Riots latest: Surrey Police have put all 15 of the county's black residents under house arrest, as a precaution. Though it may affect Chelsea's starting XI for the start of the season of course.
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From the upstairs of my house, I can see - and smell - the smoke from the burning wreck of a million CDs and DVDs going up in flames at the Sony distribution centre a couple of miles away.
I'm not going to rant and rave about the riots. There's plenty of people doing that. But I have spent all but the first couple of months of my life either living or working in London so I consider it my town.
And I have been going to Tottenham every other week or so for 35 years so I feel a certain affinity to it. This is not surprising as it's the only geographical location that I regularly sing about.
However, I don't pretend to really know the area or the people. I tend to park my car in a local council estate where a nice bunch of young men look after it for a couple of hours in exchange for some money and I walk past the lamp-posts with bunches of flowers tied to them and go to the ground, avoiding eye contact with the locals.
But after the debacle of the Ikea Riot a few years ago - when thousands of local residents piled into the opening of a branch of the superstore in nearby Edmonton and actually started stabbing each other in order to get a cut price Billy or something - you always thought that beneath the surface, areas like this have a lot of people who would do anything for a bargain.
So the thought of free televisions and mobile phones wasn't going to stop them. Particularly as it all seems so easy.
This is how it works. Two rival gangs decide they can be of mutual benefit. Gang A starts a fire in one place while Gang B loots a shop in another. Then the roles are reversed. Look carefully at the riots and you'll see that where there's a fire in a particular area there's usually another one not far away.
Let's get a couple of things clear. The riots were not the fault of the social media. Twitter and BBM made it easier to keep in touch, but they would have found a way in any event.
The lack of an internet based system of communication never stopped East Enders gathering to defeat the blackshirts or stopped the riots of 1981 or any other major civil get together.
Social media may also work to bring some kind of positive salvation to this whole mess too. The clean up campaign was a simple but inspiring way to show rioters that there are more of us than them.
And so it will, hopefully, continue. Highlighting the knobheads who boasted of their exploits on Facebook suddenly doesn't feel like grassing, for instance. And the police do not seem like the bad guys in the current unrest in the way I seem to remember them being back in 1981.
Of course, there are downsides. The riots have brought out the usual rants by every modern Enoch Powell-style racist - never mind that everyone from Bulgarians to Bangladeshis have been targeted.
And it's led to the usual 'bring on the water cannon, send the army in, hang them all' brigade who never have any real answers to anything but exist on a diet of right wing rhetoric.
Yet behind it all, I think Londoners will begin to see the positives in their community. At least I hope so.
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While most shops in places like Ilford and nearby were asked to close, not all did so. An Asian-owned 24-hour grocery stayed open. When the mob approached and smashed some melons at the front, the owner and around 20 of his relatives chased them off with baseball bats. Apparently the melons was the last straw.
And in Gants Hill they shut down the local Sainsburys and other stores but the Golan Kosher Bakery stayed open. As they say round there, geschaft ist geschaft.
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The nearest we got to riots here in Loughton was a few broken windows on a number 20 bus and the odd shop. It was foiled by a phalanx of police horses and coppers who actually did their job.
In fact, the only thing the locals round here moaned about was the amount of horse poo in Sainsbury's car park. But it sparked a new line in 'manure gold' as a skin tone at the local tanning salon. And a couple of riot cops got their shields vajazzled.
Let's talk about nicer things next time, eh? - Solly
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