I am in France meeting up with Hadley and Jake.

We have rented a place in the Tarn-et-Garonne.

The old farm has had a makeover. It has a pool, and a tiled patio. There is a cobbled yard, which you can reach from the back of the house, with outbuildings and old farm equipment. In one of them there is a new brick-built barbecue oven.

You can enter the yard from outside through high rough-hewn, studded wooden gates.

We swam and read and lingered over lunch until the middle of the week when we heard about the riots in London.

That night we watched the news and saw that Clapham Junction was ablaze,  with buildings fired on Lavender Hill. We just went quiet. We could hardly believe it. Jake said: “What’s going on? Who are those people?”

Debenhams, and JD sports were ransacked. And the Orange shop.  We watched shots of the ghoulish, hooded figures, swarming in the middle distance, smashing plate-glass windows, pulling out all sorts of stuff. There seemed to be no police around, no-one seemed to be stopping them.

The next morning Hadley said: “Our societies are breeding useless people. No-one wants to have anything to do with them so they riot from time to time. I’ve tried to use people from the government agencies. It’s hopeless.  The people they send are awful, — aggressive, illiterate often.”

“That’s a dark vision,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

I hadn’t heard Hadley speak like that before.