What's not to like about that, if you live in Stoke Newington, you might wonder? Why wouldn't you be happy to hear that the joys of Clissold Park with its deer and sheep and ducks and art classes, are being trumpeted up and down the land?

My own obsessive property disorder makes me think, wrongly, that this is the kind of write-up that will have all residents gloating and calling the estate agents at dawn to see how fast local property prices have shot up overnight. Not to mention Hackney Council opening the champagne to congratulate itself on so successfully drawing in a relatively wealthy demographic in a poor part of town and keeping them so happy.

Yet the faces around the table are grim and drawn and the hands pouring out a fortifying glass of red over the ruins of the day's papers are trembling. It's clearly not so simple.

"So are you moving to Stokey?" Vanya asks bravely (we are the evening's only incomers and he's a Stokey patriot). Everyone else harrumphs. The piece has clearly touched a raw nerve.

"Did you notice what that article didn't say?" one of the other parents grunts crossly. I run through possible problems. There don't seem to be many. Stoke Newington's fame as bohemo-parent land is well deserved, as far as I can see. Every time I've gone down Church Street it's been full of happy blokes in ad-agency specs pushing prams, just as the article said. It's near the City and the West End. It's pretty and friendly and multicultural. So can these Stokey residents be upset about the lack of a Tube stop? The stabbing in the park a year or so ago? Or perhaps the hasty closure of the glamorous sports centre a few months ago after someone spotted a major structural fault?

No - all those local hassles they've taken in their stride. They tut and shake their heads. The truth is far more obvious.

"There are no secondary schools here," the disgruntled residents chorus. "Or none where your children might pass exams."

"You get lulled into a false sense of security," added one, "because of all three-wheeler buggies and middle-class parents who don't earn Chelsea incomes buying organic baby food and living in big pretty houses at a fraction of the cost of everywhere else in London and making friends with each other at the playground and dropping in at each other's houses and congratulating each other on having chosen such a brilliant place to live.

"But then you start noticing the thing no one tells you before you come. When the first child in a family turns 11, the whole family moves away."

"So all the children disappear from the streets," another added, with all the indignation of a burgher discussing the Pied Piper's misdeeds. "Like in a horror film."

Is Hackney Council scared?

Slices of London: e-mail Urban Fox here