A strange Christmas already and the big day still has n't arrived. I've never paid that much attention to the assertions that flow from the pens of the columnists that there is no time like this time for acutely foolhardy behaviour; ok, I know very well that Christmas disinhibits people, after all there's that hardy perennial - the bacchanalian office party, and it's embarassing, gossipy aftermath, but this year I've been privy to another world. In two days, I've seen people arrested, others fight in the street, and one youngster nervously spray paint graffiti on pristine white walls. Time of year driving aberrant behaviour or simply coincidence?

Of the two arrests, the first was in Shepherd's Bush late in the evening, for that time and for that part of town, hardly an unsual occurrence; still, a little low on drama, from my experience when a man or woman gets collared, and they're with their partner, then it's almost obligatory for their other half to roll along the street the way an exploding roman candle would chasing and banging on the side of the police van. In this instance, howver she was phlegm personified. Perhaps she'd seen it all before, then again, she may well have been shocked into silence, unable to clearly emote. We'll never know.

The notion of the criminal mastermind thrown aside and torn into pieces by the second person I saw arrested a day later and in a different, more affluent part of London, right outside the local Police station. Could n't you have found somewhere less conspicuous than the front door to Chiswick High Road station to pull off whatever piece of naughtiness it was you had in mind? Ah the criminal genius...

My fight...no, not one I was in, one I saw, happened this afternoon. Just a few blows, but we bystanders had enough evidence to guess the earlier part of the story. A cab pulled out of the torrent of traffic along Kensington Church Street and unpacked a hot-tempered youngish couple. He tried to trip her up as she stormed down the street, she, for her part, balled her hand into a fist, punched him on the back of the head, swore, then stepped smartly over to the other side of the road and vanished. Eight million people or thereabouts in London, ergo the same number of individual stories. I'll never know what the plot of this little drama revolves around, maybe the participants don't fully know themselves, but it's easy to guess the thrust of the narrative. And this is how they'll remember Christmas 2006 - the day we fought on the pavement.