Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield has been getting to grips with the terrifying but comic world of the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter Lynda Lee-Potter was grinning like a lizard in the top left-hand corner of her page in the Daily Mail last Wednesday. Below her photograph was the headline 'Only one penalty for such evil'. The evil was paedophilia; the penalty was death. As I read on through 'wickedness' and 'sick desires' to 'terror' and 'raw suffering', I had the unnerving feeling that her smile was spreading across her face. Paedophiles make regular appearances in Lee-Potter's column, always surrounded by the same huddle of aging television-show hosts, young actresses, members of the royal family and pop-stars with knighthoods.

After Wednesday’s Tube strike, most Londoners will have decided again that the only solution is a bicycle. But there’s a dark side to cycling in the city. Since I bought my first bike a year or so ago I have been astonished by the outbursts of spittle-flecked fury pedestrians unleash upon cyclists. Any minor deviation from the letter of the law — a quick pedal on the pavement, a whizz through Hyde Park — induces instant Tourette’s syndrome in passers-by: ‘You stupid f—–ing cow! Get off your f—–ing bike!’ etc., etc., followed by a furious rant about how, literally, lethal bicycles are.