Letter: Yobs wherever you don't look

I THINK Cal McCrystal was in the wrong place at the wrong time: 'Middle-class man, 58, fails to find any yobs at all' (18 September).

Geraldine Bedell, as we read, encountered some young female ones exposing their knickers outside the school gates, and I met a few, too.

A large group of them partied in our street till 4.30am last Saturday night, music pulsating through the pillow at full volume. I met a number on the school run, with up-yours finger salutes if you happened to cross their path. Then there was the one who nearly floored me with the dustbin bag he was chucking out of a basement because his eyes were stuck to the behinds of the pretty secretary students walking to college. My mother sat next to one on the London to Salisbury train: a yuppie yob who shouted into his mobile phone about fund management for 20 minutes regardless of a compartment full of people reading newspapers.

All irritating encounters but not life-threatening ones, like that experienced by the black man set on fire by white thugs on Thursday. There are plenty of yobs around when you don't go looking for them.

Susan Sadigh

London SW5