The journey from page to inner thigh

So, how's it going with the reading programme? The Mayor of London's new initiative is called Get London Reading: it means that a stack of posters are appearing this week at the bus stops and Tube platforms of the metropolis, encouraging the idle traveller to stop staring into space and plunge into literature, instead. Mr Livingstone's ambitious plans also involve flyposting bookshops, libraries and schools (but if people have already found their way into bookshops and libraries, do you need to tell them that they ought to try, you know, reading?), nominating 12 books with a London theme by living authors, and distributing stickers to places named by Londoners as their "favourite reading place" - since that tends to be one's bed, or the lavatory, this may be a little hard to implement.

I see nothing wrong with encouraging Londoners to read all about their exhausting, slow-moving, teeth-grinding, grey-smoked, rainy city, if doing so both amuses them and makes them feel better disposed towards the place (though I can't imagine why the list of books leaves out Michael Moorcock's Mother London and Martin Amis's London Fields, both pretty superior examples of cool metrofiction.) But when I look at the poster at my nearest Tube station, I can't help wondering whether they've picked the right week to be doing this.

The poster shows a man and a woman sitting in adjacent seats on the Tube. She is young, straggle-haired, good-looking in a Latina-intellectual way, and she's reading a huge hardback with the utmost absorption. He is twice her age, a business type in a sharp suit and formal tie, with a mackintosh draped over his nervy fingers (hah!) and a look of faraway calculation on his handsome but weary face. He is not reading anything at all. The headline shouts, "Books Take You Further". I can see that they're trying to suggest that the woman, by connecting with the Wisdom of Ages, is getting more out of her journey than the doltish, benighted salaryman. But maybe it's not as simple as that.

Because of the news from Yale University, by way of New York Magazine, it's impossible to look at the people on the poster and not think of Professor Harold Bloom and Naomi Wolf, and the allegations of sexual misconduct currently dinging around the American academic world. How the God-like Prof was invited to dinner with the pouting, breathlessly excitable girl-student and, instead of discussing her poetry, murmured the gnomic words, "You have the aura of election upon you", and allegedly clamped his hand on her "inner thigh", whereupon the lovely, but unimpressed, Naomi puked up into the kitchen sink.

The lesson of their encounter is that literature, and the intense study of books, can give you power over the impressionable like no other subject. Look at the pair on the poster, and you now see a middle-aged academic sitting on a train wondering how simple it would be to score with the shy girl- student sitting beside him, wrapped in the embrace of fiction. Perhaps he could dazzle her with literary chat ("Of course, you realise that Proust in the original French isn't actually very 'Proustian' at all..."); maybe he could appeal to her academic pretensions ("Enough has been written about Sylvia Plath's nihilism. But where is the PhD on her comic timing?"); he could even try the Bloom approach ("May I just say, you have the aura of election upon you?"), though this clearly requires caution if the girl isn't going to honk up all over the place.

The message from Get London Reading (and from Yale) is tragically clear. If you can't get anywhere with beautiful girls, and your conversation doesn't take you anywhere near their inner thigh, try books. Because books take you further.

Smile, you're on a speed camera

With astoundingly bad timing, I've just picked up two speeding tickets in a week. My souped-up roadster was spotted twice by speed cameras doing an eye-watering, Grand Prix-style 37mph in a one-way tunnel. God knows why you need speed cameras on a two-lane road with no pedestrians on it and no traffic coming towards you, but we motorists have been asking such dumb questions for a decade. Now, the Metropolitan Police, sick of being accused of lining its pockets with fines, is cutting back on the cameras, and actually withdrawing them from places where there has been "no recent history of crashes". In other words, they are saying that motorists simply going over the speed limit don't concern the police all that much. But if it doesn't bother them unduly, why is the penalty for speeding still, across most of the country, a fine and three points added to your licence? The police should either decriminalise speeding, and do so consistently, or be completely rigorous about it, but without putting one's licence at risk.

For now, the Met is issuing electronic warning signs that carry a smiling face, but that turns to a frowning one if a car goes by doing over 30mph. A frowning face, eh? I'm thinking of having an electronic sign fitted to the front of my Chrysler that will flash a tirade of V-signs back at them...

Have you been shopped yet?

I like the sound of the Essex police corps that have relocated to a Tesco superstore. They moved from their dingy cop-shop in Rainham to a purpose-built office inside the supermarket, and it has worked out so well that the experiment will be extended across London. But what goes through the minds of shoppers, as they steer their trolleys towards the awful throne of the Law? Do they itch to spill the beans about a neighbour's cannabis plants? Will they throw in a confidential murmur about a local gambling-den, on a Three-for-Two Grass-Up basis? Will the cops charge for telling them the correct time? Will cooing announcements issue from the speakers, saying, "Bing-bong. Welcome to Tesco! Shoppers are reminded that the reward for information about Barry 'Crow' Barr and the Hoxton raid stands at £5,000, at the Met counter. Take advantage of this unrepeatable offer before 7pm"?