An advert on the back panel told me I needed a new postal franking machine. The driver crashed the gears badly going from third to fourth as he negotiated St James’s Street. I have always had a love-hate relationship with London’s taxi drivers. When I am driving myself, I think the entire bunch of them are miserable bastards who reckon they own every inch of the road, who never let anyone out, and who carve anyone up given the slightest chance, even if they have to go out of their way to do it. When I am a passenger in a cab, I think they’re bloody marvellous, terrific people, ace drivers, and I can more than fully understand their contempt for the average drivelling moron creeping his saloon around the centre of London’s roads at five miles per hour, and letting the whole world and his dog go before him at every opportunity.

But right now, my confidence in the London cabbie was taking a severe battering. For the privilege of having to stump up the best part of a week’s wages for every tenth of a mile that I travelled, I felt I was entitled to expect someone who was at least able to drive, who could, at the minimum, string a few sentences of the English language together, and who didn’t think there was a Harrods on every street corner.

As we rounded the comer into Piccadilly, we stopped at a red light. At least Mustapha wasn’t colour blind. He opened his door and hopped out. ‘You wait please, one moment – I buy Standard.’ He darted off towards a news kiosk.

I wasn’t sure afterwards whether it was his Rolex watch, or his lack of knowledge of London, or his lack of driving skill, or my sheer disbelief that with his limited grasp of the English language he could have any use for a newspaper, or the fact that for a quarter to three on a Monday afternoon he had just appeared too damn quickly, but something made me lean forward and look into his cab. There was a hand grenade on the seat and there was no pin in the grenade.

The explosion happened as I was somewhere between the door and the pavement. It picked me up, and blasted me clean over the railings into St James’s Park, and blasted most of my trousers away. It turned the cab into a ball of fire, and sprinkled smaller balls of fire around the foyer of the Ritz, and other parts of the immediate vicinity.