Notes on a riot....

In case you haven't guessed yet, I lead a comfortable, pleasant middle-class life (for evidence, see my 10 best things about London below). For the most part, my choice of where to live, work, and spend time is, knowingly, what N and I call in the "Guardian bubble". There is another, less safe, less pleasant London out there, but it's mainly in my best interest to stay they heck out of there. Though London is interestingly mixed up (you can be on a posh shopping street one minute, and turn the corner onto a council estate), you instinctively get a feel for where you belong and where you don't.

And in general London's two solitudes of haves and have-nots live in a state of entente cordiale: we know that the other group is there, but as long as we ignore them and they ignore us, everything is fine, right? (See James Meek for a much better illustration of what I'm talking about.) Never mind that, especially for young people, being poor and under-educated is a horrible trap, even here in this most beautiful and interesting of cities. What's to be done?

Around every two months I head off to a dingy community hall with a bunch of other professionals from businesses small and large. We're there to support the Spear Course: an initiative to help unemployed young people gain the life skills and confidence to help them into the mainstream work world. What we're there for is to be 'mock interviewers' - we're each paired up with a young person, and we go through a few rounds of interviewing them and giving them feedback on where they could improve. It's a surprisingly moving experience for interviewers and interviewees alike: for us, it's one of the only opportunities to actually connect with the sorts of young people who might intimidate us on the streets otherwise and realise that they have the potential to be smart, good, hard-working kids if given the right chance. And I always get a feeling that for the interviewees their experience with us might well be one of the only times they've had an adult conversation with someone who isn't a teacher or a parent or from their immediate community. For them it is a glimpse into the other world that you and I inhabit so effortlessly: a decent job, being treated with respect because of your achievements and talents, having the potential to move up the career ladder and plan for the future.

When you interview one of the Spear students they choose for you an example job that they'd like to have; their choices are almost heartbreakingly practical: I've recently interviewed two young women who both wanted to work in a boarding kennel for dogs. And it makes you think: if these young people are having such a hard time getting entry-level jobs like these, there's something horribly wrong somewhere. This financial crisis might be more than just a VAT raise and slightly lower house prices in West London.

The instructors at Spear tell us that the young people we're speaking to are battling issues that we in the other world couldn't imagine: some of them don't have very good literacy, numeracy or conversation skills, thanks to a lifetime of poor schooling at inner-city sink schools. Many of them have never been around people with jobs and haven't learned the rewards and confidence that come from working. And a few of them think that life is just about 'getting and spending' - what's the point of working if it doesn't immediately result in a life full of money and bling? Why start on the bottom rung?

What happened this week in this wonderful city was disgraceful and horrible and deserves to be condemned. There was no excuse for it happening this time, and no excuse if it ever happens again. However, to me it felt like a bolt across the bow from the other world - a horribly fashioned cry for participation in something other than the script that's been already written. Those who did wrong this week deserve punishment. But the rest of those in the parallel universe need our acknowledgment and our help: as our world has become marginally worse due to the financial crisis, theirs has become more difficult than ever.