I may sometimes seem awed by this city and what happened in it last year, but London can also be a very dark place too. I just came home from a walk: I needed to get a bit of cash out, and I’m currently trying to come up with some song lyrics, so I decided to go up to stratford for some inspiration. I had not been there in a while, and the place was very busy, so it took me a while to find my bank – so long, in fact, that there was no time to do any shopping afterwards. As I was going back to the station, though, I saw something which troubles me: at the side of the pavement there was a man in a wheel chair, begging, a red cap in his lap. It is a depressing but not uncommon sight, and I had noticed him before on my way to the bank. However, this time he was being told off by an able-bodied man who, when another passer-by asked, said he was the man’s carer. He was shouting, accusing the man in the chair of falling asleep and not raising enough money. Clearly something very, very wrong was going on: taken at face value, no carer or PA would ever act like that. I assume the guy in the chair was being used to raise money for drugs; he probably had mental as well as physical disabilities, and thus was being abused. I wanted to say something, to tell him to stop, but I would have either been ignored or punched. I tried to find a policeman or security officer, but there were none. I came home hating myself for not doing anything, for being a coward and letting some poor old man’s hell continue.