Let me paint you a picture, a simple street scene with any number of decent folk just going about their business. What do we see? In the foreground a couple of rough men squaring up to each other, one of them is carrying a basket of bread and ought to be about his business, but we just know that at any moment we’ll see fisticuffs. Behind them we see a woman carrying a metal urn, obviously alarmed that her burden might be overturned. Then approaching from our left, a man who is clearly a tipstaff, his wand of office raised, he is evidently about to do his duty and break up the fight. Finally lurking like the cliché at the heart of a poor poem we have the child thief ready to strike. He will take advantage of the chaos caused by the fight to lift the tipstaff’s purse.

But…