On Edwina Currie's Radio 5 Live show, I annoyed a listener by suggesting that increasing the numbers of police on the streets does not make all locals feel safe or more secure. Some, I said, may even feel more threatened. "There's a man here, Lauren, who says that you know nothing at all about living in the real world," read Edwina with a gleeful clicking of her tongue, "because you hang out in the Groucho Club and live in a safely gated community and use taxis everywhere. Now, what have you got to say for yourself?"

It was like being at school again and facing accusations of throwing a piece of chalk at the French teacher. "Well," I conceded, "I am a member of the Groucho Club, but I don't live in a gated community."

The enjoyment Edwina gets from hearing me wrong-footed may have something to do with a little live-on-air contretemps we had some time ago. It was after 11pm, and the subject was OAP sex - not exactly my specialised subject. A survey unearthed by the Daily Mail suggested that pensioners are having more regular and sometimes more adventurous sex than those in their twenties.

"Well Lauren," trilled Edwina triumphantly, "is it true?"

"It might be," I blurted. "But you should know."

Look, I just couldn't help it. It was late and after a certain time, the valve that prevents hideous thoughts from flocking from my brain to my mouth just stops working. There followed a tiny, furious silence and then Edwina said with mock cheerfulness: "I'm just over 50, you know, Lauren, and in the UK that's a long way from being a pensioner."

But back to the police on the street. This weekend, I had the opportunity to watch our brave boys in blue at work - and not from the window of a cab. Camden Market is a year-round festival of foreign student fashion and Seventies nostalgia. Strolling around the stalls, looking in wonder at the scratched Jimi Hendrix LPs and tie-dye baby clothes, is like stepping back 30 years. Bongo players compete with easy-listening music and wispy cannabis smoke mingles with the oily scents of Chinese noodles and patchouli. But on Sunday, a strange thing happened - the police invaded the market. Walking down towards the oldest part of the market in crowds eight deep, I was shocked to count six police vans. A worried shudder travelled through the throng. What had happened? It couldn't be trouble, could it? Not here. "Someone must have been killed," said the teenager in front of me. "It must be something really bad for this amount of police to turn up."

Then we were in the thick of it. There were 20 or 30 police all standing, arms folded, scowling, blocking the pavement. Shoppers had to walk out into the road to get around them. At the epicentre were four women and three men attempting to hand out animal rights leaflets to the intimidated crowd. I pushed through the cordon and took one: "Shell kills animals", it said on the front. On the back was a picture of a horribly mutilated cat.

I looked in wonder from the police to the protesters and back again. I asked one lady in her forties, the tiny "leader", whether they had been causing a disturbance, disrupting traffic, threatening to damage a local shop.

"Nope," she smiled sadly. "We just want to hand out our stuff. We're a perfectly legit, non-violent group."

"Then why are there so many police?" I asked.

"There are always this many," she said. "They go to our website and think it's clever to turn up and wait for us."

While some shoppers braved the cordon to take a leaflet, I asked one of the policemen if I could borrow a pen, and made notes of the badge numbers on their lapels. The one who had lent me the pen looked as if he wanted to bash me. The ladies stood quietly and gave out one or two more leaflets.

Like I said, more police is not always a good thing.

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