Tales Of The City: Yobs, gobs and good old British phlegm

Yesterday morning I watched a blistering row at the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel, in east London, which ended when the tall guy in the white jumper ceased jabbing his finger at the closed window of the besuited City gent who had upset him, got back inside his BMW, got out again and spat copiously at his enemy's windscreen. A second later the spit was ushered away by windscreen wiper, and both cars proceeded on their way. I thought to myself: what a startlingly old-fashioned, one might almost say classical, European form of insult – like the Montagues and Capulets biting their thumbs at each other in Romeo and Juliet, or French peasants wiggling their fingers around their temples to indicate that someone is a cuckold.

Spitting at people ceased to be a serious insult in 1976, when it became a sign of punk cameraderie (for the audience, if not the recipients on stage). Now look what's happened. Young Wayne Rooney, the footballing prodigy, is being investigated for allegedly expectorating at Liverpool fans. And he's not just hauled before a housemasterly figure in the Everton dressing-room ("I'm not angry with you, Rooney, just a little disappointed") but before the police. Can you believe it? As we speak, fully trained men in the Merseyside police are being taken off the job of fighting crime to watch video footage of the match and try, by minute calibration, to decide whether Rooney ejected a gob of phlegm downward (acceptable) or forward toward a gang of Liverpool fans (unacceptable). "Officers will be following up leads as soon as possible, and we will be liaising with the clubs involved," said a cop, as if an orally projected teaspoonful of sputum warranted a murder inquiry. And why are they doing it? Because complaints were lodged by Liverpool fans, who reported themselves "upset" by Rooney's behaviour.

These, remember, are football fans. Not lady shoppers in Fortnums. Not nuns. Not fragrant virgins from the pages of P G Wodehouse. These are hairy-bottomed veterans of the terrace and kebab shop. Can they really be traumatised to see someone voiding saliva in their general direction from 200 yards away? Next they'll be slapping rivals' faces with their opera gloves and saying: "Upon my soul, sir, you are a person of no consequence..."

In a surprise revelation, comparable to discovering that the best cure for cholera is toast and marmalade, scientists at Harvard say that the finest boon to the immune system – and its best insurance against the spread of cancer cells – is a cup of tea. Their findings follow an experiment with student volunteers and Lipton teabags. The chaps in white coats found that the tea-bibbers' gamma-delta T-cells – the ones that rig up a wall of immunity in your system – were bouncing with life, while those of the coffee-drinkers sat around listlessly. Tea, apart from invigorating the enervated, calming the upset and oiling the pastoral visits of clergymen, can apparently save your life.

Of course, real tea fans know that it's been marketed for centuries as a cure for all manner of ailments. It was "a certain remedy for paralysis, apoplexy and consumption" at Garway's Coffee House in London in the early 18th century, where it sold at the toffs-only price of £4 a pound. Ladies of fashion swore by "the cup that cheers but does not inebriate", and Dr Johnson drank pots and pots of the stuff, in tiny little cups. But as it became trendy, more tea was smuggled from the Continent, of a dusty and inferior brand, and its chances of saving anyone from immune-deficiency ills were slim. The great William Cobbett wrote a swingeing attack on the stuff, saying: "I view tea-drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age."

So there you are. It may help you to stave off the onset of cancer cells, but it's just as likely to turn you into a weedy, broken-winded, shagged-out and depressed old garçon de Nancy. Who'd have thought the insipid stuff could breed such passions and such fancy claims? More T-cells, vicar?

I never saw Nina Simone perform, but I was the right generation to be bowled over by that deep, slightly chilling, spookily resonating voice singing "To Love Somebody" by The Bee Gees. And I loved the stories of her legendary stroppiness. If she heard one person in the audience talking to another, she would screech to a halt mid-song and either glare at the miscreant or upbraid him until he fled in embarrassment.

Her website goes into raptures about "her often understated live act, sitting at the piano and advancing the mood and climate of her songs by a few chords", which sometimes translated as "tedious longueurs in which she moodily pecked at a few notes like a little girl playing with her food". Impatient with audiences who wanted to hear her biggest hit, "My Baby Just Cares for Me", as an encore, she would make them wait, clapping (encouraged by the band) for 20 minutes.

When she first sang for audiences, she'd ask if there were any black people in the house and, if one or two stood up, she'd say: "I'm singing only to you. I don't care about the others." She was magnificently rude, amazingly grand (when a fan compared her to Billie Holiday, she snapped: "She was a drug addict. I'm more of a diva, like Maria Callas") and appallingly spoilt, thinking nothing of stopping mid-song for an assistant to adjust her head-dress.

But my best advice is to seek out her recording of Jerry Jeff Walker's "Mr Bojangles" and shiver at that haunting, glacial, bittersweet, intelligent voice remembering her favourite Southern recidivist: "I knew a man, Bojangles, and he sang for you..."