The post-Christmas slump. Sitting at the neighbour's house, in piles of wrapping, pretending I'm there to pick up my sons, who have fallen asleep on her giant-size sofa staring at her giant-size telly (but really hoping for a cup of the reviving North London herbal tea that might heal the seasonal damage performed by a surfeit of mince pies, turkey, stuffing and brandy butter). In voices laden with ennui, we fall to talking about the state of the world. Our little local world, that is.

One. The heating isn't working in either of our houses. The thermostats have gone. So, five minutes after you flick the switch by hand, the house is either freezing or boiling hot.

Next. Despite the £10 we tipped the privatised dustmen before Christmas, they have vanished without trace. Rats are probably frolicking in the heaps of black bin liners filled with unwanted cake and pie and meat all down the street.

Three: the water. Ever since last summer when a firm called Murphy began the vast job of replacing all of Camden’s antique water pipes with nifty blue plastic ones, (a) the district has become a war zone of closed roads, improvised orange and white fencing, and instant no-go areas and (b) the water supply has become hugely erratic.

The original point of the exercise was to stop millions of gallons of water leaking out of the old pipes into the ground, and thereby to raise the water pressure and allow us all to take power showers. But something seems to have wrong.

We’ve lost count, but our area has been dug up a good three times already. It seems it’s not so easy to stop those leaks. We don’t get water at all early in the morning now. And the neighbours tell me they’ve just had a letter from the council tacitly accepting defeat - Camden’s water pressure is now to be actually lowered, rather than raised, “to improve the quality of service”.

We could at this point have moved on to Point Four, the post (do letters ever reach this distant outpost of empire? I once got a letter 99 days after it was posted, etc). Or we could have changed tack and started on the much grimmer stories that Daphne and Maria cluck cheerfully over every day (passed on from their Greek Cypriot community) about the madness, stabbings and sexual abuse in the locality. But, given the season and our exhausted, overfed condition, this would probably be too much to bear. So we’re already sighing in our grim-up-North-London way: “It’s like the Third World here”.

Wearily, we lean forward for our umpteenth mince pie and start flicking channels, in the manner of the Royle family, hoping for a nice mushy film to cheer us on through the night.

But what we get instead is news: the effects of the Indian Ocean tsunami, with the death toll doubled over the day and terrifying, intrusive, close-up shots of parents carrying their dead children away from piles of bodies and bulldozers closing up mass graves and survivors picking their way back through mangled towns and women screaming with grief by yet more bodies.

Almost worse than what you do know is knowing that you don’t know the half of it. How actively is the Indonesian government helping the people of devastated Aceh, with its irritating nationalist activists, for instance? And, even with the best will in the world, how much can impoverished Third-World governments help their people? How many people have been killed in, say, Somalia? We can’t guess. Experts think whole villages were swept away. But without a functioning central government there’s no one to gather statistics and not much aid going to the suffering either.

I find myself remembering a friend who covered wars in Africa during the Nineties and hated people comparing the minor discomforts of life in 21st-century London - where people are, when it comes to it, quite successful at getting together to iron out problems and make life go the way they want it - with the Third World, whose people are all too often alone against the ravages of cruel governments and crueller nature. (“It’s not ‘Third World’ when the postman brings your letter a week late,” she’d say. “Third World is when he rapes your sister and goes off with the TV set too, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”)

“I’ve heard that when the volcano in the Canaries goes - and it’s ready to - there’ll be a tsunami that will go straight across the Atlantic to New York in eight hours and bury it in water, right up to the Statue of Liberty’s torch,” my neighbour says now, trying to shift back to our usual note of enjoyable mock-disaster. But her heart isn’t in it any more. No one’s is.

So we end up drinking our reviving tea, from the comfort of the giant sofa in the too-warm room in North London where, at least for now, the water is on and there is electricity for the kettle and the TV and we are very, very far from hungry, and the rats outside are quite possibly imaginary, and where, if a tsunami were ever to hit London, we’d be safely at the top of a hill anyway - in complete, hushed silence.

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