Travelling to the Lost World

Angels fly lightly. All of us have seen the tourists coming off the ryanairs from outside schengen clutching their electronic chip tracers and dragging wheeled pantechnicons as if they are arriving in the Lost World. This time, though, perhaps it won't be but a step from one life into the other, carrying handbag and 5 euro cardboard identity.

Poverty strikes everyone, not just those without money, when an entire economy starts to collapse. Quality, choice, and accessibility fail with depleted stocks, closed stores, declining communication systems. Even WC1 needs decent bus services now there can be no private cars (to all intents and purposes, for everyday running about). Waiting for a 7 or even something passing the British Library has been reintroduced as a pastime, or waste of time, with the changing of the guard at City Hall.

Tights are not a big purchase like a house, tractor, ute (with or without dog), or even a winter overcoat. But get them wrong - not precisely what is wanted - and life is a misery. So stocking up in the via della Spada is worth the carry cost. No-liquids no-fly, has been met with indifference until now; but the awful smell that greets customers on the ground floor of any department store as scent-spraying, idle shop assistants are dodged on the way to buy unguents is not going to be faced at all this time. The parfumiers of borgo degli Albizi will advise, and even make up a little something for the London winter.

Flying in wellies (as essential for big city winter slush avoidance as for country mud) leads to delays at the security checks, being hard to get off while standing on one foot trying to avoid the dirty floor - and chairs not provided. But needs must and mutterings from the back of the queue will be ignored. Then a pair of indoors and a pair of heels might just be squeezed into the bag. Shoes, unlike nightgowns, do not keep from season to season so there is no hope of finding something already there in the cupboard.

Poverty starts as a disruptive irritant, the cause of extra effort to live a normal life, and ends in facing the five giants of idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want that New Labour, to its utter shame, has once more opened the door.