Bad and then good news this week. Walking to collect my car, I passed as usual through the neighbouring HLM - council estate. It is a nicely-designed series of blocks of flates that went up three years aho and now has a mixed -- but predominantly immigrant -- set of residents. Always a lot of youth hanging around, but never any trouble. On this morning I was horrified to see that every conceivable surface had been covered overnight with graffiti. Walls, windows, the ground -- everything bore the same asinine scawl, hundreds of them. Being a right-wing bastard, my blood boiled. The culprits, it seemed, were a band of brothers from an estate by the peripherique (They had left their tell-tale tag). They must have wanted to start a turf-war, and were hoping our guys would react. I drove down to the country in a state of some dudgeon, fuming about urban deliquescence, moral breakdown etc etc. Imagine my joy, then, to return two days later and discover that every last trace of the tag-attack had been removed. They must have some amazing equipment, because there was literally no sign of what had happened. Now that, I thought, is action. Chapeau to the mairie of the 14th, who reason I assume as I do: leaving the tags for any length of time is an invitation to disaster. They become part of the landscape, people stop caring, the atmosphere turns nasty - and things spiral out of control. This was a prompt "rappel a l'ordre".