weather in a geography that offers cities as majestic as San Francisco and as relaxed as San Diego, and the eye candy of its beaches, mountains and deserts, of Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. And Paris. What can I say that I haven’t already? An architectural history museum that you can actually live in, with subsidised public transport and the amusement of people watching without being judged for it.

But it's not for nothing that for some time I’ve wanted to come back to London. For a vibrancy matched only by New York; for its culture, its art, music, exhibitions and theatre; for its diversity; for its ability to blend modernity with traditionalism; for the sense of newness I keep finding around every corner, nestled amongst the old; for the joy of taking a Thames Clipper to the football; for tea that really does taste better; for breaking my umbilical cord with the south-western suburbs I grew up in and welcoming me to the south-east of the capital.

As much as there is a degree of architectural vandalism going in London, with the rapid forestation of huge, new towers of glass and steel dominating the skyline, there is also an unshakeable excitement about the place that I notice and experience every day I step outside. Even post-Brexit, with the banks and other corporate institutions supposedly buggering off to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, London feels as resilient today as ever before. It’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a force for good, putting himself about on the world stage in an enthusiastically statesmanlike manner, declaring the British capital open. If he could do something about the traffic, Heathrow and the epidemic of knife crime, he would be somewhere close to the country’s best politician (and certainly more effective than either the leadership of the party he represents or the self-serving scoundrels they are supposed to be in opposition to).

All this aside, I'm not going to make melodrama out of my repatriation. Really, there hasn’t been a lot to it. Essentially, I arrived, and then went straight down the pub. It has all been relatively easy - as really I should have expected, though that’s not to say there have been things to get used to again, not to mention things to do for the very first time. But I’ll be honest, the star of all this has been London.

I'm writing this in New York, the self-styled ‘greatest city in the world’, a description much like The Rolling Stones being the world’s greatest rock and band. If so, then London runs it close on many points, and even beats it on others. Kind of like The Who, The Kinks and Led Zeppelin. It really is good to be back.

Still waiting to land

© Simon Poulter 2016

When you've been squashed into an economy class seat for several hours, the very last thing you need is for the captain to announce that you'll be remaining in that state longer than intended because the airport you're expecting to arrive at can't fit your plane in.

For London's creaking Heathrow Airport, such an announcement will usually be a precursor to your plane circling around one of the airport's holding points for what seems like an age. Having grown up in south-west London, there's only so much I can take of watching the area repeatedly pass underneath the wing while the pilot negotiates a landing slot with air traffic control, mindful of a rapidly dwindling fuel supply.

Going in the other direction is not much better, either. Such is Heathrow's limitations that it can often take up to half an hour of crawling along a taxiway before your plane is finally in the air. For some short trips, like those I've regularly made over the last 17 years between London and Paris or Amsterdam, it often feels like you spend longer taxiing than actually flying.

But now, with the political debate about Heathrow's expansion hotting up again, it's depressing to think that whatever the solution - a third runway at Heathrow, a second at Gatwick or both - south-east England's chronic runway shortage won't be resolved any time soon. 2030, is the earliest we can expect an improvement, and that's a liberal estimate, allowing for further legal and political challenges and then actual construction of a runway or runways.

The irony of this for me, in my frequent journeys in and out of Paris and Amsterdam, is that arriving at either city is never frustrated by delays. Charles De Gaulle regularly operates four runways at once - two for take-offs, two for landings - while Schiphol has up to seven runways at its disposal. And with both airports benefitting from good transport links, it's no wonder that foreign business travellers consider both these cities more accessible than London. Post-Brexit, with companies - including London's financial community - considering alternative locations, both Paris and Amsterdam become very attractive propositions. Frankfurt, too, with its vast airport.

Heathrow is an anachronism, after all. Originally opened as just a small airfield in 1929, by the end of the Second World War it had grown into a major hub for long-distance military transportation. However, it was never designed for the volume of traffic it handles today (it is the world's sixth busiest by passenger traffic) and is now operating at 99% capacity. And that's not even taking into account the environmental and obvious safety hazards it presents London, with the majority of landings happening in the westerly direction, requiring inbound traffic to fly across London from east to west.

The question, then, is why build another runway at Heathrow at all? Why not just add a second at Gatwick, or another at Stanstead, or better still, go through with Boris Johnson's plan, when mayor of London, to build a brand new airport in the Thames Estuary. This idea would have addressed the capacity issue in one fell swoop, plus it could have been achieved relatively more quickly, and would even deliver better connectivity to, not just London, the national transportation infrastructure altogether.

However, that ship - to mix metaphors - has sadly sailed. But we're still no nearer to resolving the fundamental issue about easing south-east England's airport capacity. For those of us who fly regularly, especially for their work, we are being committed to a never-ending cycle of political arguments and fudges, followed by legal challenges before there is any outcome. Which begs the question - if 2030 is the earliest before any new runway or airport capacity could be available, what will air travel be like by then? It's safe to assume that Star Trek-style teleportation won't quite yet be available, but it's also safe to assume that the current exponential growth in commercial aviation won't have arrested itself by then.

Not that any of this is a new topic. Discussions about Heathrow expansion go back to the Harold Wilson government of the late 1960s, and have periodically cropped up in the decades since. David Cameron made a pledge in 2009 that no new runway at Heathrow would be built. However, following last year's backing of a third runway at Heathrow by Sir Howard Davies' Airport Commission, Cameron promised a new decision by the end of last year. Still, though, nothing. And now it's the turn of Theresa May's government to make a decision...which it has now pushed out to sometime next week. Possibly. Maybe.

With high-profile Tories like Zac Goldsmith, whose Richmond Park constituency sits underneath Heathrow's final approach, threatening to quit the party over airport expansion, cabinet minister and Putney MP, Justine Greening also opposed along with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson maintaining his mayoral stance, for now, the matter threatens to become evern messier, politicially, than at any time in its long history. Prime Minister Theresa May has told her cabinet that once the airports sub-committee - which she chairs - has made a decision, there would be a full public consultation on it...which would take the matter to a final vote by MPs at the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018.

London's class new mayor, Sadiq Khan - who has been doing a sterling job in promoting London's availability to do business post-Brexit - is understandably angry about the continuing logjam. "Now, more than ever, businesses need certainty and stability in order to make investment decisions," Khan said yesterday on the Heathrow decision. "Instead they are getting dither and delay." Khan favours building a new runway at Gatwick Airport, "which can be built quicker, cheaper, and without the years of legal and political battles that Heathrow clearly faces".

A good point, but sadly, for those of us stuck in economy, either circling over the Home Counties or looking out a window at Hounslow at ground level, it's going to be a long, long time before any relief is in sight.