I have to type quickly since the juice is leaking out of my well used laptop. It's another one that I've fully exploited. God bless Toshiba for making 'em robust enough to stand the pummelling I've given this over the years.

In this post riot London of ours, the mood, understandably, is for retribution, for something punitive to be delivered upon the shoulders of those who flooded our high streets, looting, stealing, terrifying, wounding, and sadly, murdering. Deliverance, at the risk of sounding like a tyro Daily Mail leader writer, is due.

Its the pendulum swinging the other way now. The first swing took us into this netherworld of violence; this is the compensatory swing the other way, our collective desires are being met now. Eventually the length of the rebound will lessen, ebb away, until we're back at equilibrium, or something as near as damn it.

We've gone through one door, been hurled through it really, and we're leaving through another into a different world. That's a poor way of stating the obvious, what I want to underline nonetheless, is this world we're entering will take shape and substance from the imaginative responses to this social tsumani that breached our landscape earlier this week; look at the self-help groups that sprung up organically, those sterling people who took to the streets with brooms; the spontaneous, independently organised social media sites that have raised thousands for the 89 year old Tottenham barber, whose shop was swept aside in the madness that happened there, or the site that's collecting money and presents for the innocent young Malaysian student, Ashraf, whose mugging by a "bad Samaritan" was filmed and went viral.

This growing sense of collective engagement makes me very proud; we're thinking, we're working out answers, we're helping.

It as a act of solidarity as far as I'm concerned to shop, even if it's goods I don't really need, at one those small shopkeepers whose businesses were turned over. It's not just to tell the rioters they will not win because they will not, that's obvious, they turned a corner and went straight into a dead end as far as public opinion is concerned. The main reason is to let these poor business owners they're not alone. We're family.